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March 14, 2018
Why Hotel Technology Must Be Customer-Centric
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"Everything you do has to be customer-centric" The online travel agencies highlighted the investments they have been making into changing the consumer experience. ÒPeople are getting more savvy," Peter Verhoeven, global director of partner services at Booking.com, said. "They donÕt want a repeat experience; they want a unique experience. Everything you do has to be customer-centric. If the customer doesnÕt find what he or she wants, they will leave and never come back.Ó Arthur Chapin, chief product officer at Brand Expedia Group, echoed the sentiment. ÒWeÕve tried to change the conversation around technology and make it about meeting customer needs. ItÕs about looking at what the big customer problems are to solve." With voice-based technologies such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant expected to be the next route to market for hotels, Chapin said that travel and hospitality companies were learning about the power of the human voice. ÒVoice will change peoplesÕ expectations about how they interact with that company," he said. "For us, every investment is about solving a specific problem. Time and time again, customers are telling us that they donÕt want to interact with another human. Technology can improve the personalization of these interactions. The investment that companies are making in machine-learning is critical. For us, a lot of itÕs about getting all the data in one place, and then it becomes [about] building the software capability that can predict answers. We need to remember that itÕs not just answering the question, but how that question is asked.Ó Representing the hotel operators, Rufino PŽrez, COO and global transformation leader at NH Hotel Group, said that any investment his company considers requires a compelling business case. "What is the return for that investment?" he asked. ÒWe want to enhance the customer experience with check-in online, choose-your-room and check-out express. [We want] to make those functions more efficient. We also want to save money at the back-of-house by, for instance, integrating suppliers. We are also looking to improve revenues, [and] we are now able to provide individual price points for all our third parties. These are critical thingsÑpractical things.Ó The Customer Journey Panelists drew attention to other online consumer brands, with Paul Roberts, CEO of Village Hotel Club, highlighting the simplicity of AmazonÕs sales process. ÒWe need to look at the customer journey, at making it frictionless,Ó he said. Productivity was key to the operatorsÕ adoption of new technologies, Roberts said. ÒWe need, as an industry, to improve our productivity, and we will invest in anything that improves productivity. ItÕs the same as any CapEx project that youÕre going to undertake. We break it down into two areasÑthe application piece and the infrastructure piece. I try to separate [them] because there are some things you have to do, such as cybersecurity, and there are others where you apply ROI.Ó Following TUIÕs announcement that it was looking to use blockchain technology to manage inventory, the panel sought to address this new potential. ÒAny sector where itÕs not a tangible good, that is a space that is going to be impacted by blockchain,Ó Chapin said. ÒBlockchain has the ability to change how things are done in travel. For a long time, there have been central systems that manage inventory, and blockchain has the ability to disrupt that. Customers expect an instant response in everything they interact with, and blockchain may increase the response times for that.Ó PŽrez, for his part, was suspending judgment. ÒThey claim that blockchain will dramatically cut commissions, but we will see," he said. "We think that the combination of blockchain and loyalty schemes will be very interesting.Ó Copyright 2018 Questex LLC. All rights reserved. From https://www.hotelmanagement.net. By Katherine Doggrell.
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