Next Generation Loyalty and Guest Centric Opportunities

How can it be that Loyalty Programs fall short in guest satisfaction? Our best customers belong to these programs. The ones we know best, right? The ones that ask us to participate and then provide a fair amount of personal data upon joining.  We track them mercilessly with rate codes and special web pages and phone numbers and guest service lines… So how can it be that one of the biggest complaints people have about their preferred loyalty programs is that they don’t receive information that has value to them. Many feel the communication sent to them is little better than spam. Frequent guests complain that irrelevant offers and off-target messages seem to ignore the long history they have with their chosen brands.  Guests’ expectations are for a more personalized experience and this desire is strongest among a brand’s most loyal customers.   The CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Council’s research in The Leaders in Loyalty: Feeling the Love from the Loyalty Club “found that 54 percent of the consumers surveyed let it be known that thanks to the barrage of irrelevant messages, low value rewards, and impersonal engagements, they aren’t feeling the love.”

The travel industry has some of the best loyalty programs in the world, with 10 spots in the top 20 detailed in this report including programs like Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest and Hilton Honors as well as American Airlines AAdvantage program, United and Continental Airlines’ programs.  As an industry, we recognize the opportunity that these customers represent, but in many cases have yet to move beyond using only the most basic transactional and demographic information on our best guests.

In the current business climate, our regular and repeat guests are more important than ever.  And they are privy to offers and enticements in unprecedented numbers in response to the economic downturn.  The good news is they want a special relationship with their brands; and they want an individualized message that speaks to this relationship. Sandra Zoratti, VP of Global Solutions Marketing for INFOPrint Solutions Company, writes in her paper The Relevancy Requirement How Customers are Demanding Precision Marketing “in order to forge these deeper relationships with consumers, marketing must take the next step in aggregating, leveraging and utilizing customer insights to deliver more targeted, personalized customer engagements.” Many travelers remain loyal, not because they are satisfied with the brand and the program but because they don’t want to lose status or accumulated rewards. It is time for smarter hoteliers to make strategic decisions and investments that improve both guest satisfaction and customer loyalty by acquiring business intelligence that enables more personalization.

So where will this intelligence come from? How can we move forward, forging stronger, more guest-centric relationships?  What systems can help with the complex analytics that assess trends then offer real customer information in order to take full advantage of market insights and how they apply to our high value customers?  Certainly there are high end solutions like IBMs Cognos Analytics that allow properties to combine business intelligence from many different sources and market to different customer groups based on complex patterns of behavior as well as identifying those events and environments favored by a hotel’s best customers.  And it does it with cool graphs and charts that make every marketing professional swoon.

But not every solution requires an big investment in technologies, some require an investment in time and an interest in what the customer is saying.  The fusion of social marketing with a loyalty program creates a meeting place for consumers and the dialogue that ensues can provide an opportunity for deeper client understanding.  Certainly email is the workhorse of the loyalty program, but social platforms like Facebook and Twitter need to be integrated as well, creating more opportunities to engage with a brand’s “biggest fans”.  The sales process is one that begins with building rapport with potential clients and comes around full circle to maintaining trust and satisfaction with our customers. The hospitality industry is dedicated to customer service practices that make a guest feel special while on-property; our loyalty programs should do nothing less.  When frequent guest programs focus on guest centric goals, they will do what operators expect them to in other areas as well: provide brand differentiation and drive business at preferred rates.

Home »