In the previous post, we’ve discussed what questions hotel executives should ask in order to choose the right technology partners. In today’s article, we will dive deeper into how you can further foster and grow those partnerships.
There are three areas where a successful technology partner can make huge differences. By focusing on those areas, you can help your hotel business really shine.
Guest experience is the core of every business in the hospitality spectrum; provide guests what they want in the way that they want it. With that well understood, how do your technology partnerships help you to meet this central mission?
Putting yourself in your guest’s shoes, how do partnerships with your chosen hospitality technology providers make the journey better for them? Are guests empowered to engage with your brand and your locations to use web-based functions and mobility to get what they want? Is the experience intuitive, continuous, and friction-free? Is it easier for them to get personalised services, adapt their experience to their needs and be supported by your employees, processes, and systems? What kind of feedback are you getting from guests and how easy is it to respond?
Your technology partnerships should help make all the above easier for your guests. And that should translate into better relationships with your ideal guests to keep them coming back to your locations.
Read more: The New Face of Hospitality: Creating a Contactless Guest Experience
Your people comprise another essential group to consider in determining how successful and supportive your technology partnerships are. This includes teams at every level, from individual locations to those at head offices.
Your employees make your brand what it is, and teams are often the primary users of the technology in which you’ve invested. Supportive partnerships should allow all your employees to do their jobs with greater efficiency, less stress, and a better view of how their efforts help realize your overarching business goals.
A healthy technology partnership should keep your employees in mind in terms of product development and features. Keep user interface design, robust and detailed reporting capabilities, data access and analytics, and vital integrations between systems and applications that connect all aspects of doing business in real-time across the whole organisation at the centre of all your conversations.
Just like valuing the needs and sensibilities of your guests, your technology and those you partner with to implement it should also enhance the working life of your teams. The resulting benefits should enrich their work and environment. An empowered workforce strengthens your organisation for the long term.
Read more: How Hotels Can Create New Revenue Streams Amid And Post Pandemic
Just as you’ve worked to enhance conditions for workers and guests, keeping your organisation’s identity, values, and focused and specific business objectives in mind when engaging with technology partners should always be in the frame. Ultimately, any partnership you enter should achieve the goals you’ve set at the very beginning and be scalable for the next phase, whatever that happens to be.
Do you see a progression from what your brand promised and delivered before the partnership to now? What are the main indicators of that? What are some of the signs that you’re gaining a competitive advantage relative to how the industry is changing? How has your dialogue with your teams, your technology partners, and your guests changed to anticipate the next stage in the life of your organisation?
When you take the temperature of where you are and where you are going as a business, do you feel confident about it? That is the bottom line for what a supportive technology partnership should deliver.
Confidence that is born from the trust is the most powerful outcome of any technology partnership. Everyone involved at the start of any partnership decision—business leaders, technology experts, financial decision-makers—should all agree that the organisation is headed in the right direction with the right partner.
Staff on every level from there should feel their efforts have an impact on the outcome to serve specific business goals as supported by technology. And the guest should feel confident that their expectations are going to be met, if not frequently exceeded, as they engage with the brand. That’s how you know your partnership is successful.
The variable nature of the hospitality industry connects with emerging technology and cultural trends like a Mobius strip that drives change even more. Forge ahead, knowing that your organisation will be supported by empathy, expertise, and engagement in continuous alignment with your business goals with a solid partnership. This will help you keep your eye on a successful horizon as the present slips into the future.
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