Just like a two-star San Diego hotel during Comic-Con, the hospitality industry is a crowded space. Hotels of all kinds and budgets jostle for travellers’ attention with popups, deep discounts, and attractive images. Standing out in this kind of competitive environment is tough.
Where is the best place to spend your hotel’s marketing budget? Instead of dropping more money into Google AdWords, why not consider something that’s more of a guarantee to bring more guests in: customer service. Nothing ensures a guest’s continued loyalty and willingness to tell their friends and family like a smooth and seamless customer service experience.
In the same way that the perfect dining experience takes coordinated orchestration between several teams, the recipe for excellent hotel customer service also takes careful planning and collaboration. Here are some automated hospitality processes that can show your guest you are serious about giving them the experience of their life.
Guests at hotels usually ask the first person they see for whatever they need. You never want to leave a guest feeling uncared for, but training each employee to solve every possible request is simply not practical. Instead, you can create automated workflows that every employee can initiate from their mobile device. Imagine the pool attendant starting a maintenance request for room 202 when he overhears a conversation about a leaky faucet. When the plumber is asked about resolving a wifi problem, he can pull out his phone and initiate a request that brings the IT team within minutes. Now, the first person a guest asks is empowered to resolve any requests that comes their way. You don’t forget an experience like that!
Your staff often knows exactly how to give guests an amazing experience – they’re just too intimidated to actually request it. It’s one thing for housekeeping to put an extra chocolate on a little girl’s pillow; it’s something else entirely to offer to take your guest’s suede suit across town to a specialty dry cleaner. While most managers are happy to make such allowances, they also like to be kept in the loop when it is happening. You can create a quick workflow called ‘Above and Beyond’ that allows managers to give approvals for larger requests without waiting for an email reply.
Unplanned things happen all the time. Let’s say you run a small hotel and a water pipe bursts in the middle of the night. Your team scrambles to fix everything, and you resettle the family in another room, but most of their clothes were ruined in the process. Even if you are out of town, you can still approve a gift card to a local clothing retailer, or add on other clever ideas to make sure your guests know you want the best for them.
Invite your staff to comment when they are particularly impressed by the behavior or service of a guest. You can create an automated formatting and approval process where these comments can be emailed to guests to let them know they are a real ‘preferred’ member. That person will be happy to stay again at a place they are appreciated.
Marketing Metrics says that there is a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer versus a 5-20% chance of selling to a new prospect, and it is 6-7 times more expensive to attract a new customer than keep a current one. So why not invest more money in automating your hotel customer service workflows with Kissflow? Take a free trial of Kissflow Workflow and see what you can build!