Increasing Customer Loyalty from Meeting and Events

Do you want more repeat meetings and events at your hotel?

Loyal customers not only return more often (which reduces marketing and sales costs) but also spend more money when they are on-property. "Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work," published in Harvard Business Review, reported that happy customers, as measured by loyalty, resulted in an improvement in profitability of up to 85 percent.

Getting customers to return begins, even before they arrive for their meeting or event, with flawless implementation at every stage of the booking, planning and event-execution process. Viewing loyalty as part of each employee's responsibility, from the minute the lead comes into the hotel sales department right until the final bill is paid, begins to pave the way to improved processes, reduced time invested and increased productivity.

Customer loyalty does not rest solely with those specific employees involved in the customer journey, however. Leadership plays a critical role in first agreeing that providing an extraordinary customer experience is a core value of the organization. In addition, they play a pivotal role in developing and maintaining a healthy culture that enables innovation and the implementation of new strategies.

By the way, an organization's culture is expressed through the values senior leaders have identified and exhibited in their behavior. Once the core values and culture have been addressed, developing the strategy and effective processes becomes the priority.

A recent project we conducted involved the ‘process' component of improving meeting and event satisfaction. The ultimate goal was to increase the probability that a meeting and event planner would return with another program. It required auditing the business from start to finish at several hotels within the company to identify breakdowns, time-eating processes, employee frustration (usually a by-product of customer frustrations), variations from industry standards, inter-departmental communication issues, and any other issues that were observed, identified by employees, or vocalized by the customer. Each step of the journey, from when the lead came into the hotel until all bills were paid, was reviewed and examined with the same lens at a sampling of their hotels in the organization.

The review resulted in an executive summary outlining core issues and opportunities and a document detailing best practices to improve the customer journey.

The implementation of the report's findings was a massive undertaking and took time to effectively roll out and implement at each hotel. This is where the importance of alignment with all stakeholders (leaders and employees) played a big part and underscores the necessity of a healthy culture to better handle change and new ways of doing things.

Once implementation was completed and after a few months to work out the kinks, the meeting- and event-planner satisfaction scores were tallied. The results: MICE market satisfaction scores doubled from what they had started with across the entire organization.

Increasing customer loyalty doesn't just happen. It takes commitment to spend the time and resources necessary to figure out what's working and what isn't. A deep dive into the processes at each customer touch point is the only way to really determine where the opportunities to improve are, all with the goal of having customers return again and again.

"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."
― Jeff Bezos

Take the Next Step Now

Improve your Customer Experience by hiring Jo-Anne to:

• Improve Customer Satisfaction
• Create Structure out of Chaos
• Uncover the Strategic Direction
• Develop a Healthy Organizational Culture
• Improve Employee Engagement
• Get Behind Barriers that Impede Employee Productivity
• Provide Leadership Training
• Conduct Leadership Executive Coaching

If you would like to hear more, simply reach out to Jo-Anne at
[email protected]

About Jo-Anne Hill

Founded by industry expert Jo-Anne Hill, JH Hospitality Consulting dramatically improves revenue and profitability in creative ways at hotels around the world. Her strategic thinking, skill, and practical approach to problem-solving come from hands-on experience at companies such as The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Mandarin-Oriental Hotel Group, Dorchester Collection and Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts.