ÐßÐßÊÓƵ

Transcript

Introduction to user disengagement
 
Hi, everyone.
 
Welcome back to Matt Talks. This week, I wanted to talk about user disengagement. It's not a very sexy terminology.
 
But I'll explain it, through TikTok. If you're like me, you love TikTok. You get trapped on that device and that software forever because the goal of TikTok is to engage you, and keep you as long as possible on the screen so that they can serve your advertisement. So very strong engagement metrics.
 
What we're trying to do with ÐßÐßÊÓƵ, however, is the opposite of what TikTok is doing, which is disengagement. We want employees in hotels to spend as much time as possible not looking at a screen, but rather doing things that add real value to the brand. Meaning talking to guests, really thinking out of the box, creating special guest experiences. And the only way to achieve that is if we disengage them from the system.

Chapter
Current hotel reception practices
 
If you walk into a hotel today, most likely what happens is you walk through the door, you look around, where's the big marble desk? And then you queue up at a reception desk where several humans are looking down on the screen, typing away. And if you're lucky, they'll look up and acknowledge you and welcome you to the hotel before they start typing in the screen once you've given them your passport and your credit card. And we started talking about user disengagement in the last few years.
 
And the only way for this to become real is for us to measure this. And it's a very difficult thing to measure. How do we ensure that the humans that we employ in hotels spend more time with guests. It's through measuring every single click and every single second spent looking at the screen.
 
And with what we started doing to map this out was first identify the golden tasks. Like what are some of the key tasks that you do in a property management system? So for example, check-in. We see the whole day, hundreds of check ins happening in hotels, and that's a golden task.
 
So a check-in, a checkout, inspecting a room, taking payments for a bill, and all of these golden tasks we've mapped out from the moment that they begin to the moment that they complete the task. And we say, okay, how many clicks and how many seconds does this take? And then we start to map, like target our design teams to saying, well, four minutes for a check-in is no longer acceptable. How do we make that two minutes on average?
 
And if we can get those numbers down objectively through data, we will hopefully also show user disengagements. One of the things, for example, we did was on the kiosk. We found that customers struggled to make a check-in. And a check-in used to be about five minutes on a kiosk, which is a very long time to be typing away at a kiosk screen yourself.
 
And we made a few strategic changes. We said we have to get that down to one minute. So often setting quite an extreme target will force really big solutions. One of the things we stopped doing, is asking for confirmation numbers because people don't know their confirmation number when they check-in.
 
So we just ask for last name. If there's a conflicting in the reservation, so there's multiple people with last name, we will ask for the confirmation number. But ninety five percent of customers then get in. And we then looked at all of the screens that we had and made them as simple as possible, ask as little questions as possible.
 
We've been able to cut the check-in from five minutes to two minutes on average for those hotels that have really embraced the modern kiosk. And that's true user disengagements, meaning guests spend less time engaging with the software or the team members spend less time engaging with the software, and that creates space to truly transform what a hotel does. And that's what I wanted to talk about in this Matt Talks. How do we do this?

Chapter
Strategies for user disengagement
 
So what are some of the biggest things that we've leaned into driving user disengagement?
 
How do we leverage the cloud to drive this? Some of the really great features inside the system, I'll show you some of the screens where we've done something interesting that helped automate some of these really painful user flows that we have. And by the end of it, hopefully, you'll have a sense of what we've done to help support user disengagement and thus support greater guest experiences. I hope you enjoy it.
 
Right. So part one, I wanted to talk about the cloud and challenges of the cloud because unfortunately the cloud does have its own challenges. And whilst we've all been advocating for people to move into the cloud, when you think back to, or you might still have an on premise server with a system on it, generally, if you have the server in a back office behind this wall, it's gonna be fast. So it can very quickly open up screens and you can navigate through that system really fast because there is no lag because I just have to communicate with the server that is in house.
 
