The hospitality industry is seeing brighter days. Restrictions on trading during the pandemic made it one of the worst hit industries in the country. But as international tourists return, food and accommodation services businesses will be among the fastest growing parts of the UK economy over the next five years.

So, how can you, a hospitality executive, bounce back and stand out to returning travellers? The answer is to go big on empathy by providing an experience that meets guests wherever they are in the customer journey. And the easiest way to put customers first is with a Salesforce 360.

By bringing together a universe of information from multiple sources into a single picture, your business can start to gain visibility into your customer's entire journey with you — from the moment they Google search "luxury London stays" to the moment they checkout. In this blog, we're gonna explore how we can help hospitality providers deliver stand-out empathetic experiences. Let's dive in...

Salesforce allows you to manage relationships with your customers and prospects and track data related to all of your interactions. It also helps your teams collaborate, both internally and externally, gather insights from various incoming channels and track the metrics essential to benchmarking your performance.

For the customer, those capabilities result in an improved service. Here’s how:

Sales cycles in the hospitality industry are typically short, so there isn’t a lot of time to capture the crucial micro-moments that make up a memorable stay. Salesforce helps you build customer profiles based on their interests, lifestyles, and preferences. Having that information equips your staff to treat every one of your guests like they’re a regular.

With automation, your customer service team can let customers know that they’re only a click away from getting the assistance they need by orchestrating admin (like reminders, confirmations, check-in forms, follow-ups etc) and personalise responses with customisable templates to give your guests an ETA on an answer. And as more insights are captured in Service Cloud during a guest’s stay, these tasks and workflows are updated to reflect their preferences and interests.

Every new booking starts with a Google search. And Salesforce makes it much easier for your marketing team to optimise your outbound communications. For instance, customisable templates means you can quickly spin up A/B testing to measure the effectiveness of your messaging, and segment your audience based on the results. And with multi-channel integration, you can push out comms that catch customers at the right moment – they’re probably more ready to hear about happy hour through Instagram than via their work email.

Every empathetic interaction is built on a foundation of accurate customer data. Salesforce can help you create a data led strategy towards empathy that feeds moments customers remember. But there’s a bigger picture here too. Once you're using customer data to deliver empathetic moments across every customer journey, you can zoom out and look for macro-trends across your whole customer database. We can help you understand which customer needs really drive your business so you can narrow in on what people like, where you perform strongest, and when people spend the most money. That's the information that can guide bigger strategic decisions – like building new facilities or launching a loyalty programme.