Discover Actabl's tips on how integrating technology and partnering with Customer Success teams can lead to a 20% revenue increase and happier hotel staff, ultimately enhancing guest experiences and the bottom line.
Technology has become an indispensable power tool for hoteliers. But with the tech landscape ever evolving and P&Ls mandating that hoteliers find ways to do more with less, it is also challenging to keep pace.
How can hoteliers optimize their operations and staff using technology? Even top-performing hotel IT teams are calling in experts to create holistic strategies that layer technology’s benefits throughout their processes. The solution starts with delivering a positive customer experiences aided by the tech company's Customer Success team.
Following some guiding principles, hoteliers can enhance and maximize the ROI of their tech stack.
Integrated tech stacks are valuable
Seamless integration facilitates data flow between systems, enabling real-time decision-making above property level. On property, it ensures efficient operations, enhances guest experiences and ultimately contributes to increased asset value.
A well-implemented, integrated tech stack can significantly impact a hotel's ROI by ensuring metric consistency, enabling hoteliers to make data-based decisions; empowering talent to evaluate trends to make beneficial strategy changes and streamlining the process to increase productivity while improving the customer experience.
Simply put, tech stack integration facilitates consolidation, which makes life easier — and empowers delivery of a successful customer experience. A strong partnership with your Customer Success team will be at the heart of this achievement.
Essential tools to enhance ROI and customer experience
Of course, a PMS (property management system) is the core of hotel operations. Finding products that integrate with each other and the PMS is key to efficiency. To truly impact the customer experience on-property, while controlling costs, narrow the focus to an operations tech stack: labor management, service delivery tools and facility and asset management.
It is also important to apply revenue management principles to labor management. The right staff in the right place at the right time is critical to operational efficiency and impact. Ensuring that facilities are well-managed and maintained improves efficiency and customer satisfaction. Communication with the hotel team and guests is paramount, while service delivery tools help cover any potential gaps in experience.
Additionally, business intelligence tools gather the data into one place for informed decision-making that drives operational excellence.
Top 5 tips to improve hoteliers' use of technology
1. Embrace change and innovation. Stay current with hospitality trends and technology, knowing that innovation can set you apart from the competition and redefine your operations. Don’t be afraid to try new things but invest wisely in technology that aligns with your business goals and operational needs, with solutions that can grow with your business to avoid costly replacements.
2. Prioritize data-driven decision-making with the right tech stack. Use technology to gather and analyze data, allowing you to make informed decisions that benefit your guests and your bottom line.
3. Invest in people — people power hospitality. Empower staff with the best tools, listen to their pain points and then utilize your tech to identify efficiencies so your team can do their best work. Plus, offer ongoing training and career opportunities. Expertise in technology is a skill that will help them grow into their next role. Take care of your people, and they’ll take care of your guests.
4. Avoid common challenges from the start. The key is to make the right choices and communicate your goals to the tech partner from the outset to ensure you have a comprehensive onboarding and adoption plan that aligns with your specific needs and objectives. It starts with a fundamental choice: what level of complexity can you commit to and how much external support will be required for success? While it can be tempting to go for the most cutting-edge, feature-rich solution available, a solution that is too complex for your team to grasp and effectively use can lead to confusion, resistance and under-adoption. On the other hand, a solution that is too simplistic may not deliver the desired results and could quickly become outdated.
5. Partner with tech’s Customer Experience (CX) teams. Collaboration with the technology provider and their CX teams – implementations, success, support, learning and enablement – is critical to maximize the tech’s value. The CX team should start by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the hotel's current labor management practices, budgeting challenges and forecasting needs. Then, craft the implementation to minimize resources needed by hotels while providing comprehensive onboarding and training programs, along with ongoing support and a feedback loop.
While it can be tempting to go for the most cutting-edge, feature-rich solution available, a solution that is too complex for your team to grasp and effectively use can lead to confusion, resistance and under-adoption.
Shannon Omsberg
With complex or full-scope implementations, the CX teams should proactively recommend good-better-best approaches to minimize the initial lift and time-to-value and should share best practices, providing benchmarking data to help set competitive goals.
After all, the consequences of proper technology integration and use are paramount, with the potential to drive up to a 20% increase in revenue. In cases where under-adoption or abandonment occurs, the entire investment can be left on the table.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure tech investment success
Though KPI metrics vary, generally, tech stack improvements should result in more money and happier teams, we recommend understanding exactly what the hotel hopes to achieve and impact in advance, then gathering baseline data for monitoring throughout the adoption process. A hotel’s operational teams also should be involved and available to make recommendations and provide feedback, ensuring everyone knows what’s working and what’s not working.
Some important KPIs to monitor include: ADR, occupancy, overtime, wages, CPOR, RevPAR, room turnaround time, customer satisfaction scores, ticket resolution, average length of stay, maintenance costs, equipment performance, inspections completed and costs of asset replacement, among several others
How hotels can fully leverage tech investments to maximize ROI
Staff training and onboarding are key. In my experience, hotels that offer robust tech support to their teams not only experience a boost in ROI but also improved employee morale. A well-prepared workforce can harness technology to enhance guest experiences, streamline operations and make data-driven decisions, while fostering a sense of pride in their work and affiliation with the organization.
At Actabl, I coach my team to take a holistic and consultative approach to guiding our customer’s experience. We provide personalized technology assessments, a thorough set of training tools and webinar series, and individualized training plans. With decades of hospitality and hospitality technology experience, our Customer Success team is well-equipped to assist hotels in selecting, implementing and maintaining the right technology solutions tailored to their specific needs and goals. We consider ourselves to be the “front desk” of Actabl, and our mission is to coordinate operations at all steps of the customer journey to ensure a customer experience rooted in hospitality.
Overall, a tech team’s approach should be anchored in the success of its hotel partners, working as an extension to ensure that the tech stack aligns with their goals and evolves with the ever-changing industries — hospitality and technology — to maximize ROI through enhanced customer experience.
Shannon Omsberg is vice president of customer success at Actabl.
The views and opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel Investment Today or Northstar Travel Group and its affiliated companies.