And that is one of the benefits of having an on premise server. Obviously, there's significant downsides to having to maintain an entire server, but the ultimate upside of it is the speed at which you can operate the system. So you don't have to really rethink screens because you can just add more screens. You can add more buttons in the screen because it loads so fast anyway.
 
And what you often find with some of these legacy systems is they do become a bit of a Frankenstein because it is so easy to add buttons and fields and screens to these systems because you don't experience lag time. So the ability to quickly add features without, compromise is easy. The compromise is ultimately when ten years later you've built a system with so many fields that the user no longer knows where to look, where to input the data.
 
And while short term there's a real benefit, long term, there is a downside.

Chapter
The role of cloud systems
 
The cloud, because our server isn't in the room next door, our server is probably sitting in Ireland or in Amsterdam or sitting somewhere in a service center. So it does take longer. It's still super fast, but it just objectively takes longer to communicate with a database that sits in the cloud somewhere.
 
So we do not get the ability or the freedom to just add any field add multiple screens because every screen and every field we have to load. And we have to think deeply about whether a field makes sense to add or whether it's going to make the experience significantly worse. In the cloud, you don't have versioning, or you could do, but we don't do that. So, whereas with an on prem, you can have a local version in the one hotel with special fields that are created for you specifically. And then in the next hotel, they have a different version of it. And both of them run pretty fast. Yes, you have updates challenges because now you run custom versions, but it does work pretty well.
 
In the cloud, all users get a single version. So you have some optionality in terms of the options of how you, how you set up the system. But ultimately every single user is running the same system. And that means we think very deeply before adding a screen or deploying a screen about speed and whether something is going to make it a worse experience or not. And that also means that unfortunately, not everyone always gets the feature set that they're looking for. And that's one of the downsides of the cloud. We build very deliberately.
 
It takes longer time because we have to redesign screens sometimes completely. When, for example, we added in loyalty, we had to really rethink, okay, how does this interact with the existing screens that we have? And that's really one of the downsides that it's a one size fits all solution. And we need to focus explicitly on great design because we do not want the system to get slower and and worse over time as we add more features in. And that's just really hard. One of the great benefits of the cloud is obviously the API integrations that we have.
 
So where, when I grew up in hotels, I remember that the interface with our central reservation system was often down. So one of the things we had to do every morning was check the reservations. We would run a report of reservations created yesterday. And then one by one, I had to open every reservation, just make sure that the source field and the origin fields were correct.
 
Those things, because of the APIs and the really strong integrations that we have with central reservation systems and channel managers, actually are no longer required because you can just assume that the rate is going to be correct, that the source and the origin fields are correct, etcetera. So you save a huge amount of time because of the type of integrations that we now have versus what we used to have when you had these legacy on premise servers with an interface into an online legacy system.
 
So there's a lot of time that you save through a phenomenal API connection to third parties that feed data in. But at the ultimate core, we build a deliberate system that takes a long time because we want it well designed. We want the user experience to be as smooth as possible. So I'd say those are the biggest differences between on prem.
 
You can add as many fields as you want. It loads pretty fast, but it has quite a bad user experience versus a cloud, which is not as feature rich. It takes a long time to build, but screens load slower. So we have to really focus on making sure that we capture data through different ways, through API connections, through, automation, through online check ins, etcetera.
 
And those are the two upsides and downsides of on prem versus the cloud. But ultimately, you can achieve so much more with the cloud because you can integrate and you can build different screens that serve different customers because everyone else is also sitting in the cloud getting access to the data. And you don't just have a database locally that needs to be maintained by the employees of the hotel only. And I think that's where the biggest win will come from, allowing multiple parties to update the database so that you don't need to do that by hand.

Chapter
Legacy systems and data entry
 
We are not a data entry system. We are a guest experience system, and that's the ultimate goal of what we're doing with me.
 
So I just talked about, the traditional systems, the legacy on premise systems, like their data entry systems, meaning they're built for employees to manually type data into the system because they had no better access to obtain that data from a guest.
 
