Why is Customer Experience important for Hotels?
Customer experience is fast becoming a commodity. Hotels that are succeeding and innovating are raising the stakes attracting new uncontested markets.
Your Hotels customers are no longer benchmarking your customer experience based on competitors in your industry they’re comparing you to the best customer experiences they receive anywhere.
Research indicates that by 2020 customer experience will be more important than price as a trigger point for the customers booking decision.
This battle is already playing out in highly commoditized Hotel markets, where brand loyalty is fast eroding.
In a turbulent and rapidly evolving landscape, customer experience has cut through the noise to help guide Hotel marketers to future success.
There are many creative and innovative ideas available for Hotels to grasp, here are 10 ways to get you starting to think outside the box.
1. Value Innovation
What can you do today to deliver expectational service that adds leaps in value?
A customer that had an excellent experience is 5x more willing to pay a premium price versus a poor experience.
Start focus on delivering services that make every interaction natural, useful, easy, and seamless.
It is important that you go beyond saying that you are listing to the customer, show it in actions!
With today’s technology, some tools and services allow you to listen to relevant online conversations. From these conversations, you can capture valuable data that position your Hotels meeting customer unmet needs they yet can’t conceive.
2. Identify a journey of Micro-Moments
Today every customer experience is part of a journey where the customers leave behind them important digital footprints at every micro-moment.
Hotels need to position themselves to help customers every step on their journey.
Today 65% of smartphone users consult their phones for the most relevant information about your Hotel. And this is information they gather from their community and other data sources than your Hotels website.
It is essential that Hotels now understand how important digital footprints at every micro-moment really is for the customer journey.
3. Personalization
As Hotels get a grasp of important micro-moments during the customer journey, they should start providing personalized content that is relevant to each micro-moment.
This is why I in my Social Media Marketing Frameworks for Hotels focus on context.
Personalized content alone is not enough, it has to be in a relevant context the customer can relate with.
Combine instant gratification and personalized content in a relevant context and your Hotel is leaping in value.
4. Foster Relationships
Through value innovation, identifying important micro-moments and personalization now has positioned themselves in fostering a new high-value relationship.
This will help Hotels gaining a deep understanding of this critical dynamic and become better able to build and manage the customer base that drives revenue and generates higher margins.
The critical part for Hotels to understand here is that customer relationships are not defined by a series of transactions. It comes down to being authentic and transparent during the customer journey.
If your Hotel doesn’t understand this part of fostering relationships it will become almost impossible to provide better products, service, improve the customer experience, or creating effective Social Media Marketing Campaigns.
5. Create a Lifestyle alternative
Most Hotels today embrace some form of surprise and delight elements for customers.
As Hoteliers, we want to focus on adding surprise and delight at every micro-moment. But in this aspect, it is critical to understand that Hotels can’t take a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach here.
For the modern traveler, their smartphones are more than just a tool they use for research, it is part of their lifestyle. This is how they communicate, spend time, and make their transactions.
Out of this, we have seen brands like Uber and Airbnb become major players that defined new uncontested markets.
The key to creating a lifestyle alternative is to add a touch of local finesse that both surprise and delight the customer. Help your customer set up appointments, identify the location, and book their transportation.
6. Bring Wellness into the Hotel experience
These days, many Hotel business owners are interested in learning how they can optimize their companies to attain a bigger bottom line, more customers, and industry leadership.
If these are your professional goals, you should know that one effective solution is recognizing and responding to the health and wellness trends that are currently shaping contemporary culture.
Accessing and implementing the right health and wellness strategies will appeal to the Hotel customer and increase the likelihood that leisure travelers will want to stay with you.
7. Ask the customer
I read a fascinating statement once ‘Asking improves your chances of receiving by 200 percent’.
In his book ‘Ask’ Ryan Levesque starts his second chapter off with ‘Strange Questions… and Stranger Answers’.
In the Hotel industry surveys and focus, forums have for a very long time been the go-to alternatives for asking customers.
And the questions asked here were intentionally designed to help Hotels figure out exactly what their customers want.
Social Media Hotels now has a unique alternative to create some juicy surveys.
Implement your Hotels strategic survey question into Social Media Marketing Frameworks that ask customers during an important micro-moment.
With Social Media, Hotels can implement proactive surveys to better understand what customers are looking for. Also, take time to ask during the experience to get an understanding of how it matches up to their expectations. And then when your Hotel does the post-experience survey you have a great picture of what compiled into their total experience.
8. Make It Easy to Jump Your Hotel Bed
You want to make the customer experience as convenient, easy, and seamless as possible.
When we look at brands like Uber and Airbnb their core concept is not unique in itself.
Their primary focus has been all on the convenient, easy, and seamless experience. They have taken to heart the growing amount of smartphone users consulting their phones for relevant information.
If your Hotel wants to upgrade the customer experience you have to start thinking outside the box.
Hotels today need to start taking an active role in the customer journey.
How can you make your Hotel guest jump on the bed with gratitude and pure excitement?
9. Scale the Real-Time Experience
When customers look for a Hotel, the key aspects remain the same as ever, clean room, comfortable bed, decent view for tourists, somewhere good to eat, and polite staff.
Hotels are now working on tasks that will ease the workload on their front desk staff by rolling out a chatbot.
A chatbot might not be the first thing a Hotel thinks of as good for customer service, further stripping away that personal touch. However, for many Hotels today, a chatbot can help deal with many of the regular requests from guests and help to drive business through upselling and special offers.
That saves the Hotel team time for vital and urgent requests where a human touch is needed.
Service automation in a relevant context will help your Hotel scale the real-time experience.
10. Transform the Customer Experience
A transformation will require Hotels to adapt to new market reality and look at new markets that don’t exist yet.
Transformation happens when your Hotel continues to deliver a leap in value over time.
It’s about changing the way your Hotel interacts with its customers and how you provide them with a consistent experience whenever and wherever they need it.
My friends at EVEN Hotels is a brilliant example of how this can be implemented. Their mantra is to make it easier for the customer to keep active, rest, easy, eat well, and accomplish more.
Just the design of their work desk is brilliant where you raise the chair and work seated, or you can do your work standing in between your workout sessions in the room. Did I mention there is a workout kit available in the room?
Seeking to add fresh air and scenery to your #cardio while on the road? Use these tips to hit the pavement anywhere you #travel. https://t.co/ur9oETHyZy pic.twitter.com/wftZpuT5qg
— EVEN Hotels (@EvenHotels) January 12, 2019
We are in this together!
I need to let you all know that we are in on this together. If you need to vent, talk, cry, or just have some to talk with then I am here listening. Since I am working part-time at the local Kroger, I will to the best of my ability to work it out around my schedule.
But you can reach me here:
Email: hotelblogger@aremorch.com
Also, join us at our Facebook Group – Hotel Social Media Community
We will get through this unprecedented event together! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong
For any specific information on COVID-19, I recommend go to CDC, WHO, AHLA, AAHOA, and HSMAI. Also, follow information from your local authorities.
NOTE
We are starting to reopen some hotels again (Yay!!!). Make sure you follow their guidelines and say THANK YOU to those that now show a unique spirit to serve, and helps us all get through this!! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong
About Are Morch
Hi, I am Are Morch. Your Digital Marketing Coach and Customer Experience Expert that specializes in creating effective digital customer experience offer for hotels while growing and scale customer acquisition and revenue.
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