People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Dr. Maya Angelou

Optimising the guest experience

The quote by Maya Angelou beautifully captures one of the most powerful insights into human motivation; everything we do is driven by an emotion and emotions make memories. In order for your guests to do something, they have to feel something first. You want them to feel things that lead to positive behaviours like smiling, telling others and coming back. But you don’t want them to feel things that lead to negative behaviours like complaining, writing damaging reviews on Trip Advisor, or switching to a competitor’s hotel.

All too often I see hotels measuring things like “was the telephone answered within three rings?”, “did they ask for card details to guarantee the booking?”, “was the reception area clean and tidy?”, “were the room furnishings in a good state of repair?.” These are quality control measures which could be effectively managed and measured in house. You don’t need an expert to tell you your reception is dirty, a good manager will never let this happen. You do however need an expert to tell you that the porter made your guest feel really welcome with his huge smile and positive body language directing you into the hotel or, conversely, that you felt afraid walking into the hotel past the park because of the dark open space and couldn’t see the hotel sign until you were almost at the hotel entrance.

What exactly is guest journey mapping?

It is an insight into the mind of your guest, describing all the experiences they have with your hotel and the emotional responses they provoke – from their first impression of your property, to speaking to staff or receiving a service. This is different to a mystery shop that many hotels rely on to monitor guest experience and goes beyond the hotel experience itself. Instead of assessing how well you perform on rational measures like satisfaction and meeting standards, I focus on what really matters – how you make your guests feel and why. To do this, I use a proprietary emotional touchpoint mapping methodology to identify the emotional hotspots, emotion triggered and the likely source of the trigger. This gives you more actionable information to help focus attention where it is needed most.

Why are emotions so important? Isn’t this all just a bit woolly and intangible?

No. Emotions are critical to everything you do for three reasons:

1. They drive all behaviour2. They drive decision making3. They make memories

Emotions drive everything we do and are absolutely key to understanding human behaviour. They are critical to understanding and improving the behaviour of your employees, guests or indeed your own behaviour. Most scientists now agree that over 90% of emotions happen outside our consciousness so its not so much what your guests say as what they do that’s important. Satisfaction is only a small part of the picture because it is a conscious, rational, thinking measure. To read more about emotions visit the webpage Understanding emotions

How will it improve my hotel?

By measuring what counts, focusing your attention on priority areas, and by creating powerful and positive emotional touchpoints/moments. We are physiologically wired to repeat what makes us feel happy so creating positive and poignant guest experiences is critical for success. Loyal guests not only come back, but they also spend more, are less price sensitive, and recommend you in a more persuasive way than paid-for marketing ever could.

What outputs will I get and how useable will they be?

You will get an Executive Summary with a diagram showing the main touchpoints in the guest journey, key triggers for positive and negative emotions and the top 10 recommended action points ranked by order of importance. Data capture documents can be provided if required but often this level of detail is distracting and can dilute focus. As an extra service, I facilitate action-orientated workshops with management / departmental teams to come up with practical ideas to maximise positive and minimise / remove negative emotional hotspots.

How long does it take and what do I need to arrange?

The exercise takes two days (usually with one overnight stay). On the second day, I will meet with a cross section of people in your team (one-to-one) to do a quick space mapping exercise lasting 30 mins per person depending on the size of your premises. A summary report will be sent within 5 working days.

How much does it cost?

From just £749 per property.

How often do I need to repeat this?

Annually. While a one-off emotional touchpoint mapping exercise is useful, it only provides a snapshot in time. Sustainable success comes from a measurable process of continuous improvement.

Even old hands can give you another perspective by experiencing another department. Ask your kitchen staff to take the customer journey in the gym, your housekeeping staff to dine in the restaurant when they’re off duty, your conference team to stay the night.

Create a checklist, so they know what they’re looking for while they’re on the customer journey. Incorporate the customer journey into any training on customer service or for specific operational training. This works best when teams are mixed or crossed over so team members are not auditing their own departments. It is key the department being audited has an opportunity to have a say, and that they are involved in auditing other departments. This avoids any departments feeling as though they are being criticized or pick on.

When giving feedback, encourage teams to talk about what was good, what was missing or what needs attention, and focus on how it can be improved. If this is not the team’s own department, it’s also good to get members to identify their role in the improvements. Induction programs for new employeesYou may include all or part of the customer journey as a part of your induction program for new employees. This provides a medium for them to become familiar with your services and encourages them to look at your hotel through the eyes of a guest. Being new, they will not

take things for granted and may provide some valuable insights into what people see or might perceive.

- See more at: http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Article/7875/Embarking-upon-the-customer-journey#sthash.Do2m3VqN.dpuf

Customer Journey Mapping: Part I – the basicsPosted on April 11, 2012 by Paul Roberts

Customer journey mapping is now synonymous with customer and user experience projects. Designing one can help employees understand the end to end journey for the customer and improve understanding of how various functions are involved in delivering the experience. Building a journey map can also be fraught with political and logistical problems. You’re likely to meet people who don’t understand the benefits or who believe a

narrative map rather than a visual one will suffice. You may even have to encourage colleagues to move beyond internal process mapping.

Below are a few pointers on how to scope and design a customer journey map which can help visualise the optimum experience you want to deliver to your customers.

1)      Words first. Map out the customer journey using single words/statements first. These might be as simple as ‘find & learn’ or ‘get help. The typical journey at a high level won’t be that long and will likely cover 8 or so steps. Be sure to agree the taxonomy of the wording to ensure that everyone across the organisation understands and uses the same terminology in the future

2)      Storyboard. Write the journey as a story or scenario from the customer perspective. You can use this written narrative later in helping a designer bring the story to life using small animations and visuals

3)      Channels and touchpoints. Map out and label the times where the customer interacts with your business. Include the types of channels used for instance retail or online

4)      Driver definition. Outline the experience drivers that really make a difference for the customer throughout their journey. Think about what makes the experience memorable for them. You’ll already have research that tells you what works best for your customers. An idea we will explore in a later post examines how you might want to define the drivers based on financial impact for the business. You should end up with a wobbly line across your journey which shows the areas you intend to provide ‘bells and whistles’ and those areas where you intend to deliver a basic but effective experience

5)      Stress Points. Look at your existing customer feedback and research. Print off your complaint codes and examine why customers aren’t happy with the experience at times. It might be simple things like not getting a bill on time or receiving an incorrect invoice. If you place these on the map against each touchpoint the map becomes a way of identifying potential problems and mitigating against them

6)      Get emotional. Think about the expectations and emotions you want the customer to experience. Think about outlining these on the map. In a later blog post we’ll look at defining customer outcomes and principles as a way of doing this

7)      Language. Make sure the journey map is written from the customer perspective with the language and verbatim they would use themselves. Avoid complex terminology and reserve it for your internal process maps

8)      Throw a wobbler. The journey for most of your customers is unlikely to be linear no matter how hard you try. Think about defining a journey where a customer might have to go back a step or two. Think about flexibility. How are you going to manage that experience?

9)      Heroes. Build a set of ‘hero journeys’ which cover the main customer segments you have. Have a mixture of easy and complex journeys

The main thing to remember is that customer journey mapping doesn’t sit well with every colleague you’ll meet. Mapping is often something that works for some but not for others. Persevere and you’ll have some great maps which can really help visualise the change you want to deliver.

Visit the download page for a set of journey map examples from across the internet.

In the next blog we’ll look at defining outcomes and principles for the journeys together with how you build maps which include employee experience