Providing engaging experiences at the right time and place along a customer’s journey profoundly affects your brand loyalty, trust, and value. Guests that value your brand will help you grow your digital experience and revenue—but only if your online capabilities allow you to enhance your brand’s mission.
Experience and personalization are the new battlegrounds in the competitive hotel and restaurant markets, and whoever can deliver on both fronts wins. In fact, 57% of B2C and 75% of B2B consumers say that a personalized customer experience would make them “much more likely” or “significantly more likely” to remain loyal. In a recent survey by Forrester of tourism and hospitality leaders, 62% say personalizing customer experiences have led to CX improvements that exceeded expectations—because even small CX gains can have a big effect on revenue.
But many tourism and hospitality industry leaders admit they lack a 360-degree view of customers, a single guest view, and the ability to offer a personalized customer experience. Still, those trends can improve with a digital transformation strategy to consistently deliver customer value by leveraging data to create connected, contextually relevant guest experiences across all interactions and channels.
Opportunities to Increase Revenue with a Digital Transformation
To drive personalization and become a data-driven, service-oriented organization, you need the right technology to provide frictionless experiences while responding to continuously changing consumer demands and markets. Leaders that invest in a data management system to understand their customers better will win the competitive battle to attract and retain consumers. A digital transformation can help leaders effectively capture, store, analyze, and interpret each customer’s data on a micro level while also spotting trends on a macro level.
From a digital perspective, hotels and restaurants often face a limited view of their customers, siloed data in disparate systems, with numerous manual processes and high expenses because they lack the proper technology. Businesses can’t grow or scale, and a lack of investment in new systems can cause the industry to fall further behind. Hotels and restaurants need the ability to offer one-time and bookings, cross-sell/upsell, redeem vouchers or gift cards. But today’s trends find hotels and restaurants also need to offer memberships, subscriptions, loyalty programs, and merchandise to maximize opportunities to drive revenue and stay competitive.
Here are a few ways leaders can overcome digital transformation challenges to create a more personalized customer experience:
Single Guest View Benefits: This feature allows you to easily create sophisticated segments, which allow for more personalized marketing campaigns for pre-defined audiences, such as travelers who love experiences or restaurant lovers who prefer a certain type of cuisine. Customer insights can capture trends to give you unprecedented access to new customer groups, which can help you coordinate communication for audiences across all direct and advertising channels.
The single guest view will also help you leverage customer data to drive precision communication and relevant recommendations before, during, and after a visit. For example, you could upsell an expensive wine based on a previous visit history or book hotel services or private excursions based on interests. Lastly, the single guest view allows you to personalize 1:1 cross-channel customer retention journeys based on your collected customer data and preferences, offering you a unique opportunity to reward loyal customers with specific offers.
Advantages of Operational Efficiency: When you want a 360-degree view of customers, you can automate processes and reporting to minimalize repetitive manual tasks to speed time-to-insight faster, allowing faster reporting, testing, and accelerated campaign planning. With a holistic 360-degree view of customers, you can gain real-time insights into operations and receive streamlined analytics of marketing campaigns with dynamic dashboards. With digital transformation software, you can understand trends, find root causes to make course corrections, and make faster, more precise strategic decisions.
Recommendations for Personalization at Scale
1-Connect your Personalization Strategy with your Data Strategy. Forrester reports tourism and hospitality leaders cannot properly serve channel-agnostic and digitally-savvy consumers across the entire customer lifecycle when data remains untethered to a single customer profile. Success with personalization is linked to your company’s maturity in data mastery—and ability to have a 360-degree view of customers.
2-Delight Customers with In-Person Interactions after Empowering Digital Tools. When digital tools enable real-time, dynamic interactions, that offers up more time for staff to focus on in-person needs and accommodations, ensuring a guest’s overall experience will be as personalized as possible.
So how can you empower digital tools to personalize at scale? Travel and hospitality software from Salesforce powers the world’s #1 CRM platform to provide a 360-degree view of customers, allowing you to deliver personalized, frictionless experiences. The travel and hospitality industry can benefit from data integration to personalize travel options, trigger artificial intelligence to provide real-time experiences, and connect guest services to guarantee complete customer satisfaction.
Propel your business with smarter technology investments, better data, and tighter integrations. As a multi-cloud Salesforce implementation partner, OSF Digital are loyalty experts that can help you deliver the personalized guest experience you want. Contact us to ensure your tech stack aligns with your growth goals.
