The Leading Hotels of the World (see http://www.lhw.com) is a luxury hospitality organization which existence is based on the membership of only the most refined hotels of the world. Almost five hundred luxury hotels are members. To join The Leading Hotels of the World as a member, a hotel must match the following criteria: being in the deluxe or luxury category and corresponding to the existing standards of the organization regarding accommodations, service, cuisine, employee behavior and facilities and every other element influencing guest satisfaction. The Leading Hotels of the World's role is to promote, distribute and contribute to the quality of its members' supply. Among other tools for quality enhancement, the organization uses quality-audits made by mystery guests, once a year at least, in order to check the legitimacy of every member to belong to the organization.
To complement that verification measure, The Leading Hotels of the World launched this week a new software program to measure guest satisfaction and improve the performance of its members. Medallia (see http://www.medallia.com), which has already provided 50.000 business units with customer satisfaction measurement solutions, was chosen among many other competing companies to supply the software. There are already 430 members of The Leading Hotels of the World (including Hotel Ritz Paris, Hotel Plaza Athénée in New York and Imperial Hotel in Tokyo) using this tool, provided with no charge by the organization. The program consists of a guest-satisfaction survey that brings hotel managers key information regarding guests' overall satisfaction. The information is immediately broadcast to staff via instantaneous message which makes them able to solve any issue raised by guests. The system also establishes figures and statistics regarding global satisfaction evolution, satisfactory or unsatisfactory elements. On top of that, training needs are identified and highlighted by the software. This means that not only it delivers information about guests needs and points out any problems that require to be solved, but it also proposes recommendations, providing then an effective solution for performance improvement.
Ted Teng, President and CEO of The Leading Hotels of the World justified the purchase of the software in these words: "We chose Medallia for the guest satisfaction program that we provide free of charge to our members because Medallia's customer experience management platform is comprehensive, flexible, and the most effective tool for customer feedback analysis." Such a speech implies the anticipation of a significant change regarding the capacity of a hotel to fulfill customers needs and, by doing so, to gain operational efficiency. Indeed, the program presents three main advantages that allow hoteliers to bet that it will be a successful tool:
- As information is not distorted by interpretation and figures are automatically calculated by the machine, the reality depicted by the program has been proved more reliable than that emerging from anyone's observations.
- The instantaneousity of alert-messages allows the staff to be more reactive to respond to issues than if they had to wait for paper-based or face-to-face feedbacks concerning guest's satisfaction.
- As all the data are collected and centralized in the program, it is easy to quantify satisfaction, obtain rapidly information like trends and statistics about customers needs, and identify precisely what has to be modified in order to meet guests expectations.
Thus, as said Amy Pressman, Medallia President and co-founder, "Medallia will help The Leading Hotels of the World membership maintain its standard of five-star customer experience by continuing to deliver premium guest service that surprises and delights customers and keeps them coming back."
The fact that The Leading Hotels of the World, the most influencing organization in luxury hospitality, decided to invest in such a software shows how the access to information is crucial for a hotel to perform well. An easy and quick access to non-biased information is all the more important as luxury hoteliers tend to provide their guests with excellent product, i.e product that perfectly matches their expectations. Once again, here is a proof that information and communication technologies are inevitably changing the way hotels work.
Sources:
http://www.lhw.com
http://www.medallia.com
http://www.justluxe.com/fine-living/trends/feature-1308747.php
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-leading-hotels-of-the-world-selects-medallia-to-run-global-guest-satisfaction-program-114586184.html
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