Managing Resource in Hospitality

(Extended Customer Journey)

A customer journey is an experience that the customers have with any organization. This
journey tells the story of a customer's experience with the brand from original
engagement and into hopefully a long-term relationship.

At first glance, a customer’s journey is pretty simple. A company offers something and
the client buy it. But once it gets into the detail, customer journeys are quite complex and
come in many varieties. The customers can come into contact with the business in a
multitude of ways and from many different starting points, for example, marketing,
referrals, search, social media, customer service enquiries and above-the-line campaigns.

No doubt, every company wants to make every experience with a customer as good as it
can be possibly. So to make sure no interaction slips through the cracks, professionals
map out every touch point or experience along the customer journey.

In a general sense, there are four steps in a customer journey. They are-

 Attraction
 Sales
 Satisfaction
 Loyalty
In broad sense the customer Journey is visualized below:

Picture: Extended Customer Journey

An Example of extended customer journey of Intercontinental Hotel, Dhaka, Bangladesh

is given below: (As we are blessed with modern technology, below will be described
about the digital channels mostly)

 Attraction
The Marketing department creates attraction worldwide through their own website,
online advertising, OTAs and travel agencies. Some traditional ways are also effective in
some cases like, word of mouth (recommendation of a client), TV and radio
advertisement etc.

 2S, Sales and Satisfaction (Selling setvice and During stay)

Sales are done by the online and direct booking through mail, chat, phone call or social
media. During stay, where the service part is taken place and this is the most important
part to make a client a regular one by providing amplified service. The provided service
by the hotel is usually more than the customer expectation to create an “OWO”
experience about the hotel.

 Loyality:
In this part, the management of the hotel plays a tricky role to make sure the customers
loyal. Feedback, online survey etc are done in a general way and by anticipation
customer’s needs, the the management offers some greedy promotions to get the client
back again. Some personal datas are collected like, birthday or marriage day to offer
something great (30% discunt only for that day) to make the day special.

From above description it can easily be said that, if an organization focus, create,
maintain and keep improving a proper customer journey path/map, it can improve the
experiences along the journey and to build a solid, long-term relationships with
customers.

*****

Angelos Lappas
Jasmin Ruste Lacandalo
Kabir Kibria