Within the hospitality sector the guest experience is vital to the success of organisations. In today’s market, hospitality organisations are being met with the very real challenge of having to keep up with customer expectations in a highly technological and rapidly evolving environment. Many organisations seem to fall short of the key factors disrupting guest experience:
Meeting Customer Expectations
Customers are expecting hospitality organisations to stay up to date with the latest technological advances, offering the services that these technologies would afford them as a guest. Hospitality organisations that fail to do this run the risk of falling behind on the available services – being deemed inadequate when compared to competitors who deliver on innovative guest experiences.
Customers expect organisations to deliver consistent, personalised and relevant guest experiences. According to Infor; “To achieve this, businesses need to integrate multiple data sources, departments, and processes to ensure that the entire enterprise can keep up with changing customer expectations and evolving technology.”
Personalised Experiences
Being technologically advanced should not mean that people lose contact with connection and humanity. Within the realm of technology, as well as business at large, there is always the risk that guests could be seen purely in terms of the revenue they bring in and/or the statistical data they offer. When organisations fail to use technology correctly they could easily fall into this trap.
According to Infor:
- 63% of people expect brands to use their purchase history to provide them with personalised experiences
- 27% of customers will stop doing business with a company if they receive poor customer service
- 54% will try a new brand or company for better service
- 60% will tell others about a bad experience
However, when utilised correctly the emerging technological platforms could help hospitality organisations to offer a truly personalised experience. With this approach, the guest feels important, seen and understood.
What Can Be Done?
Infor highlights the following steps:
- Integrate: Implement marketing automation and CMR platforms for a complete view of the customer
- Personalise: Provide messages at the time of delivery, based on the latest context and conditions
- Deliver: A guided sales experience that allows customers to co-create their own solutions
- Merge: Customer journey mapping with marketing automation to optimise campaign plans
- Go Beyond: Top-level data to find patterns and trends that drive real-time recommendations
Transforming the guest experience is within any hospitality organisation’s reach.
For more information, contact Rentia.Austin@iOCO.tech.
