PALMA DE MALLORCA, SPAIN—The saying goes, “A happy customer is a paying customer.” Solid customer service is vital to the success of any hospitality business and it’s crucial to have a vision of what that looks like, how it’s defined and how to communicate the brand’s culture of service to hotel associates and guests staying at the properties.
It’s a tall order, but Meliá Hotels International is embracing this effort across its six brands—Gran Meliá Hotels & Resorts, ME by Meliá, Paradisus, to name a few—to design a new, forward-thinking model for its service culture in an effort to activate all guest touchpoints and keep pace with the changing needs and expectations of travelers.
“I think hospitality is still very much related to its associates. It’s about the quality and where you stand as a hotel company that wants to set the trend and be known as truly innovative, as well as a leader within the industry,” said Alex Hugot, VP, global brand management at Meliá Hotels International. “You can only do that if you work with associates and have a culture within the company driven by brands that understand the needs of associates to bring that service culture alive.”
Competing through product can only take the brand so far, the real difference is made within the employee ranks and what they’re able to do, noted Hugot. “Working with them and creating a service culture with them as the ultimate ambassador is the only way to do it,” said Hugot.
Toward that effort, key stakeholders at Meliá Hotels International enlisted Toronto-based Bond Brand Loyalty, a firm specializing in building brand loyalty and customer engagement, to serve as a collaborator in this process of discerning the needs of the hotel brand’s customers, meeting those expectations through various methodologies and then evaluating the execution through client and guest feedback.
“This is a company-wide project and involves our CEO as much as it involves associates at the hotel level, employees on the corporate level and a wide range of key stakeholders in the organization,” said Hugot. “We are working with Bond Brand Loyalty and we are going back to our customers, which is an important part of the exercise to understand what guests are saying about us to determine the needs for the future ….”
As part of the process, Bond Brand Loyalty approaches the service-culture design from a holistic point of view. It is about looking at the brand inside-out and outside-in, noted Morana Bakula, director of customer experience at Bond Brand Loyalty. The firm conducted interviews with guests and went onsite to each of Meliá’s brands and held co-creation sessions to generate as much insight as possible.
“To design a service culture, it was critical to understand the brand and each of the individual brands and we wanted to hear from employees and leaders in the organization to understand where they’ve been and where they want to go,” said Bakula. “Our client has been exceptional in giving us the opportunity to do that, as well as market research—all intended to fuel us with insight and take what is already great about Meliá and use that to propel us into an era to design a new culture.”
The success of the co-creation session lies in the expertise of selecting the right customer from the brand’s base, according to Hugot, and brings value to the conversation. Both Meliá and Bond Brand Loyalty worked hand-in-hand on that effort.
“To innovate, we talk about bringing the brand to a new stage in service and this is where with a company like Bond Brand Loyalty, you really see the expertise and importance of setting it up perfectly,” said Hugot. “The outcome was dramatic and fantastic. It helped us gain insight to where we should be moving.”
Sara Ranghi, director of global guest experience & loyalty at Meliá, concurred, adding, “It aligns with our philosophy of becoming customer-centeric. There’s nothing better than to hear it from them. We have a service culture and we understand that to be able to deliver the promise of the brands, you need to give on a behavior level so associates can deliver that promise. We want to be on the innovation side, with new ways of providing things. It’s mainly about the link between the promise of the brand and the delivery of the promise.”
To educate and mobilize the hotel’s staff, there are plans in place to engage associates in lending their insight and expertise to the big picture. However, the collaboration is still early in the game. By participating in interviews and observations, input was shared by managers, corporate employees and those on the property level.
“From a more macro standpoint, this is not a program-designed relationship. It’s a program communication and long-term relationship to make sure this is something that gets absorbed among employees and will be a global player by the end of the year,” said Hugot.
Measuring effectiveness of what’s put in place will be key and Bond Brand Loyalty plans to look through the lens of the customer and the lens of employees to see the full scope of the program.
“What we love seeing is that Meliá has a lot of appropriate mechanics in place in terms of customer satisfaction and surveys, so we can present a measurement strategy,” said Bakula. “We will look at customer satisfaction, the propensity to visit again or buy more, and the likelihood to stay with the brand. As part of completing the design phase, there will be a baseline measurement and how to generate insight about potential return and how to evolve and improve the program once it’s launched.”
“Thanks to our strategic plan, digitizing our process in the company itself in the end is about the big data and how much information is available in order to create processes and innovative approaches to analyzing data. If you don’t have data available, you’re missing the main part of the starting point,” said Hugot. “Thanks to our last four years of investing in technology and being able to track customers’ behavior and making sure we have the right approach in all of our disciplines as hoteliers, we can go back and filter information and really track the importance of the long-term relationship.”
—Corris Little