At Hyatt, we believe that we are in more than the hotel business. We are in the business of caring for people so they can be their best. Our 24/7 social care efforts are a natural extension of our purpose, providing opportunities to continue building long-term relationships with existing and potential guests and to improve their experiences.
Our social care team uses social technologies simply as additional channels to not only provide functional customer support but to have real-time, meaningful conversations with our guests on a deeper, more emotional level. We treat each conversation uniquely, through the lens of our brands and of care. This means that our agents are taking the time to identify the needs and desires of our guests and taking action to exceed their expectations.
To optimize our social care efforts, we measure: guest satisfaction, brand awareness, and loyalty. Our philosophy is customer first, and by doing this, we will achieve our ultimate business goal, which is to be the most preferred hospitality brand – loved and respected by all.
It has long been clear that our guests are talking to us, and about us, online. Our strategy is to foster and enhance these conversations to drive business value for our company. We use social channels to create more personalized experiences for our guests, and by doing so, we improve their experiences both inside and outside Hyatt hotel walls.
One of the primary differentiators about the Hyatt social care approach is that we prioritize positive conversations equally with conversations about service recovery. Responding to comments with all sentiment (positive, neutral and negative) – and beyond comments that specifically tag or mention Hyatt social channels – enables our social care efforts to move beyond issue resolution & helps us care for people as individuals so they can be their best. We execute this through engaging conversations, more personalized experiences, & often highly customized surprise and delights.
For example, we delivered a 'man care' basket to a guest's room because he uploaded a picture of an ultrasound of his unborn child to Instagram. The caption read "Having a great time at the hotel, but really missing not being with my wife today after she sent me this…" Our team contacted the hotel & the hotel sent him four different types of bacon, four different craft beers, a voucher to watch a movie & a hand written congratulations card from the team at the hotel. The guest was over-the-moon and immediately shared on social & review sites!
Another guest tweeted her view while relaxing at one of our rooftop pools. It was a picture of her feet resting on the sunbed, with the pool beyond her feet & a view of the city beyond that. Her caption said "The only thing that is missing is a cocktail" – within 15 minutes she had a cocktail in her hand, all through the real-time action of our social care team!
Another key driver to our success is the strong integration with our operational colleagues, procedures, & CRM systems to make sure that we can translate what we hear from guests on social channels to driving an impact on their experience. This allows us to have cross-channel, highly relevant conversations with guests regarding requests or preferences when staying with one of the nearly 600 Hyatt hotels and resorts worldwide.
Caring for people is an everyday commitment, and so we believe that this social care effort needs to be 24x7x365. In the same way that Hyatt hotels always have staff available to guests, our approach to social needs to be always on.
Both Facebook & Twitter have recognized our leadership position in this space, and have both actively worked with us on social customer service beta efforts this year. We were one of the first brands to launch integration with Facebook's Messenger platform, and were one of the first brands to test out some of Twitter's new customer service features as well.
Our results have far exceeded our expectations and show Hyatt has a leadership role in caring for people so they can be their best.
Hyatt is consistently recognized for its proactive, human approach to social care, including recent awards for social customer service from Skift and Travel + Leisure.
According to a report by travel industry publication Skift, Hyatt has the fastest social response time of any major hospitality brand on Twitter at approximately 8 minutes. We're also proud that Hyatt responds to significantly more tweets than our major competitors. Looking at our profile on Twitter, @HyattConcierge has sent more than 227,000 tweets since the account's creation. Top competitors in the industry have sent less than a quarter of that amount.
In the past two years, our proactive, human approach to social care has led to a growth of Hyatt social conversations with travelers by over 40% year-over-year.
Anecdotally, we continue to hear numerous stories from guests who chose to stay with us because of @HyattConcierge.