When you think about what a check-in is at a hotel, you walk in, you get in the queue. At some point, you get acknowledged by the receptionist and they say, passport and credit card, please. And you hand over your passport and your credit card whilst they print you out this registration card. And you have to fill in this REG card with my terrible handwriting that at some point, a different human has to figure out how to type that into the system without mistakes. And hopefully, they've typed my email address correctly. Whilst at the same time, they're taking your passport and your credit card data and processing it. And it takes, you know, five minutes to get you checked into the system.
 
And one hundred percent of guests have to be going through this process just because just that's just how it worked.

Chapter
How to improve guest experience
 
When you saw that shift into the cloud, one of the things we architecturally did differently is that we said, in traditional systems, everything is tied to the bedroom. So we got room one hundred and one and you've got a guest in there and there's a bill attached to room one hundred and one. And at the end of the day, I need to check that out. And then I can check the next guest in, and everything is linked to the hotel room.
 
Structurally for an on premise system, that made sense. Because we're in the cloud, we actually really thought about what the guest experience should be. We thought that the guest experience in hotels was really not great. And if we get the chance to redesign all of that from the ground up, we should do that with the guest at the heart, not with the room number at the heart.
 
So architecturally, we said the guest profile is central and everything happens for the guest profile. So there's reservations attached to it, there's payment types attached to it, etcetera. One of the other major benefits of the cloud, in addition to being able to restructure and put the guest at the heart, one of the major benefits of the cloud is that not only employees can access the system, but because it sits on the internet, everyone can access that system. And everyone you want to, obviously with user rights, give access to that system.
 
And that means that, for example, guests can update their own profile because rather than making me fill this piece of paper in at the reception desk when I'm in a hurry to get into my room, I could have done that five days before arrival through an online check-in, for example.
 
And we're starting to see a real adoption of those types of services where a guest will check-in online. They will fill in their registration card. They will submit that credit card detail. We offer them one hundred percent of the time an upsell, which humans often forget an upsell of saying you don't have breakfast attached to your rates.
 
You want to add breakfast, maybe an upgrade to a high category of room. There's a messaging option. So there's a lot of data that we can capture through the online check-in that is pure because I know my address and I can type that into your computer much better than you can when you have to copy this somehow into your computer screen. So that drives a huge amount of automation.
 
These, these services where, you can do an online check-in natively in ÐßÐßÊÓƵ, or you can work with one of the integration partners that we have that can feed that information in. So that when that guest gets to your reception desk, potentially they've already checked in online, potentially they've already got that digital key on their smartphone and they can go straight to the room. And that means that you've got more time for those guests that actually do need the attention whilst not being distracted by the large queue that's standing in front of you. And I think that's one of the most exciting thing that we can see in the cloud, that suddenly through the connectivity that we have, we can pull in as much data as we want.
 
The guests can check themselves in, queues at reception desk gets shorter, and hopefully the experience in hotels gets significantly better. And you can only achieve that once you've got a fully native cloud system, but also when you put the guest at the heart of it, because the guest profile, the guest logging into their own profile to maintain it, to see all their reservation data is really critical to transforming that experience end to end.
 
So we talked about the need to, make sure that the guest profile centralized and by being in the cloud, giving access to other systems to automatically update as many data points as you need. However, there's always a need for a clean user interface that captures some of this information because a guest might still come to the reception desk to do a manual check-in. And I wanted to show you some of the really fun and amazing features that we've built inside our user interface that were only enabled because we're in the cloud. And let me share my screen with you so I can share some of the juice.
 
I have a demo hotel set up. So, it's a small hotel, but let's have a look if I have a reservation.
 
This is my timeline. So here, one of the things we did was the moment a reservation comes in, we allocate it to a room. For all the times in the future, I see that all reservations are already allocated. Traditional systems require humans to do this.
 
