Talking CX: A fresh look at Hospitality and CX
Hospitality leaders are renowned for being time-poor and needing to always oversee many moving parts within their establishments.
We spoke with insight6 specialist Chris Cartledge to explore how he uses diverse customer experience (CX) strategies to help hospitality business leaders.
What drew you to insight6 and the CX business ownership?
Having gained experience in various customer-centric roles in the hospitality sector, I was eager to apply my skills in a broader context, particularly in a setting where I could work for myself.
What’s the key to delivering excellent CX for a business?
Delivering an excellent customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business. While multiple factors contribute to an excellent CX, understanding and empathising with the customer’s needs and expectations is the most important. Once you know your customers’ needs, you can tweak your services, communication, and interactions to resonate with them, foster loyalty, and enhance their overall customer journey.
What tips can you share regarding enhancing the Customer Experience within the Hospitality sector?
When working with leaders in the Hospitality industry, I start by looking at these three areas:
1. Identifying and Prioritising Customer Experience Opportunities
Hospitality leaders often need help improving customer experience with their busy schedules and competing priorities. It takes time and effort to uncover the root causes of issues and understand guest needs. Even when problems are identified, deciding which opportunities to tackle and allocating resources is crucial. Enhancing customer service often requires integrating information from various departments or even third-party services.
2. Collecting Customer Experience Feedback
Gathering and analysing customer feedback is crucial for understanding guests’ satisfaction with your services, products, and overall interactions. This feedback provides valuable opportunities to enhance services, address dips in satisfaction, boost retention rates, and gather data that can inform your decisions.
3. Addressing Lack of Personalisation
Poor personalisation can lead to higher customer churn. Two-thirds of customers expect businesses to recognise them as individuals and understand their interests. Providing personalised experiences can be challenging, requiring interacting with customers across their preferred channels and consolidating data from various sources.
Can you share an example of a company that has impressed you with its CX capabilities?
A few names spring to mind: Amazon, John Lewis, and First Direct have all built impressive CX reputations. The common theme is the ease with which they allow their customers to purchase and, significantly, change their minds on those purchases whilst communicating clearly across all touchpoints. Empowering and training employees to deliver an excellent customer experience has created happy customers who stand out as field leaders.
Could you tell us about a bad customer experience you’ve had?
One that springs to mind is a sofa purchase that resulted in us sitting on garden furniture for six weeks! Trying to navigate a move back to the UK as the country was managing the complexities of lockdown, I purchased this particular sofa because the company had assured me they could deliver it in time for our move and before the lockdown. Unfortunately, on the day of delivery, no sofa showed up, and there was no update from the company. After several phone calls, I could not locate the sofa we purchased. This continued for several days and ended with no sofa or refund as the country went into lockdown.
Understandably, these were unprecedented times, but the communication that ensued over the next six weeks was poor. The company refused to refund or confirm when we would receive the sofa. There was little empathy and understanding and no follow-through to try and help the situation.
About the author:
Chris Cartledge is an insight6 CX Specialist based in Ireland. Please feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.
Professional background: Chris joined our team in 2024, having spent over 22 years in highly customer-focused roles across the UK, EU, and India with global brands like Shell, Yorkshire Tea, Papa John’s, Subway, and Jamie Oliver. His previous role before joining Insight6 was Operations Director for a Hotel and country, destination-led Pub operator.
At insight6, our unique and tailored solutions allow businesses to transform their customer experience cost-effectively, from end to end, with the dedicated support of a local specialist. To find your local Specialist to transform your customer experience, call +44 (0) 800 970 8987 or visit www.insight6.com.