The hotel in the clouds. - Equator · The hotel in the clouds. ... • Better marketing function...
Transcript of The hotel in the clouds. - Equator · The hotel in the clouds. ... • Better marketing function...
The hotel in the clouds. PATHS TO INNOVATION IN HOSPITALITY.
September 2017 Martin Jordan
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How the smart hotel can
transform the customer
experience.
UK hoteliers have always been innovators. It’s more important
now than ever to maintain that innovative edge as the pace of
technological change steps up a gear. Embrace the
technology and revolutionise customer experience. This paper
contains valuable insights covering mobile, AI and seamless
integration between technologies that can benefit the savvy
hotelier and focus budget on genuine ROI-driving technology.
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CONTENT.
NOW’S THE TIME 3.
TOWARDS A BROADER ECOSYSTEM 4.
A BETTER RESPONSE TO MOBILE 7.
OWNING THE RELATIONSHIP ON MOBILE 9.
FROM MOBILE TO MACHINE 13.
TO A MORE CONNECTED WORLD 17.
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Now’s the time.
UK hotels have long been innovators and early adopters of technology, unafraid to throw
out their once new and expensive technologies for modern, intelligent and open systems.
In today’s world of AI and smart technology, it’s time for hotel groups to once again lead
the way in embracing innovation. Never has so much technological capability been
available to the hotelier at such low cost and with so much potential, helping to build
consumer brand loyalty and counter increasing commercial pressure from OTAs.
Here we explore the efficiency and intelligence of cloud-based property management
systems, owning the customer relationship on mobile, harnessing the power of good data
and connecting systems intelligently to help hoteliers create multiple new paths to revenue
generation and deepening loyalty.
As our machine learning capabilities expand, we also highlight how adopting AI-driven
chatbot technology and smart UX can help bring a more personalised and meaningful
service for customers and enhance margins.
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Towards a broader ecosystem.
In The Cloud.
As more hotel systems become cloud driven, we are now witnessing a shift towards a more
customer-centric view and away from obese legacy desktop and server based systems.
This new cloud-based approach is opening the hotel tech ecosystem to multiple new
players such as Guestline, Hetras and Hotelogix, bringing new capabilities for hoteliers
large and small.
CLOUD PMS NEW TECHNOLOGY
CRM
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What used to be an expensive and cumbersome purchase can now be affordably bought
from multiple vendors for a single property, as it is for a 100+ hotel chain.
With open systems powered by customer data, machine learning and analytics capabilities,
hoteliers can exercise their customer data with more flexibility than ever before.
This brings a host of benefits:
• Smarter front-of-house, capable of personalising the customer experience.
• More intuitive web experience that tailors itself to the users’ preferences
and behaviours, driven by the CRM database.
• Better marketing function that promotes less but ultimately drives more
revenue and deeper loyalty.
• Unique and individual offerings through an enhanced on-premise experience
in a world being commoditised by the OTA.
At Equator, we’re spending an increasing amount of our time intelligently connecting
these systems. Whilst technology standards like HTNG go a long way to help ensure the
interoperability of systems, the technological space in hotels moves very fast and every
brand has their own unique needs.
There is now huge potential to deliver new forms of service through automation and
machine learning – achieved through the connectivity offered by contemporary systems.
Examples include:
• Linking a hotel’s Wi-Fi system to their CRM platform to personalise the on-site
internet experience and give loyal customers super speedy broadband.
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• Developing the ability to reward loyalty without a complex and expensive
loyalty scheme or the need to involve senior staff in approval of discounts or
up-grades.
• Taking the typical lobby screen and allowing it to serve real-time offers based
on actual availability, demand curves, current weather and more as well as
pushing distressed inventory without effort.
It’s this very path to innovation that has the potential to finally free the hotelier’s reliance
on the OTA and bring their market share down more in alignment with the airline industry,
where direct brand purchases still make up almost 60% of sales. And to suggest that the
transition from desktop to mobile could throw this all into jeopardy is to tell just one side
of the story.
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A better response to mobile.
Exploiting Mobile.
It goes without saying that if you are a hotelier in 2017 and your website is not mobile
friendly, then consider your digital strategy dead. You won’t rank in Google, you won’t
convert traffic and your brand will be slowly dying (at least online). Any traffic you do
receive from mobile will be research traffic alone – and likely traffic with high bounce
rates and low dwell time.
Thankfully the UK market is mature, has always innovated and most brands will at least
have a site that is adaptive or responsive to mobile. That said, there is still a lot of evolution
required in the hotel web space that actually starts to exploit mobile as a device, rather
than just as another browsing platform. Many brands are still staring down low conversion
rates and lots of traffic that looks like “research” traffic due to poorly thought out
mobile experiences.
