Every hospitality company these days has some sort of vision or initiative around personalized guest experiences. The term personalization crops up everywhere, yet it seems that most of the industry is struggling to achieve this supposed nirvana. Technology appears to be available and companies are making investments, but the industry isn’t quite there yet.

Meanwhile, information technology (IT) departments are getting bombarded with requests to optimize aspects of the guest experience, invest in and integrate technology enablers and provision guest data from all corners of the organization. IT leaders are starting to feel like the bottleneck in the process, but (spoiler alert) personalization isn’t all about technology.

If you dig beneath the surface just a bit, you’ll soon discover that there isn’t really agreement on the exact definition of personalization. Surely it’s about personalized content, isn’t it? But content that isn’t informed by guest preferences and behavior won’t resonate.

Then it must be about data – achieving that 360-degree view of the guest across all their interactions with the brand, right? But what will you do with that data once you have it? For that matter, how can you encourage guests to even give it to you?

Equating personalization with digital transformation is attractive. But you risk creating even more silos within the organization as you bifurcate digital channels from on-property experience. Too much focus on the tech platform without content to put in it results in lots of big dollar investment without the expected big dollar return.

As Figure 1 illustrates, the hospitality guest experience can be quite siloed. Guests interact across channels, but teams and technologies tend to be channel specific. Each channel has its own content, journey and goals, and its own technology roadmap. That means IT is frequently pulled in many different directions trying to satisfy channel-related optimization roadmaps.

Figure 1: The fragmented guest experience

What Do We Do About It?

Silos are a symptom. The problem is that most organizations don’t have alignment on what their definition of personalization is. If you asked 10 different people, you’d likely get 10 different answers. Aligning on a single definition of what personalized guest experiences mean for the organization is the single most important first step.

Consider this definition of personalized guest experiences: Using guest insights and preferences to design, deploy and optimize personalized experiences across marketing, sales, property and other guest facing channels, delivering improved guest value and value for owners.

Think about how this definition gives responsibility for personalization to a broad, but integrated, group of stakeholders. Insights includes the data and analytics teams. Design, deploy and optimize brings in the business owners responsible for strategy and

operations. Specifying across sales, marketing and all guest facing channels breaks through the silos. Finally, the definition clearly communicates the goal: value for guests and owners.

Each organization will likely have its own definition, as it must be aligned with the overall company strategy, branding and market opportunity. For example, some organizations will focus personalization efforts around their loyalty program, driving guests into it and personalizing from there. Other brands may not want a traditional loyalty program. Instead, they may focus personalization around the on-property guest experience. These two different strategies will result in very different “North Stars” for guest personalization.

The final step in setting the vision is to understand what “good” looks like so that you can ensure that the effort you put in the program will be worth the value you get out of it. Think about what percentage of guest interactions you’ll realistically be able to personalize and what the potential impact could be. This will help set the right expectations and justify the proper amount of investment.

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Align the Organization Around Personalization

As you probably noticed, our proposed definition of personalized guest experiences requires the organization to develop and synchronize broad capabilities. In fact, we’ve identified eight capabilities:

• Guest analytics
• Guest strategy
• Content
• Orchestration/next best action
• Activation/channels
• Operations
• Data/tech foundation
• Organizational transformation

These capabilities must be organized in an integrated, automated approach. This will require business process transformation (Figure 2). Organizations tend to focus on technology enablers, mostly because that’s where the bulk of the investment lies. This is important, but it’s only one of the eight key capabilities.

Figure 2: Eight integrated capabilities: five marketing capabilities, two foundational enablers, and a transformation program

Supporting this initiative will require adding a few key roles in the organization. You’ll need a guest experience lead who’s empowered to take responsibility and drive change. They’ll require support from guest experience strategy, digital enablement, guest analytics, operations and technology resources.

It matters less to whom these people report and more that they're responsible and accountable for making this happen. Achieving these goals requires an operating model that facilitates cross-functional collaboration and communication. We’ve seen many examples of hospitality organizations bringing in a guest experience lead, but not giving them the scope and power to do anything but “advocate” for integrated, automated personalization.

Don’t Give Up – the Path Is Shorter Than You Think!

We could write another eight articles on how to develop and execute these eight capabilities. We could also write another article on the integrated team you must put in place to be responsible and accountable for success (so stay tuned!). These investments are critical, and they do seem daunting. However, many organizations have already acquired the technology tools needed to build these capabilities. And most are already spending money in digital and other channels. They’re also collecting and storing guest data, even if it’s in disparate systems and formats. Finally, they have people focused on key areas like operations, content, marketing and even analytics. The missing piece is how to integrate these investments toward that common strategy for personalization.

Knowing these pieces exist in some format, the next steps are:

• Assess existing capabilities across all eight areas

• Identify gaps between what currently exists and what would be needed to deliver on your version of personalized guest experiences

• Develop a roadmap that closes those gaps

• It’s crucial that the roadmap be detailed (down to the task level), that it delivers value at every stage, that it be visible across the organization, and that it be implemented and tracked. Detail is key here, as is delivering some measurable value at every stage so that momentum continues.

• We can’t overemphasize that you must make a plan for all eight capabilities. The biggest mistake we’ve seen organizations make is only tackling one or two. In fact, this is probably the barrier to success at your organization right now.

To summarize:

• Delivering personalized guests experiences will provide value to everyone in the chain if you do it right. If you don’t do it, or do it wrong, you’ll get left behind.

• You have to define personalized guest experiences consistently across the organization. Don’t start work until this occurs.

• While technology gets a lot of press, it’s only one of the eight capabilities. IT doesn’t hold all the responsibility for success.

• Start by building a task level roadmap for all eight capability areas, with all eight involved at every stage.

• You’ll need a cross-functional team to support the eight capabilities areas and deliver on the roadmap, so build and empower one. Worry less about who they report to and more about their mandate.

• At every stage, the roadmap must deliver guest and business value– however you define it.

• Organizations should take a pause on investing in technology, and instead invest in the time to build out the strategic underpinnings of personalized guest experience. This will guarantee that investments are directed toward elements that will add value at every step of the way.