Every company operating in the hospitality industry knows that business excellence is a complex framework composed of multiple key factors. Those, combined together, become a valuable and powerful tool for happy guests, financial, and operational success.
Exactly, for this reason, it is important for the hospitality companies to look into the business strategy challenges that trammel the achievement of business excellence and recognize the smart solutions which can help them to tackle the occurred obstacles.
No surprise, the assets which can give the best solutions to resolve excellence issues are data. Data integration and analytics provide plenty of both smart, specific, and broad answers to diverse questions that business entities have.
Now let’s dive into the essence of this article. The business strategy challenges:
Challenges
The business strategy is a complex term, which by itself creates challenges for the organizations to achieve excellence due to gaps in the established framework.
Lack of mission and vision
When a company lacks mission and vision, it is unable to focus on specific goals. In this case, it develops in multiple directions simultaneously, therefore, limits the consistent growth in a specific area or niche.
Data solution #1
Data can help the hospitality companies to create mission and vision according to the current strengths of the organization, taking into account the weaknesses and the risks that it bears in a specific period. This facilitates the businesses to get the best out of the talent pool and capital assets that they already have available and create objectives and goals which to take advantage of those.
Let’s say that a family hotel has the goal of becoming an international hotel chain. By looking at the strengths, weaknesses, assets, and risks, the business would gain an idea on what short and long term goals to set, and how to formulate the objectives for its future action plan.
Besides, by looking at all the data, the organization can decide whether to change its vision and goals according to the opportunities that have arisen: maybe to start growing as a national, but not an international hotel chain.
On the other hand, data analytics can help organizations to identify target groups, such as young people, couples, pensioners, athletes, etc. This way, the company would be able to focus on the specific customer groups that are aligned with and suit the objectives, mission, and vision of the organization.
For instance, if the same family hotel from the previous example operates in an area where most couples have their romantic vacations, it would be a waste of time to focus on young individuals or groups who are noisy and want to party. And data analytics give you this advantage of knowing whom to target.
Not paying attention to market trends
Not looking into the competitors’ actions, plans, and events contribute to a lack of knowledge about the industrial trends and potential future changes. As a result, those companies are given a disadvantage when it comes to providing better products and better services to their guests, which are in accordance with the market demands. And being one step behind the competition translates into low levels of customer satisfaction, bad CX, inability to attract and engage new clients, and poor financial performance.
Data solution #2
Data can provide a clear overview of the market trends, competitors’ actions, and the latest improvements. This enables the company to respond quickly to changes in market and customer behavior and maintain a competitive edge even when the industry changes at a fast pace.
What is more, data analytics provide valuable insights, which help the hospitality businesses to understand the expectations, needs, and desires of the customers. As a result, they can work towards providing them with the best experience possible, taking into account the factors that contribute to a high level of customer satisfaction.
Advanced data analytics also give insights on the means of communication that are most suitable for both attracting new clients, engaging and communicating with them. As a result, the company is enabled to target new prospects through the most used communication channels, and with the most suitable offerings, pricings, and content pieces according to their interests.
For example, if the company’s main focus group is married couples, data can give answers to the business entity regarding questions like:
- What are the usual months in which this client group organizes their vacation and book hotels?
- Do they plan their trip in advance or wait for the “the last minute”?
- Do they use Facebook, Instagram, or another social platform, and what is the media they mainly use for communication? (In fact, “...66.7% of millennials plan their trips on mobile devices.” according to PWC.)
- What is the average price they are willing to pay per night?
- What special commodities do they expect in the hotel (double bed, breakfast included, restaurant, sea view, bar, spa center, pool, etc.)?
- Do they read blog articles to take advice for trip planning?
And when the company knows such details, it can use them for effective targeting, offers generation, price setting, nurturing, and providing high-grade CX and client satisfaction.
Compromising quality for growth
Often businesses are so motivated to scale that at some point, they stop paying attention to the most crucial factor for success: quality of operations.
What often happens from a strategic point of view is that the organizations start hiring too many people, and creating new roles, which generate excessively high costs. In fact, according to Deloitte 2019, “As of 2018, the hospitality industry in the US had 1,139,000 job openings.
From another viewpoint, businesses start targeting too many customer groups, which makes them lose focus and direction in their development.
Moreover, when striving for growth, hospitality companies fail to properly evaluate the risks that they bear, ending up with taking too much pressure at once, which potentially leads to operational and financial losses.
For example, bad room occupation planning, or poor demand forecast can lead to low performance in terms of profit, task allocation, asset depreciation, and increased costs. That is why focusing only on the idea of growth is not enough for sustainable development and maintaining quality operations.
Data solution #3
Data analytics help companies to improve their planning process by using data-based information. This way, they achieve data-driven decision-making and are able to benefit from an improved focus on short term operations, taking into account their long term goals.
Besides, data facilitates the business entities to expand their human capital in a measured and regulated way, in order to achieve the most efficient levels of employment and forego any duplicated or unnecessary tasks and roles.
What is more, deriving insights from the available data, facilitates the transformation of risks into evaluated opportunities that motivate sustainable and continuous company excellence.
Conclusion
Achieving business excellence is not an easy task. It demands clear long-term vision, competitiveness, a well-measured action plan for growth, and high-quality products and services.
But knowing what can trouble your success and how to sustain it smartly can be the cue to achieving your corporate goals. And data plays a central role in helping you on this matter.
