One guest record, alerts within the hour
A luxury eco-resort group where every guest has a personal butler and each resort's property system kept its own record of the same guest.
/work/guest-memoryCame in under strain
- System
- Guest CRM, staff apps and alerts across the resorts
- Ask
- One profile per guest, running pre-arrival form, survey and email
- Region
- Several resorts and a head office
The piece An open hourglass of sixty beads, the last one falling hot: the hour an issue has before it escalates.
- 60minutesto close an issue before it escalates
- 10moduleson one guest record
- 5tiersinternal, from five years of stays
- 50 to 80%check-outs with a survey, flagship, 2020
The ask
A CRM that deduplicates guests across the property systems, gives each one ID and runs the pre-arrival form, survey and email.
The real problem
A returning guest could be welcomed at a sister resort as a first-timer with no spend on record.
The butler, the kitchen and housekeeping needed the right detail in front of them when they acted.
Many profiles, one record
- Idle
- Live
- Strain
- Fail
BeforeEach resort's system held its own profile. What the guest wrote on paper or by email rarely reached the butler in time.
AfterOne record, ID set at booking and synced twice a day, routing each answer to its team and escalating issues hourly.
What we built
One guest record across the resorts and the head office. Reservations attach the ID at booking, so every stay lands on the same record.
The preferences form goes out six to eight days before arrival and each answer goes to the team that acts on it. The butler's app holds every past stay, preferences by department and the day's checklist.
How we made it hold
Staff log an issue and its department has an hour to close it. Then an orange alert goes to the team, red if the guest is leaving with it open.
Backstage The decisions behind the build, and the hardest problem
Decisions
Attach the ID at booking.
Reservations look the guest up first, so every later stay lands on the same record.
Route each answer to the team that acts on it.
The kitchen gets the allergy and housekeeping the pillow, so no team has to dig through a form meant for someone else.
An hour on the clock for every issue.
Orange after the hour, red if the guest is leaving with it open, and only the head of department can close it.
Ruled out
Recognition by number of stays.
A count of stays could not pick out the small share of returning guests the business rested on.
The hardest problem
Getting the record used on the floor. We trained butlers and managers at every resort and kept going back, each visit changing the alerts and screens staff skipped. A data capture competition between resorts kept contact details complete.
The difference
- Every resort and the head office work from one record per guest.
- 50 to 80% of flagship check-outs ended with a survey, against 0 to 4% by email.
- Still in daily use across the group at the end of 2020.
