Tourism and hospitality leaders have noticed a major shift lately in the path to purchase because buyers’ tendencies have changed.
Digital transformation trends in hospitality and tourism show that demonstrating a strong omnichannel journey with robust data and content creation is essential. Delivering omnichannel orchestration is key to providing contextual experiences guests now demand. And ensuring senior leadership is attuned to the importance of having a 360-degree view of customers is just as important to remain competitive.
In a comprehensive study involving 1,749 hotel guests and 1,905 retail consumers, Medallia, a leading research company, identified a strong correlation between personalization and overall customer satisfaction: 61% of consumers are willing to spend more on companies that provide a customized experience. The same study highlights significant opportunities for hotel and retail brands to enhance their offerings and increase revenue, with only 23% of consumers reporting high levels of personalization during recent hotel stays. Are you maximizing your ability to personalize customer service experiences so you can improve revenue generation and operational efficiency?
Creating Data-Driven Capabilities
Hospitality businesses have leveraged technology to understand their guests better and create more personalized and engaging experiences with the ability to have a 360-degree view of customers. By leveraging data and insights, hospitality businesses can provide more precise customer service, build targeted marketing campaigns, and create more effective loyalty programs.
Guests increasingly seek hotels that cater to their entertainment preferences while expressing a strong desire for personalized amenities and services throughout their stay. A significant portion, 43.6%, are interested in having voice-activated controls for room amenities, including lights, curtains, door locks, sinks, showers, and TVs. Additionally, 34.4% of guests prefer using their devices for seamless hotel access. Furthermore, 25.4% are intrigued by room controls that automatically adjust temperature, lighting, and even digital art tailored to their pre-shared preferences. With the right technology in place, this quick scan enables a 360-degree view of customers that can potentially connect all of your systems—including marketing, service, and point-of-sale to every dine-in customer.
Here are eight perks that offer a personalized guest experience and the ability to build a stronger hotel loyalty program or restaurant loyalty program:
- 1. Personalization: When you have a 360-degree view of customers, you get a comprehensive view of a guest’s behavior, preferences, and history. This insight allows hospitality businesses to tailor their offerings better to match the needs and wants of each customer. For example, hotels can offer personalized room amenities or target promotions based on a customer's preferences. If a guest prefers a particular type of pillow or cuisine, a hotel can use this information to tailor their experience to meet their specific needs.
- 2. Customer Service: With a 360-degree view of customers, hospitality businesses can quickly and easily access a customer's history and interaction with the business. This allows staff to provide more personalized and efficient customer service, resolving any issues or requests quickly and effectively, helping build their hotel loyalty program or restaurant loyalty program.
- 3. Efficiency: A single guest view can improve efficiency by allowing staff to access information quickly and easily about a guest. This can help reduce wait times and streamline processes, leading to a more efficient and positive guest experience.
- 4. Marketing: With insights from a 360-degree view of customers, hospitality businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns more likely to resonate with each customer. Targeted marketing plans can increase customer engagement and more effective use of marketing resources.
- 5. Loyalty Programs: A 360-degree view of customers can also create more personalized loyalty programs that reward customers for their specific behaviors and preferences. By analyzing data on customer behavior, hospitality businesses can create targeted offers and promotions that are more likely to drive repeat business.
- 6. Feedback and Reviews: A 360-degree view of customers can be used to collect and analyze customer feedback and reviews, helping hospitality businesses identify improvement areas and make changes to better meet customer needs.
- 7. Single Guest View Benefits: 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.
- 8. Advantages of Operational Efficiency: A 360-degree view of customers allows you to automate processes and reporting to minimalize repetitive manual tasks to speed time-to-insight faster, allowing faster reporting, testing, and accelerated campaign planning.
Digital Transformation in Hospitality Industry
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.
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.
