What would happen to loyalty and guest acquisition if your marketing team could predict with a degree of certainty what guests wanted before they asked for it? The currency of any hospitality providers’ business is the guest, literally.
When guests are treated as a transaction, they often wait for the best offer since they receive similar opportunities from various brands. Managing the situation with what we call “Predictive Guest Marketing” or PGM, allows brands to build personas that anticipate needs and make targeted, timely and personalized offers to guests.
Today, what we know about a guest is based on the limited metrics derived from disconnected systems and guest preference surveys. PGM starts by delighting the potential guest before they plan a trip by applying analytics and CRM technologies to better understand the needs they have in common with others and those which are unique to the guest and or their family.
Thanks to the rapid expansion of cloud-based services, hotel organizations can now glean the insights they need to have this powerful guest-centric information on hand. These CRM tools can actually provide the following information:
- Insights into producing and non-producing corporate accounts
- Hotel contacts
- Guests’ purchasing habits
- Travel agency referrals
In addition, working in concert with these new CRM tools are new approaches to property management that integrate with new mobile solutions and social networking sites, and can scale globally.
The foundation of all of these new tools is one thing: guest knowledge. The more guest data a hotelier has at their fingertips, the better service they can provide. But is it always that easy? Having the right data is one thing, but hoteliers need to train their staff to make this data actionable at all times.
Knowledge is only powerful if it is put into action. For example, the Grand Heritage Hotel Group recently implemented a new cloud-based CRM solution to standardize guest communication efforts, as well as streamline customer satisfaction evaluation and reporting.
This new systems allows the hotel group to coordinate pre-arrival messaging, including confirmation emails and amenity up-selling. It also allows for guests to provide immediate feedback. This new solution also allows hotels to organically boost their rankings on TripAdvisor. In addition, and most important, this new solution is easy to use, according to the press release.
For hoteliers, there are a world of technologies that can help manage relationships with guests. When making new investments into key innovations, simply focusing on how it will positively impact our guests goes a long way. And, it does not hurt to have deep analytics on each guest.