Insights
Managing Director, Steven Pike, breaks down our Guest Experience Management solution.
Guest Experience Management (GEM) is a complex business. The hospitality delivery team of any business is at its heart, but even with an excellent attitude and work ethic, they must have the necessary knowledge to do a great job. Fostering an understanding of what matters most to guests and embedding behaviours within your team that align their focus to deliver this, is where HGEM can add most value.
Our approach reframes hospitality, which can seem like a thing you either get right or don’t, as a GEM process. As soon as a business begins to think of hospitality as a process, delivered by people, it becomes something that be broken down and methodically improved upon.
It’s helpful to think about guest experience management as something that happens at three key points in a delivery chain. It begins with the knowledge we just touched on, then moves to the delivery of brand standards and interactions, and concludes with the perceptions shared by guests after they leave. Each of these: knowledge, standards and perceptions, can be measured, but each requires a different approach.
In order to analyse performance in these key areas, we engage with three separate audiences: team members for knowledge, managers for standards, and guests for perceptions. In this questioning, we apply the same measurement framework (which we call the GEM wheel). This applies to all three audience groups, and it helpfully breaks down guest experience into its core components. For each of our clients, we apply the GEM wheel in context of the brand promise unique to individual operators. This allows us to link the three points in the GEM delivery chain. The result is actionable insight that improves consistency and quality of GEM delivery for our clients.
Once we have gathered measurements and feedback from mystery guests, we can blend it with information from other sources – such as downstream data from online review sites - to build an overall picture of operational performance that goes beyond the insights delivered from mystery guest reviews in isolation or NPS scores. Presenting all this in a platform which we call the GEM Hub allows managers to turn data into actionable insight that they can use day to day. Drawing on a deep understanding of hospitality culture and experience of how to improve guest experience, HGEM provides clients with the tools to shape their success.
HGEM data helps brands build an information resource that illustrates changing customer preferences and the evolution of guest experience expectations. This can help our clients evolve their guest experience, ensuring their offering tallies with customer expectations.
When we’re preparing reports for our clients, we ensure that all insight can be used to trigger action. We’re aware that insights are only as useful as the improvements they can inspire, so we draw on the expertise within our team from many years’ worth of front line experience in delivering hospitality, to suggest improvements to training, behaviour and process, all tailored to the client’s business model and market.
