Jeff Zidell, Senior Vice President of Hyatt Gold Passport, discussed the company’s guest loyalty program and company culture with Loyalty360 CEO and CMO Mark Johnson. Hyatt offers two elite tiers in their Gold Passport program where members enjoy exclusive worldwide benefits towards stays, flights, and upgrades.
How does Hyatt define customer loyalty?
Zidell: Hyatt doesn’t like using the word “program” because it diminishes what they’re all about. Hyatt is moving toward the loyalty experience. Program is something that’s well defined and well, programmatic. Loyalty is bigger than that. Loyalty is more than a program; it’s customer advocacy. Why do you choose this brand? Not because they give you something that’s prescribed. What are the intangibles? It’s how do they make you feel? Why would you choose it based on reasons that aren’t necessarily rational? The reasons aren’t on a chart of benefits. The ultimate goal, the Holy Grail, is how do you create irrational loyalty−true customer advocacy? You want customers who believe in your brand beyond what you deliver to them day in and day out. Customers who believe in the promise of what you stand for. That’s bigger than hotel x.
Do you benchmark your loyalty success against peers in your industry or experiential leaders? What is the challenge in measuring your program’s efficacy?
Zidell: We certainly look at our direct competitors. Customers have many choices when they want to choose a hotel. We look at the standard and what our nontraditional competitors are doing. We look at Airbnb, and HomeAway and Uber—companies that are in the travel business, but not in a traditional sense. We look at their customer satisfaction score, their engagement metric and their customer advocacy. We understand how it is different or similar to ours. We also look at people who aren’t competitors like Zappos, or Nordstrom or Apple and we ask: “What are they doing in terms of customer service or design? Or online or via mobile apps?” There are all kinds of companies you need to look at. If you narrow yourself just into your own space you’ll be talking to yourself—and that’s not a good place to be. We also take inspiration from companies like Whole Foods and Starbucks—companies that are doing really interesting things around mission-lead and purpose-driven initiatives about creating a community and a movement that is bigger than just what they stand for. We take a lot of inspiration from traditional competitors and probably more inspiration from the nontraditional set of people who are in our space and outside our space.
How do you see the challenge of listening and engaging your customers?
Zidell: We have the advantage of having customers enter our hotels day in and day out. We have employed a lot of new techniques to ensure that we are engaging with them and being very empathetic with them, and listening and understanding the cues on how that customer wants to be treated. There’s going to be one customer who enters our hotel and he’s going to want very little interaction, very little with the front desk and just to get to his room. There’s another customer who may want to engage in a chat. He wants to know the local areas that he should explore. A big piece of our business is understanding how you read customers and give them service in real time based on who they are. They may be one person one day and another person another day. You’ve got to understand how you treat each person differently. You’ve got to be able to read them and deliver accordingly. We’re not perfect at it...but we create an experience that’s better.
How do you affect your customer’s experience?
Zidell: We’re in a service business. Service is based on the quality of the people that we hire and how we embrace them internally. The onus is upon us to treat our people just the way we want them to treat our guests. We have to provide a spirit and a culture of care and generosity, and sincerity and empathy internally. Our associates around the world feel good about coming to work and feel that we uphold and help them be their best, so that they can embrace those same principles externally. That’s just who we are.
If we’re treating all those people with respect and care−employee engagement is very important to us, we measure and we track it−we believe that there’s a link between how we treat our people internally and how they treat our customers.
How do you create a unique experience for each guest?
Zidell: Each of our hotels is in a location that reflects the uniqueness of that location. You want to make those experiences alive. Odds are you are going to spend more time at a hotel than a lot of other interactions in other industries. We reflect the localness of the experience. That makes it more memorable. A business traveler might be all about efficiency and efficacy—be quick, be easy and I’m gone. A leisure traveler wants the best hole-in-the-wall restaurant or what’s the undiscovered find. Customers ask: “How can you give me something that I can take back that’s new, different, something that I can remember?”
What’s the biggest challenge that Hyatt faces?
Zidell: One of the things we’re challenged with is how do you differentiate each of your brands? We have nine brands now from flex service to luxury service. How do you clearly define each of those brands and who their target market is? How do you bring each of those experiences to life so that what a customer expects at a Hyatt Place verses a Park Hyatt is very different? We need to do a better job to evolve our brands to make sure that they’re all clear differentiators for each of those experiences. There might be an occasion when a customer wants to stay at Hyatt Place but there are also occasions when a customer wants to stay at a Park Hyatt. Brand differentiation –not only verses our competitors—but internally is a big opportunity for us moving forward.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.