Consumers these days are looking for connectivity and personalisation when they make a purchase.
NB: This is an article from BEONx, one of our Expert Partners
This is especially true when they make a reservation in a hotel. They want a tailored experience that meets their expectations in terms of wants, needs, and desires. And this, together with advancing technology, has led to a new era of hyper-personalisation in the hotel industry.
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Let’s explore what hyper-personalisation is, and why the concept is set to be the future of the customer experience.
What is hyper-personalisation?
For a number of years now, companies from a range of industries have been leveraging data to create innovative solutions that strengthen the customer relationship. And the hotel industry is no exception.
The most recent trend we are now seeing in the hospitality industry in this sense is hyper-personalisation, and many brands are already referring to it as the future of the customer experience.
But what is hyper-personalisation exactly?
Hyper-personalisation comes down to one core brief: customers want to buy from companies that understand their needs. When it comes to hotels, they want to stay in an establishment that understands their desires and expectations and goes the extra mile to connect and interact with them. In other words, they want a personalised experience that makes them feel seen and valued.
However, hyper-personalisation goes beyond the standard strategies for customising each touchpoint in the customer journey by segment. In fact, it’s a whole new style of segmentation that relies on technology to tailor each guest interaction according to their real-time actions. Instead of focusing solely on demographic and customer value data to deliver unique experiences, you also need to respond to a customer’s specific needs, wants and desires, and understand their behaviours and purchasing habits. And the best way to do this is through artificial intelligence, machine learning technology, real-time data, and predictive analytics.
How to implement hyper-personalisation and improve the customer experience
Evolving technology is enabling hotels to digitalise and automate many of their internal and external processes. By using tech like revenue management software, hotels can access a wealth of valuable data relating to demand, market trends, competitors, and hotel market positioning. This technology also enables hotels to get to know guests better, both as segments and as individuals.
The more hotels are able to improve their knowledge of their guests through data analysis, the easier it will be to design hyper-personalized experiences that are adapted to the specific needs of each guest. The aim is to create strategies that make each guest feel special and unique, instead of feeling like a faceless member of a generic market segment. But before you can achieve hyper-personalisation, you need to shift your focus from the product to the client; you need to develop a customer-centric approach to your strategies. And you need to understand exactly who your clients are, how they behave, and what they expect when they come to stay at your hotel.
Let’s take a look at how you can do this.