So a human comes in every day and then in the morning has to go reservation by reservation to find the room allocations. But we try and really capture the request to the guest and allocate them to the right room. And I can quite easily still drag and drop reservations. And I can do that far in advance as well.
 
So I can take some of these reservations and start to move some of them around if I needed to.
 
But let's go to this reservation from Matthijs as well.
 
Because we put the guest at the heart, again, we think about the guest experience.
 
If has stayed with us before, we will automatically add an icon because we recognize that there was a previous reservation.
 
So we say here's, you know, a signifier that tells the receptionist saying this guest has been with you before, welcome them back. So Mr. Welle, welcome back to the hotel. Great to have you back with us.
 
Instead of Mr. Welle, have you have you been with us before? And the guest says, yes, I've been with you five times. So it's these little triggers, these visual cues that we've added across the system to see to help the user experience.
 
But I also see that there's this little other icon. It's one of the internals, which in this case means this was a customer who complained previously. So I can now go into the guest profile and actually find that information. So we can actually go into the internals and see some of the reasons why he complained.
 
But the other thing I could do is just read the AI note. We've started adding these little smart AI tooltips, that feed off all of the guest profile, reservation, dietary restrictions, and we summarize it for the user directly in the screen that they're using to check the guest in. So you don't have to open up multiple screens to kind of find the information about the guest. We're doing all of that in one screen, and that makes it really powerful.
 
Because like I said in an earlier section, in the cloud, it takes longer to load screens. So you wanna bypass as many screens as possible. So we've got all this information and it says, hey, prefers to send high floors, previous complaints, prefers to be referred to by his last name. So these smart tips, we start to inject into different parts of the system when it really makes sense.

Chapter
Making payments easier
 
Another thing that I love about ÐßÐßÊÓƵ is the way that we've thought about payments.
 
There's no one who gets excited about taking payments. But if you think about an interaction at a reception desk of a hotel, most of the time it is about payments. It is about saying, can I have your passport and can I have your credit card? I'm going to take a pre authorization of your card of fifty euros per night, etc etc.
 
And we try and automate all of the payment flows. So, in this case, Matthijs Welle might have booked a non refundable rate. And at the time of booking, we capture his credit card. We transacted his credit card automatically. We send him the receipt automatically. There's not a human who has to touch that reservation until the guest checks in.
 
If he booked a flexible rate, we might have a different charge rule set up. If it was a virtual card, we might only be able to charge that card on arrival, but all of these different payment flows we've built in. And that's probably about two minutes of a typical check-in that we've been able to cut off, making sure that you can spend time with your guests. Let's have a look at his profile.

Chapter
About a more efficient check-in
 
Some of the things that I really enjoy here is, for example, this little icon that opens up a camera on my computer because most computers have a camera built in. And let's assume this is my passport, which it isn't, but, I don't wanna give you my passport details. What you can do is you can hold this in front of the camera. It will read the machine readable information strip on the passport and automatically fill in the details directly in my profile so that you don't have to type it in and make mistakes. So the data gets cleaner and is updated much faster than having to do that through a traditional passport scanner. So that's a little thing that we added. So you see also here again, we added a smart tooltip, which is this AI tooltip with information that we have on this guest, really powerful.
 
Then on the billing screen, one of the things that I loved when I, go into Amazon is one click payments where you just buy a book, you press one button, your transaction cards, you get a receipt, and you get the book sent to you automatically.
 
And that's ultimately what we did with this screen as well. So you've got a, a minibar transaction here. I can just press charge and close. I just say, yep, I wanna charge that credit card.
 
I don't have to open all kinds of screens. I've got a credit card. I know what the amount is. It instantly processes it, closes the bill, and the transaction's done.
 
And I think that's it's those little things that are really, really powerful.
 