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Today as we see many hotel brand sites pass the 50% mark for mobile traffic, we are
developing sites with a completely different approach to the user - one that is actually less
about mobile and more about the user.
Intelligent Mobile.
This is what we call “Responsive Plus” - a site that not only adapts to the user’s device
but thinks intelligently about the content it is going to show them by looking at where the
user is, what time of day it is, whether they are logged in, whether they have a booking
and whether they are in the middle of the booking process.
After all, a website connected to a smart CRM system and with visibility of its location can
tell you that User X is at your hotel, making use of their booked stay. In this environment,
the website should look to cross and up sell services on-premise, not try and get another
booking there and then.
You then begin to understand that much of that “research” traffic is people in your
property consuming your product and not “wasted” traffic.
This again underlines the power of the connected world and how a responsive mobile web
experience can deliver services at all stages of the purchase and consumption journey,
and beyond.
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Owning the relationship on mobile.
Before: A one-way street with PMS dominating.
After: CRM as the beating heart.
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Deepening loyalty through mobile.
By comprehensively owning the conversation with your customer from the point of
booking to the point of consumption, you can begin to create multiple new paths to
revenue generation and deepening loyalty.
The 15-20% you hand over to the OTA as commission starts to pale into insignificance
when you compare what the loss of relationship management is worth to your business in
terms of cross and up-sell opportunities, brand building and repeat purchase behaviour.
Now, customers are arriving at the hotel with the same device they made their booking on.
There is a device that has the potential to finally give you greater insight into the look-to-
book-to-stay journey in a way simply previously unavailable.
A smart hotelier must own the customer relationship at every stage.
If the customer journey started on an OTA, the relationship will likely continue with the
OTA. Persuading the consumer that the value of your brand experience is worthy of their
attention becomes much harder when they’re simply booking a room.
Consider also that returns are diminishing from the “traditional” digital channels (SEO,
PPC, affiliates and so on). Natural search on mobile has but a few front-page positions
battling with increasingly dominant ads. Additionally, paid search budgets are finding the
cost of generic terms too high with budgets being increasingly restricted to brand and
Hotel ads – and now we find OTAs relentlessly in that space too!
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These market pressures once again underline the need for the smart hotelier to create and
exhaust their ability to own a customer relationship at every possible stage.
Tracking a customer’s moves online is critical to understanding the value of your
marketing efforts, as well as helping improve and redefine your service proposition.
Of course, in a mobile world it’s not about one device, it’s typically about multiple devices
and about devices that ‘roam’. Thankfully technology is on hand to help the hotelier
navigate these challenging waters despite the decrease in search visibility and the increase
in data protection.
The Power Of Good Data.
Cross Device Tracking (CDT) is a growing technology set that helps to augment the
hotelier’s view on their investment. CDT can be achieved through apps, wireless gateways,
beacons, facial recognition, biometrics, and several other methods. Capabilities vary
depending on the user’s device, the apps installed and what the user has enabled.
However, if you assume the full capabilities are at the hotelier’s disposal, it starts to bring
back the level of ROI and behavioural tracking we were used to on the web of three years
ago. The benefits are strongly in the marketer’s favour and swing only to the user’s favour
when the capabilities are used to deliver better service and not pervasive marketing.
And again, with a service and marketing proposition journey that starts at the point of
purchase, the argument for ownership of that journey directly becomes far stronger.
The value in being able to learn more about the customer before they’ve consumed your
product gives the hotelier the ability to be more relevant and deliver an even more
personalised experience.
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But, we have to be good citizens with this data. Within Equator, we’ve been adding to our
data and insights skillset massively over the last few years because we recognise these
benefits. We spend more and more hours consulting with clients on their customers’ data,
we advise on systems and platforms to help collect and manage that data and we’re
constantly creating intelligent pieces of “management layers” that interrogate and help
surface that data in ways that make it more accessible.
But we’re also increasingly investing our time in ensuring that we all work hard to exploit
these tools and techniques for good. As these capabilities grow and as our Machine
Learning capabilities expand to make even more of this data actionable, the temptation is
strong to get out there and just to sell, sell, sell instead of to deliver a better, more
personalised service.
Hoteliers must use data to personalise the experience, rather than just sell, sell, sell.
A quick buck today is very tempting and there’s certainly lots of examples of campaigns
that drove large chunks of short term revenue. This is not an effective long-term strategy.
Relentlessly selling to the consumer, haunting them across devices and chasing their
money will ultimately lead to disenfranchisement, no matter how personalised you
make it.
