You sell memories and experiences, not a product, in the hospitality industry. So, it becomes even more important to be customer friendly and offer a top-notch user experience. That too at a jet speed. That’s why SMS marketing, owing to its speed in delivering the message, is extremely helpful in acing customer service in hospitality.
Here’s a blog post to help you improve your customer experience with your brand by using text marketing in hospitality.
7 Ways to Enhance Customer Service in Hospitality with Text Marketing
- Information, Updates, and Bookings
Most customer service desks are overloaded with calls and queries. You can automate your communication with MMS and SMS marketing so that most of the simple questions can be handled automatically.
Customers need to know the charges? Auto-feed the rates in your SMS messaging system. Do you offer customized food and beverage services in your hotel? Tune your answer into your automated texting system. Let your guests and travelers contact a dedicated short code to seek such simple queries and more.
Assure your customers with the right information every needful hour. Update about booking confirmations, bills for the transactions, reminders for the bookings and events, and cancelations via SMS. SMS marketing can handle almost all minor and major updates before, during, and after travel and lodging of your audience.
With text marketing, you can automate check-in and check-out processes. Ask your customers to reply to an SMS with a relevant answer.
- Put Humans Back in e-Communication
Having discussed SMS automation, it’s still crucial that you deploy human touch at all possible touchpoints. Keep your customer care executives ready to answer queries that can’t be customized in the SMS automation system. Don’t make them feel ignored with irrelevant answers.
To enhance the customer experience in hospitality, you must have your staff ready to answer each question politely. Offer links to raise complaints and requests and customer care hotline numbers via SMS. Share your website address, contact number and address, and location via text. Also, don’t forget to update an SOS number in an emergency.
Such handy information is useful to your users in times of stress.
- Room Services and Travel Needs
Take bookings for laundry, room cleaning, food and bar requests, and special needs like a wheelchair or extra blankets via SMS. Such simple yet friendly gestures help hospitality companies render high-quality user experience. Similarly, accept all complaints and offer assistance like issues with electrical appliances, taps and showers, bed, lighting, and noise levels.
If you’re into the travel industry, offer aid while a customer travels. For instance, provide informational assistance in the airport and other places. Share updates on safety issues like landslides, rising water levels near a water body, temperature updates, special events in the destinations, etc., to keep your users abreast during their travel.
- Promotions
To render better experiences, let your customers enjoy added benefits like a free spa or a plus-one drink during hours when the rush is negligible. You can even offer them a discount for the next booking with your brand all over the world via SMS.
Extend customized offers based on their previous bookings in the future and remain in their minds and hearts by creating nostalgia and good bonding.
Read more on how to skyrocket your customer engagement with SMS marketing.
- Feedback
There’s no better way of strengthening your services than feedback. Seek your recent customers’ personal experiences. Send them a link to a survey form. Or ask them simple questions over a series of SMS.
Make sure you ask the feedback at a proper time. Be mindful of their travel time. Also, don’t delay a lot and collect opinions while they’re still lingering in fresh memories.
- Ensure Data Security
Most users are worried about sharing their personal information for the sake of security and privacy. So, ensure their data security, and share your data sharing policies via a link or document in SMS or MMS. Goes without saying never share their data with your partners and vendors, and other companies.
- Aware Your Staff
To expedite issue resolution with your customers, your staff should be equally involved and inspired. Keep them updated via texts about an ongoing issues and coordinate with them over SMS about the travelers and guests’ needs and general business processes and routines to keep running the business as usual.
Also learn to extract the best benefits with MMS marketing.
Textmunication’s SAM for Hospitality Businesses
If you’re new to text marketing in hospitality, Textmunication is here to help you. We’ve served our customers from various sectors for 14 years. With our patent-worthy* technology, we can make a big difference to your customer service. Reach out to our team of textperts here.