Taking a reservation for the restaurant. One of the biggest challenges we have in hotels is that guests leave the hotel to stay some to go and eat somewhere else. But you wanna make sure that you capture them, especially on the first night you wanna get them in the restaurant saying, could I make a table reservation booking for you right now? We've integrated with Res Diary, with Zenchef. So I can instantly create a booking in a different system directly from the user interface of the check-in screens. And I can instantly create that booking.
 
And it's all these little things, the passport scanner, the AI notes, the the instant payments, the instant making a table reservation, that we've injected throughout the system that make for a much better guest experience and hopefully for a much better staff experience. Because for example, if I have these AI notes, I'm hoping that rather than asking for passport and credit card data from guests, that we stimulate our employees to ask real questions because the question you often get asked on checkout is, was everything okay with your stay? Implying I'm looking for a yes.
 
And if the guest says yes, great. Then they check them out and they leave. But actually, I think that there's a shift in behavior that needs to happen where the guest says, yes, everything was okay with my stay. The follow-up question would be, next time you stay with us, what could we do better? And that kind of information, we love to capture into these internal notes because all of that will feed into the AI so that next time Mr. Welle checks in, you get better smart tips on AI saying this guest likes red wine so that you can do a nice VIP welcome, welcome, arrival package or something. And it's those little things that are really exciting and make quite the difference in the experience.
 
I hope you enjoyed that little demo that I did, but, but I wanna just keep talking about some of these elements, but I wanted to make sure that I show some of the things that I talk about that have a real impact on the experience.
 
So we're talking about user disengagements, meaning we want users to spend less time in the system and more time with guests to create better guest experiences. At ÐßÐßÊÓƵ, we do a lot. We've got a number of systems that we we build, but all of them have different levels of user disengagement that we're trying to force. And a word that we often talk about is friction.
 
How much friction is acceptable on a different screen? So sometimes we have to have more friction because we are required to fill in certain levels of data. But if you think about what happens in a booking engine on the website versus a check-in online versus check-in at the reception desk, those are very different processes that we need to really help improve. If you think about a restaurant point of sale, for example, you want as fast as possible to turn over.
 
When a guest is ready to pay, get them to pay as fast as possible. Don't wait for the bill, walk up and down, then take the credit card terminal, all of that process. You wanna eliminate as fast as possible. Let me, for example, talk about the booking engine.
 
I have an example that I can just quickly show you. Here, we've got the booking engine of a hotel, that I just built.
 
We've got a really nice video built in. You can pick the dates. And on the website, this is not yet a guest for you. So the least fraction is required because you wanna capture this reservation.
 
Because if you don't create a smooth guest experience, they're gonna go to booking dot com works media and make the booking there. But let me switch this to English and I'll just quickly take you through what we're doing here. So select dates, then pick the category of room that you want. We have all of the nice pictures in there.
 
Room descriptions can be in there.
 
You add rates. Here are the rates, any products that you want. And I said book now. Is this what you want?
 
And then on the checkout screen, we require last name, we require email address, and we require a passport, a credit card. In this hotel, they don't have the credit card integration set up because it's demo. But the booking engine, you wanna set up with as little friction as possible because you are still competing with Booking.com and Expedia. The moment that they have booked, you can can get away with some friction because at this point, that guest is gonna have to check into that room whether they like it or not.
 
So now you can introduce saying, okay, he's now made a booking. Let's ask him to check-in online. And we see that if they've booked on the booking engine, one in three guests will check-in online. And there, you can have some friction because this guest is gonna go through that process and you can say, would you like an upgrade?
 
Would you like to add any products, fill in your registration card? Who else is staying with you? And invite them into the online check-in. Because there's no queue of people waiting behind them, and they can take that time to absorb the information.
 
And it's also building some of the anticipation. So when you think about online check-in, you can add a couple more screens to create a better flow and some friction is acceptable.
 
Then once you get to the day of arrival and you're thinking about a reception desk or a kiosk, then it becomes less acceptable to have friction because now there are people possibly queuing. They get frustrated with a long winded process. And this is really where you'd benefit from some of the earlier steps that we've taken to try and drive automation. So that booking engine with a credit card, that is now fully automatic payments.
 
