How Big Business Makes You Feel Special

Everything you do for your business is a compromise. A natural selection of the middle ground between what’s best for your customers and what will still make you money as a property manager. If money and time were no object and your only concern was guest satisfaction, imagine what you could do for every guest. You could send exact details, organise transport from the airport or even exclusive tours of the city they’ve come to visit. Your property would be perfect. Your organisation would be flawless.

But, you have a limited time and a limited amount of money to invest in each guest.

As property managers discover – as you develop your business, it becomes harder to offer truly personal service. When were considering this issue, a great example of how to personalise on a large scale was sitting right in front of us. One of the biggest franchises in the world, Starbucks had found a way for every customer to get personalised service wherever they order.

Faced with a rapidly expanding business and a growing image problem of being corporate and soulless, Starbucks created an elegant solution to add a personal touch to their franchise. It’s the same coffee in downtown San Francisco or Tokyo airport, but in a moment of corporate and organisational genius, they decided to personalise each cup – just by writing on each customer’s name. You now know which coffee is for which person at the counter but there was a surprising side effect: this is more than just a venti, double-shot latte. It’s your venti, double-shot latte, with your name scrawled on the side in marker pen. They also have to ask your name, creating a connection between the company and the customer. They created a simple system with which they can make a small concession to providing a personal service at minimal time or expense – and roll it out across their thousands of outlets.

At this point, you might well be asking how does this apply to my properties?

You doubtlessly read about providing ‘personal service’ to your guests but have no tangible way to actually apply it to dozens of properties and hundreds of guests every year. You don’t need to know that you should provide personal service, you need to know the methodology to apply this in a way that you can roll out across your entire business.

The best managers in the world are still human. If you’re short of time, or simply having a bad day – you might not be able to give every guest a personalised guide or the attention that you would truly like to offer. Simply being a great manager isn’t enough to provide this level of service to every single guest.

Vreasy provides a methodology for you to keep up this level of service, and even add to your guest’s trip in a way that you can use no matter how many properties you have. To provide superior personal service you need to consider the five stages of travel. These are: dreaming; planning; booking; experiencing and sharing.

Property managers have been forced to ignore elements of this, or provide differing levels of service between bookings because the level of work is unmanageable. We help property managers create simple systems that allows them to add to the guest experience at each stage without ever repeating work or creating brand new content for every guest.

We will be explaining how you can build your very own methodology over the course of our posts. Stay tuned to get started.