Mr. Waddell

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

Enhancing Guest Experience with a Methodology Based, Service Oriented Approach

By Michael Waddell, Managing Director, INTEGRITYOne Partners

The emergence of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has changed traditional thinking when it comes to envisioning, designing, and building information technology (IT) systems in the modern hospitality enterprise. SOA brings a renewed emphasis on improving leverage of IT investments through reuse while simultaneously allowing unprecedented amounts of business flexibility.

Hospitality business processes are typically replete with similar actions and activities that are used in many functions, sometimes crossing the boundaries of quite different parts of the business. Being able to use this reality to create competitive advantage can go a long way toward ensuring success in this competitive industry.

It's Not Just About the Technology Anymore

Even with the best technology available at guest servicing locations, enhancements to guest experience are not likely to occur unless the technology is combined with necessary adjustments to business processes. In some cases these are very minor adjustments to the way guests are serviced on property, and in other situations there are more complex changes that may need to occur. Either way, any changes that must occur can be managed through application of a comprehensive guest experience enhancement methodology.

There are two significant goals that must be achieved through the methodology. The first is the comprehensive analysis of possible guest experience touch points and the probability of capturing meaningful guest experience information at each touch point. Second, the business must define a suitable topology of guest experience events, generic enough to be leveraged across multiple brands and multiple properties yet extensible enough to accommodate the need of individual properties.

An extended event might include more detailed elements that capture specifics that may be only meaningful for the property at which the event occurred.

While the detailed event may ultimately wind up being most useful at the property where the event occurred, it may also be leveraged by alternate guest servicing locations. In this case, the restaurant manager at another property can check the guest service history from other properties, determine if a particular dish was liked, and recommend similar dishes on the local menu. Even better, an offer to have the chef make the preferred dish (even of not on the menu) could go a long way to securing the loyalty of a valued guest.

The most important point of creating the service event topology is to keep it as simple as possible. A breaking point occurs when the complexity of describing the event makes it onerous or time consuming to capture the event at the guest service touch point. And an event not captured can never be leveraged to enhance future guest experience.

Think 'Service Oriented' when Creating New Services

The next step in executing the methodology is to define and create the services that will be needed to capture the guest service events, make the information available on demand, and publish events to related systems. Each service is defined to perform a common, consistent, reusable, and simple-to-leverage function for the entire enterprise. It is critical to pull away from the mindset that each property-based system should implement isolated guest service capabilities. Service oriented thinking forces the enterprise to define the core generic services that have the broadest possible leverage value and then exposes those services to facilitate easy consumption.

It is relatively simple to define some basic services that could achieve the functionality required by the methodology. In its essence, the most important functions necessary for achieving the goals of the methodology are services to capture guest service events and services to provide access to past events associated with a guest.

Variations on the services are suitable for multiple methods of guest identification at the touch point, and multiple mechanisms may be available to capture the guest identity - by name, room number, key ID, RFID, and so on.

Following Through with the Right Technology Choices

Now that guest servicing touch points have been defined, the event topologies have been determined, and the business is ready to move, the enterprise will ultimately need to leverage the right technology in order to achieve the goal of enhanced guest experience.

The first step in this process is determining what existing technology is accessible at the guest service points identified in the early stages of the methodology. For example, in the restaurant scenario described earlier, it is likely that a point-of-service or restaurant management system is available to manage guest reservations, check ins, orders, and so on. Then the determination must be made as to the least disruptive way to access the guest experience services defined. The need to extensively modify an existing system is often a "deal killer" for transformation projects, as the cost and risk of making significant modifications to existing technology can often outweigh the advantages of adopting the new capability. This is especially true when multiple existing systems are involved.

The good news is that we now live in the world of SOA, where the concept of "loose coupling" is central. "Loose coupling" is a design principle requiring that someone providing a service should not be tightly bound to the consumers of that service (or vice versa). In this case, it usually means that existing systems will be capable of getting to the new services without needing significant modification. Moreover, the services (and the technology used to host the new services) will be suitable for a broad range of potential consumers. There should never be a need to create specific versions of services for each specific type of consumers.

While loose coupling is the goal of the service oriented architecture, it is not achieved through any sort of magic. Proper service design techniques need to be applied, industry standards should be used to facilitate ease of technology adoption and integration, and enterprise service bus (ESB) technology should be used to mediate between service publishers and service subscribers. ESB technology can be one of the most valuable technology assets used by an organization attempting to achieve loose coupling in an SOA environment as it can provide the ability to shield service publishers and subscribers from their differences and dependences. This enables new services to be consumed and leveraged without disrupting the rest of the enterprise and avoids the need for significant legacy systems modifications - which can kill a project like this before it even gets started.

Of course it may be the case that a guest service touch point has no current proximity to the technology that would allow guest events to be captured or leveraged. In these cases, the value of the guest event must be assessed and a decision made as to whether or not the value of the event exceeds the cost of capturing it. While this is more of an art than a science, the guest experience enhancement methodology is capable of providing help in this area.

Once the decision has been made to introduce new technology at the guest service touch points, a number of excellent choices are available. PDAs and similar handheld computing devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and available at lower price points. The same can be said about the wireless and broadband networks that are used to connect portable devices to the services created to capture and disseminate guest service events. Portable device interfaces must be defined with simplicity in mind for the same reason that the guest event topologies must be as simple as possible - guest events must be easy to capture or they will not be captured.

Of course process and technology compromises are always available. Some events could be captured on paper and subsequently scanned or keyed to submit the captured event into the system. Deferred event capture techniques will usually be sufficient, as most guest experience events do not require immediate reaction but are used more frequently to enhance future experience.

Why somewhat technical, hospitality SOA is really just another adaptation of a simple rule of guest service: the hospitality enterprises that know their guests' preferences and make it easy for staff to provide them win.

Steve Winkler, contributed to this article. He is a Managing Director with INTEGRITYOne Partners, and is a systems architect with more than 17 years of progressive experience in information technology. An expert in project management, technical management, strategy and planning, and technical architecture, his industry expertise includes hospitality and the public sector. Steve led INTEGRITYOne Partners' own effort to define and implement a guest experience enhancement methodology and the associated architecture and technology for use by the firm's clients.

Michael Waddell, a Managing Partner with INTEGRITYOne Partners, has more than 20 years experience in business, technology, and the Hospitality & Leisure industry. Mr. Waddell's technology background along with his familiarity with and affinity for hospitality allow him to conceive unprecedented solutions for critical hospitality business issues. He leads the firm's efforts to develop tools that bridge costly disconnections between technology and operations. Mr. Waddell can be contacted at michael.waddell@ionep.com Extended Bio...

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