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Staying in a hotel should be a relaxing experience for any guest – a place where they feel unburdened of the stresses and strains of everyday life the moment they step through the front doors.
Every guest should have a reasonable expectation of being provided with a certain level of comfort, of having their needs met in a professional manner and, yes, of being made to feel a little bit special. In return, the hotel benefits from customer loyalty and recommendations that enhance its brand and improve its bottom line.
Quality customer service requires excellent staff; highly trained employees who are able to be calm and composed, present and discreet, attentive, and obliging. The better the hotel, the higher the expectations for excellent service and an enjoyable, relaxing stay.
Of course, the polished exterior presented to the guest is somewhat at odds with the hectic reality of the intensive, unglamorous work that goes on behind the scenes. Like a duck gliding across a pond – a good hotel is poised and serene above the water and frantic activity beneath the surface.
Even in an increasingly connected and digital world, the personal nature of what hotels must deliver remains largely unchanged. However, technology is changing the way it is delivered and the opportunities that now exist to exceed guest expectations.
From Personal to Personalised
Good customer service should always feel personal but these days it starts long before the guest sets foot in the hotel.
The moment someone picks up a phone or tablet or logs on to a computer to browse hotels in your area is the point at which their journey with your hotel begins. Traditional thinking has it that a hotel's online presence is just about facilitating bookings; but this is outdated and there is now a growing need for investment in digital solutions, as well as the physical property if hotel operators are to provide the best experience for their guests.
This means collecting data as potential guests navigate your booking engine to build a profile of the guest and using it to promote certain rooms, packages and content accordingly; it means making more services accessible online so that guests have greater control over their stay; and it means providing a personalised digital experience for each guest from the booking stage to through pre-arrival engagement, their actual stay in the hotel and even check-out.
The technology already exists to deliver this level of service. A personalised digital experience can comprise online check-in and checkout, reserving a car parking space, booking a restaurant, a spa treatment, or a golf tee time, booking interconnected rooms, paying the bill, and much more. There is no reason why all these same services can't be made available online. With today's digital solutions, guests can manage their entire stay from their mobile phone or any internet-enabled device to accomplish things that previously had to be done by phone or at the front desk.
The more interactions with services guests have online, the more data is collected and the greater the personalisation of their journey. This allows a hotel to build a well-developed picture of the guests, predict what they will need during their stay, and plan and deliver the service they deserve – both online and face-to-face.
The information that booking engines and other online ancillary services can capture about the guest can be fed into the hotel's property management system. This means the guest stays constant in the system and their information is saved and updated with any new data when the guest books again.
Information about dietary requirements, personal preferences, and whether the guest is travelling alone, with family or a group is saved on their profile. This process is automated and informs digital interactions with the guest, while in the physical hotel, all your staff needs to do is look at this information in order to interpret and act accordingly to deliver personalised customer service.
Throughout their stay, when the guest accesses hotel facilities, this information can be captured and used to build a picture of their interests and expectations, allowing the hotel to make recommendations, either digitally or in person, based on previous choices.
Booking Is Just the Beginning
A prerequisite for a hotel to be able to gather this information is having a booking engine that is seamlessly integrated into its property management system (PMS). Being taken offsite during the booking experience is unsettling and is responsible for high customer drop-off rates, so branding must be consistent throughout.
However, the booking engine is just the beginning. As the inevitable march of technology continues and more functionality is developed, many hotels should be looking towards a more complete ecommerce platform – one which allows an increasing number of services to be accessible online. The way these services are able to integrate with the PMS is key because they will only improve the guest journey and quality of customer service as long as navigating these services is a frictionless experience.
Facilitating online guest access to make a car park reservation, book a restaurant or spa treatment, or any other ancillary service is not the function of a hotel PMS – and neither should we expect it to be. However, a PMS which allows the integration of third-party apps which deliver these additional services is becoming an increasingly important part of a hotel's digital property.
Systems which embrace advances in technology and the availability of APIs – such as the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) – allow hospitality software solutions developers to roll out additional digital functionality for hotel guests far quicker than before.
Traditionally with software, there was a tendency to close out a system or perhaps let one vendor integrate with it if you've decided that you're not going to develop in that area. The thinking was that by controlling who develops into your system you might be able to own that whole marketplace in the future. That protectionist approach has been dispelled and what happens now is that PMS providers are focused on doing what they do well and facilitating other companies that actually enhance their offering by providing additional services.
