The best way to provide an exceptional guest experience is to start with the core principle—understand your guest. You must deliver a high quality, high-touch, and efficient experience guests are now used to from the ecommerce industry. In addition, the J.D. Power 2020 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index (NAGSI) study found that hospitality venues that prioritize guest experience, cleanliness, and proactively communicate with guests prior to arrival will reap the benefits in terms of guest satisfaction, profits, and reputation.
So, how do hotels and convention centers begin to understand their guests in order to deliver exceptional, personalized experiences and proactively communicate prior to, during, and after a guest stay? It all comes down to leveraging the right technology and ingesting the data it provides into a centralized platform. Then, you combine it with expert analysis to create actionable insights. Data from cameras, WiFi, sales transactions, people counters, and mobile apps, can provide hotels and convention centers a complete view of the guest from the moment they book a stay until they depart.
The analysis of this data can help hotel and convention center managers measure guest engagement and satisfaction as well as predictively suggest offerings and activities. This helps improve the guest experience and increases the likelihood a guest wants to return to the venue or recommend it. This is one of the most important satisfaction scores hospitality venues strive for. When this is achieved, it means the venue understands a guest’s priorities, meets or exceeds expectations during the stay, and adapts to priorities as they change over time.
This all starts with gaining the visibility you need to know your guest to create a positive guest experience.
Understand the guest experience
Understanding the guest experience starts with observing behavioral patterns. Data from cameras, WiFi, and LiDAR can be used to map common guest journeys. You can find out who your guests are and what they do, both physically and online. This data also maps guest pathing, dwell time, areas of congestion, busiest times, and popular areas. This helps you begin to know your guest and understand the busiest times and areas in your venue. You can then optimize staffing, security, and operations to meet demand and improve guest experience.
Skyfii’s platform allows you to see how visitors move through different zones in your venues.
Additionally, you can identify websites guests visit when on your guest WiFi network. When you understand guest behaviors online, you will understand what activities interest them. This is useful when creating cross promotional ads or choosing where to advertise.
Once you better understand the guest experience, you can begin to engage with your guests in a personalized way.
Improve guest engagement
Guest engagement begins even before a guest checks-in to your venue. Targeted communications to confirm stay, gain guest preferences, encourage use of guest services and amenities, and provide information on safety protocols will start the guest experience on a positive note.
Once the guest is at your venue, your guest WiFi can provide many benefits that extend the positive guest experience. Guest WiFi can connect your guest and their device to your property management system. You can then deliver targeted communications to your guest via mobile app, email, or SMS based on the data gathered within your data platform.
You can also target these communications based on behavior and location within your venue. For example, if your guest has historically dined at a restaurant within your venue, you can send an offer once the guest is on the hotel premises to encourage a visit. Another way to improve guest engagement is to survey guests at the end of their stay to gauge sentiment and how to tweak the experience in the future.
Trigger automated campaigns to guests based on behavior, time of day, and location in your venue.
It is important to measure and adapt personalized marketing campaigns as you go to ensure engagement. Skyfii’s platform measures guests’ visits and what they do while in your venue so you understand how effective different marketing campaigns are at influencing behavior.
Another way technology and data can facilitate a positive guest experience is by improving staff and venue operations.
Optimize staff and venue operations to positively impact guest experience
Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, or LiDAR can provide a ratio of staff to guests and the impact staff ratios have on room turnover, queue times, congestion, and more. In the event of a health and safety incident, the Skyfii platform can detect the nature and location of the incident in real-time and notify staff instantaneously. Staff can also receive automated notifications to optimize cleaning cycle frequencies based on increased or decreased guest volumes.
Skyfii’s platform can show you how visitor traffic compares to staffing levels throughout the day, week, or season.
Cameras or LiDAR can also help hospitality venues provide better accessibility design and features. These data inputs can detect the behavioral patterns of guests based on classifications such as a person walking or wheelchair moving. This data can help hospitality venues understand the most efficient paths for wheelchair users so hospitality managers can plan safer and more efficient accessibility routes and services.
In addition, data can also help you measure your venue’s assets. Data from cameras, WiFi, BLE, RFID, or GPS can provide analytics on asset patterns or generate real time alerts based on the location of an asset. You can also understand how information booths and service desks are used. Data can report upon utilization as well as queue lengths and times. You can then implement countermeasures to reduce queue times.
Improve your venue’s satisfaction score
These technologies help hotels and convention centers understand what is happening to an entire guest population in real-time. We can provide insights so you understand your guests’ priorities, create a positive guest experience that exceeds expectations, and improve your satisfaction score.
We aim to design the most suitable and innovative solutions for our customers based on their unique requirements and environments. Our recent acquisition of CrowdVision strengthens our video analytics and LiDAR capabilities to expand the benefits we can provide to our customers.
If you are looking to improve your guests’ experience and your satisfaction score, we can provide the guest measurement data and insights that you need to make better decisions.
Check out how these solutions are incredibly beneficial in other verticals like stadiums, airports, and retail venues.