Profile Match & Merge is one of the many unique features that distinguishes RoomKeyPMS from other property management solutions. Designed to ensure a better guest experience by making guest profiles a more productive tool, this feature automatically identifies duplicate profiles, merges the information and deletes the redundancies.
We engineered Profile Match & Merge to solve persistent guest pain points experienced by all hotels. In order to ensure we are providing a true solution for hoteliers, we asked our users directly. We sent out a customer satisfaction survey asking hotel managers what kind challenges guest profiles create and how Profile Match & Merge solves them. This survey returned helpful insights into how hotels currently manage their guest profiles, the importance of streamlining guest data and what we can do to continually improve the guest experience.
The False Promise of Guest Profiles
Hotels have always set out to understand guests in-depth on an individual level. Now that widespread data collection is relatively easy, it’s possible to develop comprehensive profiles of each and every guest.
Good profiles make every aspect of hotel management easier. Marketing messages and upselling offers are targeted to a guest’s known interests, and knowing every detail about a guest will ensure they receive the kind of personalized experience they expect from today’s hotels. Every aspect of service is easier when hotel staff know what a guest really wants, and this can be achieved easily through accurate guest profiles.
The value of guest profiles is undeniable. However, as our customer satisfaction survey revealed, realizing that value is difficult. Respondents pointed to a number of persistent pain points that make working with guest data a challenge:
- Maintaining guest profiles takes a huge amount of time and staff resources
- Poorly maintained profiles have limited value and can even compromise the guest experience
- Large-scale data management is a skill missing from most hotels
- Simply deleting old profiles causes valuable data to be lost
The paradox is that as guest profiles become richer in data, they also become harder to organize and optimize. As a result, something intended to be an asset can become an obstacle. Understanding this pain point, we were compelled to create a specialized solution.
The Immediate Advantage of Automation
Guest profiles have to be carefully managed so that the data within is accurate, up-to-date and free of redundancies. Unfortunately, this management takes an ongoing investment and is ripe for human error. The solution is simply to introduce automation as a way of managing and maintaining guest profiles.
Our customer satisfaction survey revealed that our users’ number one concern was improving reporting and analysis by using higher-quality data. That is impossible to do with staff no matter how many are assigned to the project. With automation, however, speed and precision are the defining features. Technology is able to deliver higher-quality data but in far less time and with much less input. Plus, with the tech doing all the hard work, decision makers can dedicate more time to utilizing this data rather than merely organizing it.
The benefits aren’t limited to staff either. As the quality of profiles quickly and automatically improves, the guest experience becomes more streamlined as well. Every touchpoint becomes an efficient and engaging experience. Not surprisingly, complaints plummet as guests begin to receive exactly what they want before they have to ask.
Our customer satisfaction survey reveals that Profile Match & Merge solves the kinds of problems that hold more hotels back. That said, the survey also reveals that the feature is not perfect. As the needs of individual hotels and the hospitality industry as a whole evolve, so too must the technology that is essential to the operation.
We are committed to refining the core features of Profile Match & Merge while expanding its impact on guest data. Since this feature was created with hotelier’s needs in mind, we want those needs to guide its ongoing development. That way, we ensure we are providing true solutions rather than just flashy features, and providing a product that will fundamentally aid in a hotel’s success.
If you are struggling to manage guest profiles and data, what kind of issues have you experienced? If you had a solution, what would it look like? Share your ideas with the team at RoomKeyPMS so that we can continually update and evolve our technologies.
Photo Credits: Shutterstock / Jacob Lund
