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Delivering on the Promise of Automation for the Hospitality Industry

Automation can help by tailoring the experience to the customer based on country or buying behavior. 

In the hospitality industry, customer experience is king. At the same time, companies face fierce competition for each customer dollar and have to deliver outstanding service with ever-increasing efficiency. Automation – especially voice processing, artificial intelligence, smart devices, and robotic process automation – can help with all three of these competing challenges.

Today’s customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. From research, to bookings, to their actual en-route or on-property experience, customers demand more. They want to use any device, tailored to the way they live and work. They want to immerse themselves in their leisure experience, and they don’t want to have to worry about the technology.

Hospitality firms are improving customer experience through natural language interaction, high-end digital experiences and with AI algorithms to help guide their leisure choices. They are also increasingly using automation and smart devices to reduce loss, speed up check-in and check-out and provide entertainment and comfort features exceeding those found in a typical home.

Customers are increasingly seeing service where the curtains gently open 15 minutes after the alarm goes off, where they can ask Alexa for room service, or they can have their room cleaned based on the service team knowing the room is vacant.

Improving service to their customers drives repeat business and the tailored experience provided by automation helps enable that part of the growth curve. Additionally, hospitality firms want to grow by capturing more market share, opening up new and emerging markets.

Automation can help by tailoring the experience to the customer based on country or buying behavior. A customer in China books differently than a customer in France!  Further, automation can help hospitality firms use detailed quantitative analytics to drive what routes generate the most revenue, which locations are best for new properties and how to distribute luxury versus budget offerings based on customer spend and feedback.

Finally, because of the intense competition in the industry, cost efficiency has become paramount. As a simple example, in most properties, energy costs account for 6% of all expenses.  Using smart in-room devices (thermostats, automatic curtains, heating & cooling) can help lower energy costs by reducing use.

Automation can also be used to join together legacy systems to enable more efficient team deployment – connecting reservations to housekeeping for more efficient room cleaning or connecting airframe or in-room systems with maintenance to dispatch repair teams more efficiently.

Automation is a win-win-win proposition in the hospitality industry. When properly deployed, the components of automation.

Vice President of Transformation - Digital Intelligence Systems, LLC | + Posts

Dr. JJ Foster is the Vice President of Transformation at Digital Intelligence Systems, LLC (DISYS) a staffing and managed services firm with more than 35 offices worldwide and strategically-placed global delivery centers. Dr. Foster is a seasoned Fortune 150 executive and is responsible for driving the DISYS vision of using automation to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve the agility of our clients’ IT estates and for harvesting automation-enabled solutions to create client value and differentiate us in the market.

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