So you've just got two minutes of a check-in because we've just taken payments automatically. The online check-in cuts another minute, two minutes from that. If you do a digital key integration, meaning that my phone becomes the key that I can send to the guests automatically, there is no more check-in required for that guest. Meaning you've just completely disengaged that guest from the painful experience of the administration and allowed them to check-in.

Chapter
Housekeeping and tech
 
And I think that's really how we think about all of these different steps about, you know, how do we create as little friction as possible? One of the things that I always get frustrated by in hotels is the way that housekeeping goes about their floor because they are in the morning given a piece of paper with all the room allocations on it, and that they're not given access to the information in the system. So whilst the system knows that, you know, one room might be, checked out, the housekeeper doesn't know. So what we did is we built a native app for housekeepers.
 
It's not great, but here you can see very simple room numbers. You can see if a guest is physically in the room, if he's checked out and there's an arriving guest. And that way they can prioritize the rooms directly from the app. And we try to keep that really simple because a housekeeper doesn't need too much information.
 
They don't need big screens. They just need to know, can I knock on this door or is that guest still sleeping? And do I move on to the room next door where I know the guest has already departed and I have an arrival coming? And that way, they can better prioritize which rooms to clean, ensuring that the guest doesn't queue down at the reception because his room is actually already inspected, getting them in the room faster or potentially charging an early arrival fee drives more revenue for the hotel.
 
So these are all the different ways that we think about, the users that we serve. Sometimes that user is the guest. Sometimes that user is the receptionist. Sometimes that's the housekeeper.
 
And how much friction do we induce or how do we make their job easier to ensure that the guest has the best experience possible and they get a really engaged experience from the employees that they're, that they're working with?
 
So in this last blog, I know that I've talked a lot about how we build systems, and that isn't necessarily that relevant to to you because it's our job to build these systems. I think what makes it interesting is that a lot of, hotels will buy our system. They're replacing a legacy system, and then they operate the hotel like they have still a legacy system. And because of the things we've done, the use of disengagements, there's a mind shift that needs to happen in hotels where they say, well, I've found out about this Ferrari and I should drive in like a Ferrari.
 
So maybe I should lean into having a kiosk, embrace the online check-in and online checkout so that I only have to serve ten, twenty percent of the guests with a physical reception experience. And maybe you can even remove the reception desk and rethink what you want that really great experience at the, check-in to be. And if you don't have a reception desk, what should that lobby experience be? And I think this is what's exciting me about hospitality, the ability to differentiate again, because most hotel brands today offer the exact same experience.
 
But because the systems have now driven a level of disengagement, meaning that you don't need people to sit there and enter data all day in the system, that allows you the freedom to rethink what you want the end to end guest experience to be at your hotel. One of the things I'm really hoping to shift is rather than asking for passports and credit cards, it's asking those open questions. What are you hoping to do when you're staying with us this time? And capture that information.
 
And we wanna capture as much data as possible so that the AI can give you summaries of what the guests are expecting because it is very difficult to remember people's name.
 
But the systems are so smart that it can help you when you recognize a guest. How do you drive a better experience and help you think out of the box? And I think that's the shift that we're hoping to work towards. Let us do the administrative, the boring parts of the check-in, whilst you think, what do I want the lobby experience to be?
 
What do I want it to be the data that my team is, is asking for? And then how do I drive a culture where the team is stimulated to create really crazy good experiences for guests? And that's a very different employee that you're looking to create. Someone who craves creating these magical experiences, but you can only do that once you've liberated them from the administration parts of the systems.
 
And this next step is really thinking about guest experiences. And one of my very next Matt Talks will talk about how do we build in a culture of excitement around guest experiences. Because I think honestly, if we get that right, it could be transformational for hospitality.