Hoteliers are embracing new ways for providing more personalized services that are data driven to the point where front desk staff can wish a guest a happy birthday, or correctly pronounce a guest’s last name.
This level of personalized service, though, can be a challenge for large organizations. Unrelated systems across multiple touch points throughout a property, each with different data formats and required fields, can make accessing and integrating guest profiles difficult.
However, a recent article in Hospitality Upgrade, touches on a new effort, called master data management (MDM), that leverages operational data to deliver personalized services that can help increase operational efficiency. MDM streamlines personalization by providing real-time access to key information about guests at the point of contact. All employees have the same information needed to make the right decisions about how to treat each guest, in real time. The information can also be used to streamline data entry, and to make operational decisions.
As an MDM example, the article highlights a large Las Vegas casino company that has recently implemented MDM to support its goal of differentiating its customer service capabilities. Its call center and reservations agents use MDM to streamline the reservations process. When a guest calls the call center, the casino’s phone systems use the MDM processes to perform a lookup based on the phone number. If the phone number is associated with an existing record in MDM, then it sends all the master data to the call center agent’s application. The information is displayed as the agent answers the call, so he or she is ready to begin the reservation process, with knowledge of patron preferences and eligible offers without having to be retold. All identifying information is ready to be entered into the Lodging Management System (LMS), avoiding any keystroke mistakes. Any relevant interactions during the call are sent to the MDM hub, and the record is updated.
By having important profile information about each guest, MDM provides hospitality companies essentially with the actionable intelligence they need to provide completely customized services for each individual guest.