Building great loyalty program
If you want to create a strong loyalty program build great profiles first!
This week client workshops in Oslo was around the importance of building a strong guest profile to have a successful loyalty program.
The aim of loyalty is first and foremost to personalise the stay of your most frequent guests, to make them feel recognised when they interact with your hotels. Hence the importance of knowing who they are.
As we know, guests who enrol to a loyalty program are usually more encline to share proactively data with hotels as they expect in return a better guest experience (and are less afraid that the hotel would sell their data to third parties).
To build a better profile:
capture data early
it needs to start as soon as the guest interact with hotels. Don’t wait to find out the guest is a regular. It is better to start early and clean database afterward than missing some important information and have to ask it again.
centralise data
too many hotels have several profiles or information spread over several tools. In the eyes of the guest they are interacting with one brand or one hotel group. If there are different level of information among stakeholders then there is a risk of not delivering the same level of experience.
let guests update their profile
it is still common for hotels to solely rely on their staff to capture the data, while there are many touchpoint (booking engine, communication, etc.) where the guest can pro-actively enter information. Giving guests a chances to fill some information like preferences will result on a better | cleaner data entries.
capture, centralise and letting guest update their profile will help your staff better understand who are the loyal guests and ensure a better guest experience.
