Improving the hotel guest experience with tech doesn’t need to be complicated

Guests expect convenience at every touch point during their stay at your hotel, and to meet these demands, it can feel like your only option is an expensive overhaul of your systems and hardware.

Thankfully, that’s not the case.

Improving the hotel guest experience with tech can very often be done by using what is already there, and without needing to increase headcount. Big budget overhauls aren’t necessarily needed to feel the effects of transformative changes. 

It can be done by harnessing customer data from self-check-in kiosks and in-room tech. This data can then be used to refine operations, creating a better experience for the guests.

Here, we’ll explore how to use guest data and technology to amplify the journey you already offer without having to add new, expensive systems.

Kiosk interaction data helps predict demand and free up staff

Kiosks form a prominent part of many customer journeys these days. And while the businesses that use them, such as McDonald’s and JD Sports, benefit from speedier customer turnover and increased average order value (AOV), it's the data from those interactions that really proves the ROI of a kiosk estate.

As usage data increases, kiosks start to show trends in:

• Peaks in check-in and check-out times
• How many guests are making additional purchases themselves
• Which upselling services perform best at different times of the day
• Where bottlenecks form based on screen flow or user behaviour
• The average time it takes for a guest to complete check-in

The numbers behind the scenarios laid out here can be used to enhance service quality. 

With the help of cloud technology, the user journey across every kiosk can be remotely tweaked in real time to make the process even smoother based on the data it provides. Staff can also be deployed to help guests use the kiosks during busy periods to avoid excessive screen time.

As well as using data to refine the check-in process, the upselling opportunities presented to guests can also gather insights of their own. 

For instance, the kiosk data may show that the adoption of a late check-out is low among guests. A/B testing of new creative can be deployed in minutes, with minimal downtime to the kiosk estate, to combat this and prevent an additional revenue stream from slumping.

Telemetry uncovers service issues before your guests do

Guest data and telemetry can be found in more places than kiosks, and their insights can prove just as effective. 

Telemetry is the remote monitoring of systems and devices. In hotels, that's everything from digital signage in corridors to in-room technology.

The ever-increasing integration of smart technology into hotel rooms, be it through temperature control, smart TVs, or virtual concierges, presents a golden opportunity for businesses. As with kiosks, smart tech provides a standard of experience most guests now expect, with the added benefit for hotels of more and more usage data.

With a hub in place connecting all these devices to one central location, the data it provides can help to spot emerging issues before guests have a chance to complain about them to the front desk. 

Telemetry insights can be viewed and changes made as a result without needing to invest in new infrastructure or hardware.

Rooms with Wifi connectivity issues can be seen by maintenance teams and fixes can be deployed, for example.

With so much choice at a guest’s fingertips, and a bad review over the smallest thing just a few taps away, hotels can’t afford to let problems become visible. 

Telemetry data from smart tech helps keep those problems solved and hidden.

Make the most out of existing guest data

What your guests think and feel about your hotel is just waiting to be captured with the help of our hotel kiosks.

Discover our range of hotel kiosks 

Feedback is the start of smarter journeys

A customer forms thoughts and opinions about your hotel from the moment they walk into your lobby. Key processes such as check-in are scrutinised just as much as the standard of room service or how clean the bathrooms are.

This scrutiny is data. And it can be utilised.

One way it can be captured is through a post-stay survey. A consistent set of questions can be devised without significant investment to:

• Highlight any consistent pain points that guests experience
• Hero any key members of staff who went above and beyond
• Uncover recurring service gaps that wouldn’t be present in daily ops reports

A formal survey using a CSAT metric, for example, is a great way of getting quantitative data too. By asking guests to rate specific aspects of their stay, such as room cleanliness, with a scoring system, you’ll quickly build a consistent data set that tracks how well your team’s delivery works against key goals.

Feedback is more than just numbers, though. 

Allowing guests to provide feedback in their own words also presents rich insights. Turning this qualitative feedback into efforts to further improve the hotel guest experience can also be done extremely easily by analysing written, unstructured reviews from review sites and social media (which can be done with the help of AI). 

These processes can help discover sentiments, positive or negative, expressed toward a hotel, which can be used to inform action changes. 

For example, if the word ‘noise’ or iterations of it were consistently found in reviews, action could be taken to better insulate rooms closer to busier parts of the hotel.

Connect data touchpoints for a 360° view of the guest

A guest's journey from booking to checkout involves dozens of physical and digital moments that all provide insights.

By connecting self-check-in kiosks with in-room tablets and loyalty programmes, for instance, hotels can build a more expansive, unified profile that truly reflects guest behaviour beyond standard booking details.

With one integrated system supporting existing apparatus around a guest's stay, it becomes easier to offer a greater level of personalisation, especially with the help of AI.

It can summarise a guest’s preference and flag opportunities for front-of-house staff to provide an even more tailored experience in real time. 

For example, a hotel might link its app usage data with check-in patterns from its kiosks. From that, they may discover that early-arriving guests took longer to engage with morning services and began to offer complimentary later breakfast slots as a default option. 

Quite quickly, they’ve managed to improve hotel guest experience with tech by aligning it with guests' preferences without them needing to request a later breakfast.

As with many examples here, what's needed to make this work is already there. Large-scale investment in hardware isn’t needed to feel the benefits of connected data.

Use insight, not instinct, to improve lifetime value
While seeing familiar faces return to the hotel keeps the feel-good factor up, the real value of guest loyalty can be found in the numbers. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, it can cost anywhere from five to 25 times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. 

And research by Frederick Reichheld shows that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits from 25% to 95%.

Use insight, not instinct, to improve lifetime value

While seeing familiar faces return to the hotel keeps the feel-good factor up, the real value of guest loyalty can be found in the numbers. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, it can cost anywhere from five to 25 times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. 

And research by Frederick Reichheld shows that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits from 25% to 95%.

The best hotels use insights from those connected systems to create bespoke offers and messaging. All of which helps to create that customer-hotel loyalty that makes clear commercial sense, as we’ve seen.

Personalised rebooking journeys are one of the clearest ways to build that loyalty. Data on birthdays or upcoming anniversaries can be used in an email campaign encouraging a user to book a romantic getaway.

Combine that with acts of service on arrival, a complimentary glass of champagne, for instance, and that bond is made secure.

It’s been said already, but it's worth reinforcing: all these changes revolve around making smarter use of what is already there, not adding more tech to your system.

Data doesn’t need to mean disruption

Digital transformation doesn’t have to come from investing in a full replatform. Small steps can make a big difference.

The fact is data you need to make transformative improvements to your customers’ experience is already there. It just hasn’t been captured and funnelled into something that can be viewed to make changes yet.

Updating existing kiosk systems with software that’s built to capture data and provide feedback loops can set you on the path to incremental improvements from the moment it goes live. 

And all this can be done without having to rip up legacy hardware or transform the design of your hotel, which may continue to serve your guests well.

With the right partner, such as Evoke, an enhancement of existing infrastructure using cloud-based software gives you full visibility of the numbers and percentages behind a typical customer’s journey at your hotel. This can be done so effectively because of our consultative approach to your installation. 

We don’t just set software live and leave. 

Instead, we offer hands-on training and support to help ensure a seamless integration with your legacy systems with minimal disruption to your daily operations. 

With our guidance, you’ll feel assured that the data you’re now seeing from guests is thorough enough to make decisions to improve their experience.

Want to modernise your guest journey without ripping everything out?

Evokes transformative digital solutions that can be integrated into your existing systems so you get more from your data.

Explore out hotel kiosk range