A Compelling Call for Data Integration in Hospitality

The hospitality industry is centered around a single pursuit—an exceptional customer experience. Guest-centricity, customer satisfaction, and long-term loyalty start with strong, data-driven strategies that integrate information from varying touchpoints, including online reservations, mobile apps, loyalty programs, and social media interactions.

Today, consumers have come to expect a personalized experience. In fact, 81% of consumers want the brands they interact with to know who they are and what they prefer. What’s more, 95% of customer experiences will be powered by artificial intelligence by 2025. Brands in the hospitality sector are seeking new technologies and data-driven solutions to keep current with changing consumer expectations and provide exemplary guest experiences. 

However, using multiple solutions can create disparate data silos, segmentation, and other issues, including: 

• Outdated customer information
• Duplicate or inconsistent guest records
• Challenges with personalization efforts, loyalty programs, and more

How does your hospitality brand overcome these solutions? Discover tested methods to integrate disparate data sources, specific to the hospitality sector.

1. Employ Machine Learning Tools for Identity Resolution

Identity resolution between data sources can become a tangled web without a bridge to bring all this information together in real time. Leverage AI-powered machine learning tools to eliminate these data silos, keep data current, and strengthen the power of your brand’s customer identity profiles.

Here’s why: Unifying customer data from multiple sources into a single profile is the first step toward providing highly personalized customer experiences. These machine learning tools can also be useful for streamlining problem resolution, managing customer preferences, and providing individualized recommendations. 

With identity resolution, you can better anticipate a customer’s needs for things like flights, rentals, or bookings based on their existing data across every platform and touchpoint.

See here how harpin AI uses a range of technologies and protocols to assign guests specific PINs and identities to unify data from multiple sources for stronger guest profiles and more robust data.

2. Don’t Forget Back-End Integration

In hospitality, your data isn’t just coming from the front-end or guest experience; it’s coming from your back-of-house operations, too.

These help provide a full, holistic view of how your operations work together, and where you may have the most opportunity for growth including:

• Corporate Performance Management (CPM) for budgeting, forecasting, and accounting.
• Property Management Systems (PMS) for check-ins and check-outs, pricing strategies, and customized guest experiences.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for analyzing guest data and managing marketing and loyalty programs.
• Revenue Management Systems (RMS) to support dynamic pricing based on demand, occupancy, and market rates.
• Point of Sale (POS) Systems for things like room service, spa services, upgrades, and more to track and analyze customer behaviors and preferences.

In short, you can make faster, data-driven business decisions when you combine front- and back-end data integration.

3. Prioritize Data Consistency

In hospitality, consistency is everything—and your data is no different. Inconsistent data can create expensive errors or other inefficiencies that can drive up operating costs or negatively affect the guest experience. Consistent data (and a consistent user experience), on the other hand, makes the lives of your guests simpler; it makes booking with your brand the easier, most logical choice.

Prioritize data integrity, accuracy, and consistency across every platform, but especially for the factors that can have the biggest impact on the hospitality experience like:

• Guest information
• Inventory data
• Financial data

When you provide a consistent experience across each touchpoint, you reinforce your brand and the promise you make to your guests. Data consistency can even improve or reinforce your reputation and bolster guest loyalty over time.

4. Make the Most of Every Customer Interaction

Loyalty programs are a must-have in the hospitality industry. In fact, 44% of today’s consumers report that loyalty programs have a huge influence on which hotel they select.

Here’s the problem: Siloed loyalty programs without strong data integration leave customer engagement opportunities on the table. Without AI-powered integration, meaningful tools like social media engagement, in-person interactions, and other customer interactions that lie outside a loyalty program often go untracked.

By integrating data across all these platforms and systems, hospitality brands can expand their reach and convert and delight more guests. You can make the most of your marketing strategies and improve your ROI with better personalization.

5. Protect Data Quality 

With data coming from many sources, interactions, and solutions, there may be anomalies or redundancies that impact the guest experience. 

How do you address this issue? Look for a data integration solution that indexes and monitors data to spot and resolve these data quality issues. This protects the integrity of your data and the guest experience, ensuring your customers keep coming back.

Consider solutions that provide continuous monitoring and error detection to alert you to potential problems. 

harpin AI alerts you to any data quality issues via an intuitive dashboard, pinpointing and resolving the source of the anomaly with automated data repair tools.

6. Include Data Management

As your brand continues to grow and evolve and you bring on more solutions and data sources to power your operations, so, too will your data management needs. 

Where does all this data go? Choose a data integration strategy with built-in data management support, one that also:

• Preserves historical operational and guest data, including data from legacy systems
• Prevents business disruptions that may lead to guest dissatisfaction and customer churn

Data management may not seem like an obvious component of exceptional hospitality. But by choosing an integration tool with strong data management support, you can limit downtimes and maintain access to all the information you need to provide reliable, personalized guest experiences—and what could be more hospitable than that? 

7. Establish Rapid Response Tools & Protocols

If any data integration breakdowns occur, are you ready? Your IT team should be notified immediately. 

When things go wrong, your rapid response tools and procedures should include considerations for:

• How you communicate and resolve any front-facing issues with guests to limit frustrations and protect customer trust
• Continuous updates regarding the status of the breakdown and repair

Issues like these highlight why data management is essential—solutions like harpin AI reduce operational costs and help prevent these interruptions and limit any subsequent impact on the guest experience.

8. Think Scalable…

As you consider data integration, consider the fact that you will probably need to scale up your integration solutions as you incorporate additional technologies.

For example, some hotel groups are employing AI-based concierge services for some guest queries—reducing calls to the concierge desk by 35%, giving their team more time for the more hands-on aspects of the guest experience.

Data integration should scale with your operations, especially as you incorporate new technologies, properties, or services. 

9. …And Think Secure

Regardless of where your brand lies in the hospitality sphere, you handle all kinds of sensitive customer and brand data that requires robust security measures. This includes data cybercriminals seek out, such as: 

• Personal guest information
• Financial data
• Proprietary brand information

You should always take steps to ensure your systems and all patches are updated, your security solutions are robust, and that you comply with data privacy and security standards—and that any integration solutions and strategies you employ also prioritize security. This is essential to maintaining trust with your customers and guests and keeping them coming back.

harpin AI helps protect your brand reputation, avoid compliance fines, and resolve PII issues quickly and efficiently.

10. Choose an Integration Solution Equipped with a Full Stock of APIs 

Integrating data from multiple sources should make your work better—and easier. However, coding to connect one solution to another is time-consuming and tenuous.

Opt for a low-code deployment strategy by going for an integration solution that comes with a full stack of pre-existing API connectors.

harpin AI understands that data integration should work for you, not the other way around. This is why our solution is loaded with thousands of pre-build API connectors, to provide you with seamless, reliable integration from Day 1.

Elevate Your Guest Experience

In the world of hospitality, your sole focus is the customer experience. At harpin AI, we share this same focused commitment to the customer experience. We concentrate our expertise on one thing: Integrating customer identity data, all so you can do more with it.

Because we have made integrating identity data with ease our singular mission, harpin AI is singularly positioned to support those in the hospitality industry who value an exceptional, modern guest experience. With harpin AI, you’ll start experiencing the benefits right away—things like cleaner data, which can boost your ROI by 40%.

Discover for yourself what a fully-integrated customer identity data solution can do for you. 100% of our harpin AI partners see results within 3 weeks. Want to see firsthand how we’ll take your guest data to new heights? Book a demo today!