[WHITEPAPER] Recovery Through the Eyes of Your Guests.

How innovations in experience management can drive business growth in hospitality in a post – Covid landscape.

As the hospitality industry’s health begins to turn a corner for the better, brands are looking for ways to run streamlined, agile operations to remain competitive and prepare for any unforeseen challenges the year may bring. Welcoming back in-store traffic, maintaining off-premise sales, and introducing new processes and procedures to teams requires a juggling act that most won’t have the time or resources to manage.

What can the industry expect?

The latest edition of CGA’s 2021 Hospitality Consumer Forecast shows that getting back to hospitality will be a priority for many people. A total of 59% said they can’t wait to go out again, and four in five (80%) hope to get back to a venue within a few weeks of reopening.

In a separate December 2020 study of hospitality business leaders by CGA, with 121 CEOs, chairman, and board-level directors, 94% believed technology was fundamental or important in helping them successfully negotiate the current marketplace.

One universal necessity is essential to the sector’s reopening success: implementing or optimising a digital-forward strategy.

Consumers have grown accustomed to convenience and value, and have an expansive digital marketplace to choose where they spend their time and money. By capturing performance insights throughout the customer journey, operators have the visibility needed to maximise every digital interaction with their guests.

Leading bar and restaurant operators will place greater-than-ever focus and resource on continually elevating the guest experience. And they will seek to make greater use of technology to improve their businesses, including how they manage and drive the guest experience, and how they manage and protect their brand.

We’re providing viewers with an in-depth whitepaper that grounds aspirational reopening goals with proven achievements across seven industry-leading brands.

The whitepaper, titled “Recovery Through the Eyes of Your Guests,” reveals the adoption and demonstrated success of modern guest experience management.

Connecting Guest Experience to NPS

The piece breaks down how the key metric of measuring customer sentiment, a brand’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), directly and indirectly, correlates with service execution and sales growth. By capturing the defining moments of a positive or negative experience, guest sentiment can translate into anticipated or lost loyalty. This system specifically measures how your business is doing through the voice of your guests.

As a standard practice, business leaders in the hospitality sector strategically develop menus, decor, venue, and website to serve a target audience or culinary speciality. However, the way guests interpret the end result is the true indicator of performance. By leveraging customer feedback, hospitality teams can adjust critical areas of the business with confidence and prepare for a triumphant return to full in-store and off-prem operations.

In the whitepaper, Yumpingo shares:

• What end-to-end experience management is, its demonstrated impact, and how conventional ways of approaching it won’t work in this digital-forward era
• How to leverage the voice of your guest to address operational challenges, make ongoing improvements, and build greater guest engagement and loyalty
• The NPS success stories from brands: 7 Bone Burger Co., Bistrot Pierre, Bone Daddies, Rosa Mexicano, Hickory’s Smokehouse, Olive Tree Brasserie, YO! Sushi, and New World Trading Company

Experience management technology

To run a leading hospitality business, every service, dish, and safety adjustment must be carefully monitored to uphold the value, quality, and service guests expect as part of a memorable experience. The brands featured in the whitepaper master the use of guest experience management technology, leveraging customer satisfaction insights to close the gap between service & dish execution and guest perception, increasing loyalty as a result.

A great guest experience can translate into a competitive NPS, which is then proven by ongoing loyalty. Yumingo’s platform helps hospitality brands – on average – increase their NPS by 17 points by connecting operators to a flow of insights that shine a light on every step of the customer journey, in real-time and at scale.

Once this flow of insight is established, it can reveal almost anything one would wish around brand proposition and guest experience: from booking to welcome, service, food quality, menu specifications, menu innovation, brand standards, guest interaction, servers, and of course brand sentiment, such as perceptions of value, quality and ultimately NPS. It shines a light on those moments of truth – how individual guests are experiencing and receiving our brands.

How sales data + guest data drives results

The amount of insight available in the hospitality space today gives teams opportunities to create better businesses, and for individuals charged with driving these businesses, the ability to not only understand guest experience but financial performance too.

Typically, a rich and flowing guest experience data set is a very helpful proxy for future sales forecasting and performance. If there is strong momentum building behind the guest experience and a rising NPS score, we would expect sales growth to follow, as it’s shown on the whitepaper.

Therefore, while straight sales data tells you what happened, guest experience data can help you predict the future.

React, respond, recover

Many hospitality operators will emerge from Covid-19 with their brands and businesses available in more places and spaces than ever before. For anyone charged with being a hospitality brand custodian, there are more guest touchpoints to stay across and manage than ever before, and the prospect and complexity can perhaps seem overwhelming.

An important aspect of the Yumpingo platform is the ability to collate, pull and present a powerful 360-customer view, at every touchpoint, into one guest experience dashboard. A string of integrations with businesses including Airship, Comtrex, Facebook, Google, Omnivore, OrderPay, Tipjar, Toggle, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Vita Mojo, Wireless Social, and Zonal means that the ecosystem is vast and ever-expanding.

It means that the guest experience in-venue is captured alongside social media sentiment, online reviews, through any digital channels such as website booking journeys, the brand experience via the aggregators and third-party delivery brands, and so on. As well as in-venue experiences insights can be collected across any service style including click and collect, grab and go, delivery and retail.

Yumpingo is on a mission to transform guest experience knowledge-sharing in hospitality from anecdotal, extreme, divisive, and slow to land, to something that is insight-based, instantaneous, and transformational: a management tool that helps everyone in a multi-site hospitality environment to perform and excel, to yield more happy guests, and ultimately, higher sales and site contribution.

“Yumpingo has enabled everyone in our business, across all departments, to be able to continually improve our offering and our service through the eyes of our guests. Since rolling out Yumpingo our NPS has been steadily increasing and is now 14 points higher; which means 11% more happy guests! We’ve also seen our online reputation scores climbing from 4.3 to an excellent 4.7 stars. And we have seen a direct link between NPS and sales growth. Yumpingo has helped give us the confidence to make changes to our guest journey, our menus, our training and get a genuine feel for what our guests think of those changes. It ensures that our commitment to deliver genuine ‘Southern Hospitality’, to all of our guests, is permanently under scrutiny.”

John Welsh – Managing Director – Hickory’s Smokehouse

To find out how to transition your brand into a data-driven, customer-centric business, download a free copy of the whitepaper by clicking here or get in touch with our experienced experts to find out how to start driving more happy guests across every shift, every single day.