There has to be a value exchange. Consumers recognise that the things that make their
digital experience great are typically delivered by them surrendering elements of their
privacy. So far, this relationship has been mutually beneficial but as AI becomes
mainstream and our ability to target to an individual level with complete automation
becomes the norm, we must continue to observe this value exchange. If we don’t, we risk
losing that relationship altogether or, worse, having legislation come in and remove our
right to try and own it completely.
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From mobile to machine.
Modern Machine Learning.
As hoteliers work to bring to life a mobile-focused hotel, the next big innovation on the
horizon is machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
With the mainstreaming of cloud computing and the efforts of internet goliaths like
Google, Amazon and Microsoft, what was once the preserve of the few is increasingly in
the hands of the many. The consumer is already feeling the benefit of this technology and
they’re barely aware of it.
Similarly, the modern hotelier will be reaping the benefits of machine learning when they
purchase modern programmatic display advertising or use some of the latest revenue
management platforms.
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This is an everyday technology and getting access to it is often free. Google’s Cloud
computing platform can be tested for free, Microsoft will let you use its natural language
processing technology for free and Facebook is more than happy for you to use its voice
recognition technology.
Connected Environments.
Again, each of these platforms offers great potential, but their power is only realised when
in a connected environment. An Amazon Echo is a friendly, music playing helper on its
own. However, plug it into a hotel’s system, connect it to the technology in a room and
teach it about your world and it becomes an all-powerful helper that brings service-driven
marketing to life in a way not previously available. This is perfectly in the reach of
all brands.
We’ve already delivered an Alexa-based solution for Village Hotels which does all of this
and more. From controlling the television to booking a spa treatment. From check-out
times to checking out upcoming on-premise events.
Smart assistants can augment the job of a human and help deliver a better service.
From a wakeup call to cooling the room, we took a number of technology stacks and
connected them to this smart, AI world and made it accessible for the client and consumer.
It was not just Amazon’s Alexa technology that made this possible. It was a hotelier with
a set of contemporary, open technology platforms, our expertise in understanding and
connecting those open systems together and, importantly, a client with an open mind –
one that is innovative and ready to embrace the next level of technological development.
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Similarly, we are exploring, but most importantly further expanding, their service-based
marketing proposition through the use of smart assistants, commonly known as chatbots.
These portable, lightweight solutions are demonstrating clearly that, in the right
environment, smart assistants can augment the job of a human and, in some cases, deliver
a better service.
We cannot pretend that in a hospitality environment, smart assistants can replace human
service. When the customer demands hospital corners on their sheets or soya milk in their
coffee, machines cannot yet understand many of the subtleties of good service.
However, when we are clear about what they can do and then we make them do those tasks
swiftly, efficiently, and gracefully, they come alive.
A 24-Hour Service.
Smart assistants with a clear purpose make sense, are inexpensive and deliver positive
outcomes. Every hospitality business is full of linear processes that are customer facing,
whether it be taking a simple room booking to informing the user of check-out times or
requesting a wakeup call.
Embracing AI-driven chatbot technology can transform a two-star offering.
When you offer the ability to undertake certain tasks commonly undertaken by call centre
or front of house staff, this leaves them more able to deal with the more nuanced enquiries,
deliver a better service or even allow them to do some proactive service or marketing.
In addition, these assistants can deliver service relentlessly 24-hours a day. There are few
hospitality businesses that can offer consistent service every hour of the day, at least
not inexpensively.
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With a clever embracing of AI-driven chatbot technology, a two-star offering can begin to
offer four-star service without the added cost. And just as many strains of AI technology
have crept into the lives of the consumer without their realising, so too will this.
In a business with wafer thin margins and only service left as a differentiator, the modern
hotelier will have little choice but to embrace AI and use it to service their customer better,
manage their rates with more intelligence and promote them online with less waste.
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To a more connected world.
With so many expert systems and technologies available at prices that no longer cripple,
hoteliers are increasingly building a technology-driven hotel business. And as these
systems are connected and made accessible, the opportunities to drive greater revenue,
improve efficiencies, deliver better service and change the entire marketing proposition
are tangible and excitingly achievable.
Any fear of change needs to be swapped for the fear of being left behind. Technology
continues to evolve ever faster. If you can’t keep up, find a technology partner who
understands your world to help you stay ahead.
In the future, when everybody’s lives are in the cloud, the savvy hotelier will be using tech
to make their hotel feel like home. The in-room entertainment will be what the customer
likes and their dietary requirements will be understood - all without adding mountains of
cost or complexity. The future is not far away. But it starts with a more connected
hotel world.
MARTIN JORDAN INNOVATION DIRECTOR
EQUATOR, 58 ELLIOT STREET, GLASGOW, G3 8DZ
EQTR.COM