Over the years, texting and mobile guest engagement solutions have taken multiple industries by storm, including hospitality – allowing employees to effectively communicate and build loyalty from guests.
This is important for the IT professional, as texting and messaging options ease operations by providing a seamless opportunity for guests to connect with team members. Further, it eases the process of resolving disgruntled guests and provides a positive brand experience.
As someone who works in IT, the idea of implementing a texting and mobile engagement solution is then considered a considerable asset to communicate successfully with the modern-day guest.
In order help you optimize your guest engagement within your hotel, here we outline our 6 best practices when implementing a text and mobile engagement solution.
An Omni-channel Experience
Creating effective mobile engagement at your hotel starts by delivering an omni-channel experience. That means you should not only consider including text messaging as a form of communication but also including means of communicating with your hotel via native apps, email, social messaging, chat messaging, and more.
According to a study conducted by Business2Community “companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.” Thus, omni-channel efforts help businesses not only engage guests encourages loyalty.
With a tool like Loop Messenger™, you can utilize multiple messaging channels and effortlessly manage all of them on one unified platform. This makes it easier for other departments like Guest Services to optimize guest communications while allowing your IT department to measure satisfaction across the various channels your guests prefer.
Auto-Routing Messages
For the IT professional that wishes to improve workflow and engage guests efficiently, we suggest a mobile engagement solution that allows you to auto-route messages based on topic.
By adopting a text and mobile engagement solution like Loop Messenger™, your hotel can support the tagging, tracking and routing of all guest conversations through our natural language processing tool.
The feature allows guests’ input – based on location, sentiment, contact preferences, and subject (request, compliment, complaint, etc.) – to reach the right team members for action. It does this by reading the message and auto-tagging the conversation based on what the guest is asking, making for a more streamlined process of identifying the guest’s needs and routing it to the right person who can quickly help them.
Learning from Conversations
Engaging guests begins by understanding their needs and catering to their preferences. As an IT professional, you know that with the proper analytics solution, you not only gain visibility into guest sentiment but you can also improve overall operations over time by learning from guest trending topics.
With a mobile engagement solution like Loop Messenger™, you can monitor trends in guest conversations in order to see where your performance disappoints and succeeds in real-time. With these insights, other departments can accurately reward particular team members behaviours, make changes to processes or policies, and continuously improve the experience your team provides to guests.
Real-Time Feedback
Allowing for real-time feedback is a strong asset for many reasons. It allows hotels to pre-empt negative experiences and reviews while also improving overall performance.
With a mobile engagement solution like Loop®, your internal IT team can manage guest conversations as well as access sentiment analysis to improve operations.
In addition, real-time feedback can help frontline teams connect with hotels privately to discuss any issues that may have occurred. Since it is real-time, you can recover a guest immediately, preventing them from going onto social media to share their frustration publicly or giving you a poor rating on a variety of review sites.
Personalize Through System Integration
In a sea of competitors, personalization is an effective marketing strategy that helps hotels become closer to their guests, and in turn, foster greater loyalty.
Implementing a texting and mobile engagement solution into your loyalty programs, service-order, and property management systems is an effective way to personalize your guest communications.
With Loop Messenger™, you can connect with hotel guests using emails or phone numbers gathered from previous interactions that have been logged in your database – via integration of PMS or CRM systems. This not only helps your team manage communications with guests but also helps them identify loyal members in order to further optimize guest engagement.
Create Benchmarks and Goals.
In order to foster an effective guest engagement strategy, it is important that you have a set of benchmarks and goals in place that can measure the health of overall operations.
When it comes to integrating a texting and messaging solution, you know that it isn’t as simple as setting and forgetting. Launching this type of solution should come with a clearly defined set of metrics for success, such as third-party website review and rating improvements, increasing return visits, capturing quality customer feedback at key moments, and improving overall guest satisfaction scores. Including metrics and goals and benchmarks is important to measure the performance of your program and continuously improve.
What are some ways your hotel has integrated texting and messaging? Let us know in the comments, or on social media:
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