Hotels, hostels, and Bed and Breakfasts (BandB) run on ensuring their customers receive great customer service. For those that ultimately decide to stay at your property, their experience will decide whether or not they return in the future, or, furthermore, whether or not their friends and acquaintances will similarly visit in the time to come. The ease of experience — comfort, accessibility, convenience — are the primary factors deciding how a customer’s feelings upon leaving your property. When these experiences are negative, customers are unlikely to leave with a positive outlook on your business, and the data goes to show:
- CEB research shows that 96% of customers that have to exert a “high” amount of effort when fixing a problem with a company are likely to be unfaithful
- 86% of customers in 2011, as reported by Harris Interactive/RightNow, quit doing business with a company after a bout of bad customer service
Yet, when you manage to get your customer service right, it proves to be extremely beneficial for the future of your business:
- Nearly 75% of travelers plan on returning to a destination they have previously visited and enjoyed
- Building this customer loyalty by just 5% can lead to an increase in profit between 25-100% per customer
Ensuring great customer service might sound like an easy thing, but from employee-to-customer interactions, online experiences, and property management, it can prove to be difficult. However, one way to oversee the process of your property management is through the utilization of hospitality software companies.
By using these hospitality software companies, you can utilize specific hotel software, property management systems (PMS systems), and concierge services that will allow you to succinctly manage the various properties of your business and its customer interactions.
Considering the characteristics through which BandB travelers decide upon a property to stay at, the most common (besides price and location) is through consumer reviews, photos, friends’ recommendations, flexible cancellation policy, and ability to book online. Similarly, the use and efficiency of a well-suited mobile site is important, as 53% of people use mobile devices to research their travel information. Through the utilization of hospitality software companies, you can assure that these systems are properly structured for customer use, thus bringing more customers (business) to your property.
The benefit to the variety of hospitality software companies and hotel software on the market is that they allow you to effectively measure trends in hospitality technology, while similarly having an interface that can be intuitively understood and used by your staff. Through its various distribution, customer service, and revenue based management services, these PMS systems allow you, as a business, to better structure business characteristics for future innovation and customer relevancy, based upon the continually arcing trends within the business.
By working through these hospitality software companies and their easy-to-use PMS systems, you and your staff can effectively manage your business and focus on your customers, rather than struggling with complex software and hardware. In this way, your company and its customers are effectively the focus, not the software, ensuring that great customer service is the first and foremost focus of day-to-day interactions.