Redefining Hospitality

Hospitality Service Design | Customer Journey | Experience Audit | Digital Diaries

We enabled a global hospitality brand from outside of China to innovate and relevant services and loyalty programs.

By leveraging actionable insights and a fail fast approach, our client secured the funding needed to prototype & implement.

BACKGROUND & BUSINESS PROBLEM

Global brands recognize that the world is now connected and market boundaries are less rigid, they need to deliver localized customer experiences regardless of geographies.

For service industries, companies need to make sure that the products they offer are relevant and desired by their target customers in each market. Growth under a "one size fits all" strategy has become to hard.

As the team at CBi China Bridge helped discover during a recent engagement with a global five-star hotel chain, these trends are challenging firms to do more than just tailor by country or geographic region. Instead, they need to identify those key elements along the customer’s journey that enable staff to deliver the right, culturally resonant experience, no matter where in the world that customer choose to stay.

China’s meteoric economic rise has been accompanied by an expanding and increasingly affluent class of consumer; these are people whose expectations and demands of global brands are complex but often not yet fully formed. They have money they are looking to spend, but their preferences are not completely understood. Tapping this ‘new generation’ of consumers has become a priority for pretty much any company looking to secure strong and sustainable growth, and in this regard the hospitality industry is no exception.

However with shorter lead times to entry, the hotel market has seen a rapid influx of foreign brands coupled with the increasing ambitions of local Chinese chains. This growth has thrown the market in many parts of the country into oversupply. The problem is particularly acute at the lucrative luxury end of the market, where a massive buildup in competitive pressure means that hotel chains no longer can focus their attention exclusively on expanding presence but must also think of ways of protecting existing markets and retaining customers. 

In a business where customers have more and more bargaining power, increasing customer satisfaction by exceeding expectations can not only increase customer loyalty but also provide positive, and free, word-of-mouth marketing.

Boosting customer loyalty and satisfaction through incentives and more tailored experiences has made sensitivity to customer needs of prime importance to hotel brands. Although most firms are aware of this need, not all know how to respond or how to enact the needed changes.

RESULTS & IMPACT

We enabled the client’s China locations to change their experience offering and use this new service blueprint to redesign the company’s global strategy to better accommodate the tastes of Chinese guests wherever in the world they stay.

By creating specific and actionable recommendations around each touch point that we identified to be key, we greatly reduced the inherent complexity and ambiguity of the challenge, allowing the client to take specific steps to improve the service.

We not only helped the client develop a five-year service innovation strategy for the Chinese market, but also helped it to secure internal funding by demonstrating how important, on a global-scale, Chinese clients will be in the future.

Our client tells us our support has helped ensure their competitive edge in China, so now let’s talk about yours.

If you find yourself with a similar challenge and needs contact us, our leadership team would like to to see how we can help you bridge your next. 

Photo by Matt @ PEK / CC BY

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