Travel and Hospitality: Elevating Customer Experiences
What an incredible Dreamforce last week with so many exciting announcements and industry perspectives! Among the more eye-catching was from the travel, transportation, and hospitality (TTH) corner of retail. Leisure and business travel are booming and nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. I also spoke to several TTH customers using Salesforce who are making significant investments in elevating traveler and guest experiences.
Here are some trends and takeaways that are fueling this remarkable TTH industry recovery:
- Personalization drives technology decisions — not the other way around.
- Data underpins everything about the customer. Harvest rich data to understand customer preferences and what will drive more loyalty.
- Don’t compromise on data or customer experience. Understanding your data will shape how you service your customers more thoughtfully.
- Fast service can be delightful. Customers still want efficient service, but it needs to be painless.
- Conversational interactions are customers’ top priority. Digital hospitality is wide-ranging and covers broad services and offerings. Improve digital hospitality by using GenAI assistants that improve the experiences for both customers and agents.
In Slalom’s featured Dreamforce session, Now Boarding: Travelers Raise the Digital Hospitality Baseline, my colleague Kelly Wood and I — along with industry experts from Southwest Airlines, Julian Azzam and David Kobbe — discussed the ongoing journey of Southwest Airlines in adapting to these dramatic shifts in the industry.
Azzam and Kobbe stressed the importance of personalization in creating memorable experiences and how Southwest’s multicloud Salesforce strategy is enabling them to service their customers in new and innovative ways. Additionally, they emphasized the importance of harmonized data in driving hyper-personalization and creating a scalable experience for the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Southwest Airlines reimagined corporate travel experiences by putting the customer at the center of their business decisions, check out this case study.
Additionally, Virgin Voyages, an adult-only cruise line, is capitalizing on Gen AI assistants to provide guests with immediate answers so they can spend more time planning the perfect vacation experience with customer service agents. The “Vivi” chatbot provides faster, seamless, and natural answers to questions from those aboard the cruise line.
Virgin Voyages is using Gen AI to keep knowledge articles current, it learns from real time dynamic data and proposes new articles for approval. As a result, guests are always presented with the most up to date information with minimal human effort. If you want to check out this innovative new tech, you can interact with Vivi life on Virgin Voyages’ website.
Since Slalom is the No. 1 Salesforce travel and hospitality industry partner, I’m thrilled to see that travel is back and excited by the opportunity to use transformative tools to deliver memorable customer experiences, improving how TTH companies service their customers.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more or contact us today to schedule a demo.
