Today, nearly 60 percent of travelers book hotels using a mobile device and 81 percent find user reviews important. With mobile devices serving as a natural extension of travelers, hotels must engage with their guests where they’re talking and listening before, during and after their stay to manage the guest experience from check-in to checkout.
Streamline Operations
Before a guest even steps foot onto the property, hotels should incorporate mobile technology into their internal operations to streamline communication between departments and shifts. Replacing physical logbooks and finicky radios with mobile devices is one way to ensure transparency and accountability between frontline employees and management, shaping the guest’s first impression and ensuring consistency from day to day.
Encourage Engagement
Once checked in, guests should have a way to communicate requests and complaints directly to hotel staff via mobile device without being required to download an app or call the front desk. Requesting more towels or expressing a noise complaint via text encourages guests to engage directly with staff in a manner that is intuitive and natural for today’s traveler. Opening this additional line of communication between the guest and staff not only creates a highly personalized guest experience, it also provides the opportunity for management to address an issue that might otherwise only be discovered after the guest checks out and publishes a review.
It is imperative that mobile-initiated complaints are escalated quickly, handled appropriately and logged correctly. While a complaint may have been initiated via text, hotel management should not necessarily continue the dialogue using the same medium. Instead, the manager should quickly take the complaint offline by engaging with the guest verbally or face-to-face. After the issue is remedied, the incident should be logged so that staff can be aware of and sensitive to the guest’s issue during future stays.
Keep it Simple
If technology overcomplicates the guest experience, don’t implement it. Completely replacing traditional staples in the hospitality industry like the front desk associate or housekeeper with technology removes the opportunity to personally connect with guests and create the highly customized experience we’ve all come to expect.
While comment cards on pillows might be obsolete, the concept is certainly not. Hotels should automatically send a brief survey to the guest’s mobile device after checkout requesting feedback on their experience. Many hotels offer points as incentives to completing these surveys, which ultimately provides a wealth of information to calibrate operations and increase guest satisfaction.
While we most certainly have not seen the extent of mobile technology’s role in the hospitality industry, it’s clear that hotels seeking to increase customer satisfaction must connect with guests where they’re engaged through mobile technology. Through technology, savvy hotels should proactively shape the guest experience by streamlining internal operations, opening a new line of communication and implementing technology where it makes sense.