The move is towards hotels having a technology ecosystem consisting of a PMS, booking engine and ancillary service apps, all integrated and operating seamlessly for the guest while capturing data which helps the hotel deliver better customer service. This benefits the hotel reputationally and in terms of driving revenue through greater uptake of ancillary services and increased direct bookings – but the drive towards digitalisation also has positive implications for hotel operations.
The automation of certain services – such as online check-in and checkout, kiosk key collections, restaurant reservations, and mobile bill payments – reduces the administrative workload on hotel staff and frees them up for higher-value interactions with guests, which in turn improves customer service standards and help a hotel exceed expectations. Your duck continues to be frantic activity beneath the surface, but more of the work is taking place in the cloud rather than in back offices.
Giving The Guest Control
We've already looked at some of the things that are possible now but where is this digital transformation leading – and what does it mean for the guest journey and customer service expectations?
The focus at present is on giving guests more control to customise their stay. In the short-term, this means being able to filter their room choice by options such as its view, the floor that it is on, its proximity to the elevators and function rooms to facilitate either convenience or a quieter, more restful stay.
Much like when choosing a seat when booking a flight, a hotel guest will be able to pick their own room type rather than being assigned one by the system or the reservation staff. Today's technology allows them to literally be able to pick their room number – and it will be guaranteed because it will be locked into the hotel's PMS. Special room configurations, such as interconnected or adjoining rooms can also be booked ahead of time, as long as the hotel has deployed that capability.
After room selection, guests can build their own stay – picking what they want in the room in terms of pillows and refreshments, requesting a toiletry pack because they forgot their own, with that information sent to housekeeping. In an era where guests increasingly travel light, this is a relatively small but much appreciated service.
The only barrier to hotels delivering these services is a lack of information. The hotel staff have no idea that the guest needs those extra things in their room, and the housekeeping department doesn't have access to the information of who's staying in each room. Technology can solve this problem.
Much of the information about personal room preferences that a guest has – particularly if they have been requested over the phone or in person – will be contained in a customer relationship management (CRM) system which operates separately from a hotel's PMS. This means if you are front of house, you have to move between systems to understand better that guest profile.
What is required is two-fold: first, the CRM system needs to be able to integrate and deliver the information it holds to the PMS; and second, the hotel's booking engine should have the capability to offer these choices, to collate the information, and make recommendations accordingly during the booking process.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
These recommendations will not be available just online – they will also generate a guest report for staff which can inform the service they provide.
For example: Mr. Jones has checked-in online and will be arriving at 5pm, he is probably a corporate guest, he would probably like extra water in his room, he might want coffee vouchers from the coffee shop.
Alternatively, the guest report might state: Mr. and Mrs. Penaud have booked interconnected rooms, this looks like a family booking, they will probably want information about the swimming pool, and they might like free swimming caps.
The report can also include relevant guest history, such as that Mr. Jones has stayed at the hotel four times before, that he previously ordered extra water and pillows, and that he usually has dinner at the hotel.
Armed with this report, hotel staff – liberated by technology from the requirement to focus on checking in and out guests, handing out keys, and taking payments – can focus on making relevant suggestions to the customer which might enhance their stay. It could be recommending somewhere to go for dinner, letting them know about a show or concert happening in the city, ordering a taxi, or simply having a nice conversation with the guest. That 5-star concierge service suddenly becomes more attainable in lower-rated hotels.
It's also about improving service in non-customer facing roles, such as housekeeping. With information fed into an integrated housekeeping app, these staff have full visibility of when a guest's room needs to be ready and what requests have been made. They can plan and act accordingly so that the guest has everything in their room as requested when they walk through the door. Again, this level of service shouldn't be exclusively for 5-star hotels – but lower-rated hotels can adapt to what they can provide.
This is part of personalisation, and it is what is required to deliver customer service which exceeds expectations – all that is required for it to be delivered across digital and physical property, is for the hotel to have IT systems that are integrated and allow the flow of information to where it is needed.
Changes After the Pandemic
The digital transformation of customer service in hotels has its genesis during the Covid-19 pandemic. Up to that point, online check-in/checkout had been a nascent service with a niche audience. It had been conceived and developed before the pandemic but to reduce the workload on front of house teams during the check-in process and free them up to provide better personal services.
It grew widely because of Covid requirements to limit the level of contact between guests and staff, and the subsequent labour shortages hotels faced in the aftermath. However, it also led to a greater focus on digital capabilities. Forward-thinking hotel operators began to look at all their services and how they are delivered. They have invested in their digital as well as their physical properties and have partnered with third-party providers to grow and enhance the guest journey. That growth is now becoming exponential and is fundamentally changing how excellent customer service is delivered.
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