6 Steps to getting started with creating a connected guest experience

6 Steps to getting started with creating a connected guest experience

Where do you start?  Here are suggestions for you to consider as you look at creating or enhancing your connected customer experience. 

1) Recognise the Opportunity. Probably no organisation today can fully deliver the connected traveller or connected guest experience – unless they embrace a new way of unifying the customer journey and, most importantly, their entire organisation.  But they know they need to find and understand these customers. A connected organisation makes that leap and is always on for the customer, alert, listening and responding.

2) Don’t Exceed Your Capabilities, Take Incremental Steps. For many organisations that have tried to create a connected experience, they have gone too big, too quickly, spending a lot of time and money that doesn’t deliver on the expectations. It’s better and more effective to focus on the connected experience journey in increments.  For example, better mastery of existing customer data can allow monetization and promote the development of “connected” features.  This is where quick wins exist that can encourage the next steps.

3) Establish the Framework of Connected Operations. Those next steps include beginning to define and build a single view of the customer for the organisation. Then, begin to map the customer journey: By taking a full view of the customer’s journey (both literal and figurative) and creating your own journey map, the potential to grow and convert business at every step will become clear.

4) Complete the Transition. However, organisations should seek to avoid the danger of half-steps or too much gradualism. That can keep the hardest and most liberating steps from being taken, namely implementing the capabilities that make the integration between and among systems both possible and practical. This effort at Hyper-Integration not only yields benefits in the near term, it also prepares the organisation for whatever comes next – whether it is further improving existing internal functions, rapidly delivering new capabilities, or perhaps absorbing and rationalising the assets of another organisation.

Hyper-Integration can better support process automation, which in turn can deliver insights and actions to systems and people.

5) Improve Your Connected Organisation. Further value can be achieved through increasing personalisation. With information inherent in existing processes, much can be gleaned and inferred that can, in turn, lead to value for the customer and potentially increase sales. Customers willing to share further, subject, of course, to any relevant privacy regulations, can add further value to the journey of connectedness. 

The Diverse and Demanding world is travelling. Old ways of doing business just won’t do. Being able to deliver unique and complete customer experiences, as embodied in the connected traveller and connected guest, is a vital differentiator for today’s travel or hospitality organisations. It is the key to growing business and increasing market share.

Organisations that can’t transition will be left behind. The connected customer experience will also drive the travel and hospitality business to success and profitability like never before. It’s also a no-option play for business and technology executives.  They need to embrace the reality – a connected customer experience is how successful businesses will transform and stay relevant moving forward. 

As we finalise this blog series, we hope you have gained valuable insights and inspiration to start your business transformation. By harnessing the power of your existing data, system integrations, and analytics, you have the opportunity to revolutionise the way you engage with your guests, enhance their satisfaction, and drive business growth. Embracing a Hyper-Integrated approach, leveraging technology advancements, and prioritising personalised experiences will set your organisation apart in a highly competitive market. 

To learn more about how organisations are quickly generating value, contact marketing@xiatech.io to schedule a call with our experts.

Read the rest of the creating a connected guest experience series:

#1 – An introduction to creating a connected guest experience

#2 – Embracing the Connected Customer Experience: Challenges and Opportunities in the Travel Industry

#3 – Understanding high customer expectations

#4 – A vision of the new connected guest experience