How do you decide whom to trust with your travel plans?
Some people read online reviews. Others consider recommendations from friends and family. Sometimes, it comes down to who offers the best deals and specials or a unique experience you can’t get anywhere else.
But for customers, when it comes to selecting the right hospitality company to trust with their vacation plans, one thing is clear – customer experience is king. It’s the key to ensuring that your customers aren’t simply one-and-done buyers but are loyal brand advocates.
Hospitality Businesses Offer Much of the Same. It’s Time to Stand Out
The reality of hospitality marketing is that much of it uses the same hook. Everyone boasts about their great deals, world-class accommodations, and the life-changing experiences that can happen when you book with them over their competitors.
“Book with [insert brand name here] and say hello to the best vacation you’ve ever had!” Sound familiar?
But if you look closely, these hotels, airlines, rental services, and resorts all look … pretty much the same to a discerning customer. So what makes your hotel truly different from the one down the road or the airline at the next gate?
It’s all about customer experience.
Your CX helps you stand above the competition and let travel-ready customers know that when they choose you, they’re choosing a business that legitimately cares.
Good CX can mean many things, but here’s a checklist of the top ways to ensure you’re genuinely making customer travel experiences a notch above the rest.
Top Customer Experience Strategies to Help You Stand Out
- Proactive Customer Support – When customers come to you with an issue, are you generally reactive or proactive to the problem? Are you identifying customer needs before they happen or reacting after they become a more significant issue? Use FAQs, 24/7 customer support, and other tools to provide a proactive response.
- Knowledgable and Friendly Employees – Your employees are the face of your company, and that’s doubly true for the hospitality industry. Ensure your employees are adequately trained to provide any assistance a customer needs. And doing it with a friendly demeanor goes a long way too.
- Personalization – How much of your current customer experience is personalized? You can tailor experiences to individual customers by utilizing data and insights you gather from interactions and offer special deals or recommendations that will make customers feel special.
- Seamless Omnichannel Experience – That’s a lot of words to simply ask: do customers get the same experience on every channel, whether it’s a phone, website, social media, or email? Allow customers to communicate with you their way, and you’ll quickly improve your CX.
- Exceed Expectations – Every company talks about going above and beyond what their customers want, but how do you achieve that? It starts with listening to what your customers like about your company and the pain points they experience. Then, use that feedback to improve your processes and exceed their expectations the next time they choose you.
- Continuous Improvement – There are many ways to improve your customer experience – hiring great employees, offering better value, and investing in new technologies are just a few examples.
The good news? There’s one solution out there that can boost all of these customer experience strategies in one clean sweep. Yep, we’re talking about branded phone calls.
Add Branded Calling to Boost Your Customer Experience
According to a survey of hospitality customers, 9 in 10 people expect hospitality businesses to take steps to identify their calls.
Why? Because customers aren’t answering unknown calls anymore.
In a customer’s mind, an unknown call means a bad actor is attempting to contact them. And with scammers targeting your customers at a significant rate, it’s easy to understand where the idea originates.
The same hospitality survey shows that almost 30% of people have received a hospitality-related scam call in the past 12 months. And some customers have been hit financially, too, with 1 in 5 people saying they’ve lost money to a hospitality scam.
Branded calling through our INFORM® solution can solve unknown calls and scammers tricking your customers.
With a 32-character customizable text display, you can accurately identify your business name on all your outbound calls – you can even customize multiple numbers with the correct branding and the department that’s calling.
So if you’re a customer service agent calling a customer about an important change to their travel itinerary or an opportunity to upgrade their accommodations, a branded phone call lets them know who’s calling and why. With customers sure of whom they’re talking to before they answer, both answer rates and engagement rates go up!
Increase Engagement Rates with Branded Calls
Businesses that have adopted branded calling into their communication and customer experience strategies have seen engagement rates skyrocket by up to 90% compared to unbranded phone calls!
Engaged customers are more likely to convert on upgrades and offers. They’re also more likely to be satisfied with the customer experience they received from an agent.
With INFORM, our Branded Communication solution, you can take your customer experience from zero to 100 with a simple upgrade! No complicated integrations are needed, and your branded calls can be up and running in minutes.
Get Started
Hospitality businesses should focus on delivering value to their customers and standing out from the competition with a unique customer experience.
To add Branded Communication to your outbound call strategy, get started today and speak with our friendly sales team.
