If you operate in the hotel or hospitality industry, you’ll know that the customer’s experience is EVERYTHING. From a customer’s first online search and the booking experience to every customer touchpoint and interaction during their time with you, it’s the customer experience management that drives repeat visits and those glowing online reviews.
But it’s not just the hospitality industry where customer experience is king. These days, excellent customer experiences and a high quality of service are expected across all sectors. Businesses that fail to meet these expectations risk losing customers, damaging their reputations, and seeing revenues fall.
One of the biggest challenges for many businesses is the growing gap between what business leaders think good customer service is and what customers want. In this article, we’ll cover a few of the basics, discuss how customers’ and leaders’ perceptions often differ, and provide tips to close the gap and get your CX strategy back on track.
Customer experience management (CEM) is the process of systematically monitoring, analyzing, and improving the interactions your customers have with your brand at every stage of their journey.
Customer experience used to be easier to manage simply because there were fewer touchpoints for businesses to worry about. Now, social media platforms, online review sites, and third-party booking platforms can all influence potential customers before they’ve even tried your products or services. That’s why it’s so important to closely monitor and enhance every part of the process.
As an example, a typical journey for a customer booking a hotel room could involve:
All these customer experience touchpoints occur before they even arrive at your hotel. You then have to think about the service when checking in, the cleanliness of the room, the dining experience, and all the other opportunities you have to delight your guests in person.
Customer experience management allows you to cut through the noise of the many touchpoints to understand what customers want, what you’re doing well, and where you’re falling short. Once you know that, you can put an end-to-end strategy in place to enhance their experience and ensure consistency throughout their journey.
To deliver a high-quality customer experience, you must first understand what your customers expect from you. You can then start to shape your interactions to meet and exceed their expectations. That sounds like an obvious step, but there’s often a disconnect between what brands think their customers want and what they actually expect.
Recent surveys of 1,000 consumers and 500 business leaders shed some light on that disconnect:
These numbers indicate that companies have a blind spot when it comes to looking critically at their own organizations, and that can mean customer experience issues often are not identified or resolved.
Failing to meet customers’ expectations can have serious consequences. One report found that 51% of customers were disappointed with the interactions they had with businesses over the past year, with 66% saying they would refuse to buy from a brand they previously had an unsatisfactory experience with.
Another reason for the CX disconnect is that those responsible for key customer experience decisions are often not high enough up in the business to drive the change that’s needed. One survey found that 78% of CX decision-makers are director-level, but only 43% are in the C-suite. Without representation in the C-suite, it can be difficult to drive the customer experience transformation that’s needed.
This is where a customer experience management system comes into play. By monitoring all the touchpoints in the buyer’s journey, you can identify where your customers’ experiences do not meet their expectations. You can then put a process in place to deliver consistent encounters and communications that can differentiate your brand and drive growth.
Here are three steps to success:
The first stage in the process is the systematic collection of guest data to understand what you’re doing right and where things are going wrong. You can do that by analyzing relevant sources of customer experience data, these include:
These sources will give you valuable insights into customer preferences and expectations so you can make immediate improvements.
Businesses tend to adopt a promotional approach by putting their products and services first. However, a lack of focus on the customer can create disconnects that often lead to unsatisfactory experiences. You can overcome that by putting the customer at the forefront of everything you do.
In the digital age, customers are overwhelmed with information and choices, particularly in an industry that’s as competitive as hospitality. That’s why you should focus your efforts on helping them make informed decisions. Investing the time and money to personalize customer interactions and create data-driven engagement tools to simplify their journey will improve your service.
Investing in technology can be a game changer when aligning customer and business CX perceptions. Depending on the insights from your customer data, you might identify AI tools, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, that can provide quick answers to customer queries and free up human agents to provide more complex and personalized guest interactions.
Other solutions that can enhance the customer experience, particularly in the hospitality industry, include:
All of these tools can create a more luxurious experience, yet hospitality remains a business where real human interactions are essential. So, while technology is a great tool for improving CX, it should not create a barrier to real human interactions nor reduce the humanity of a brand.
Customer experience issues are relatively easy to solve by gathering relevant insights, shifting to a customer-first mentality, and investing in technology. Often, the most problematic part of the process is getting business leaders to recognize the organization’s faults. Only by acknowledging your shortcomings and getting buy-in from the C-suite can you deliver customer experiences that consistently delight.
To learn more about excellent customer experiences, and how to achieve them, check out these articles.
Are you looking for training or education related to this topic? As the world’s top-ranking hospitality school, with over 125 years of experience, EHL Hospitality Business School’s Graduate School (GS) offers programs for the leadership sphere focusing on human-centricity, and thereby improved customer-centricity, which elevates the customer experience by involving all levels of an organization.