CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Communication and aligning goals are the keys to success at hotel contact centers, according to experts who work in that booking channel. Communication hasn't always been a priority, but hoteliers say booking success depends on how dialed-in contact centers are with overall sales strategy.
During the "Maximizing Your Contact Center Channel" session at the HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference, Adam Hayashi, vice president of revenue, distribution and business intelligence in North and Central America for Accor's Fairmont Hotels & Resorts brand, said his company took a long look at how it deployed its contact center during the COVID-19 pandemic and found it wasn't talking enough with contact center employees.
"We had all these commercial activities and actions that we were putting in place, but we weren't actually communicating to the people internally who were selling our product," he said.
Now, the revenue team has monthly calls with the contact center to discuss strategies and trends, along with upcoming promotions.
Crystal Daigle, director of operations for Accor's global reservations center, said it's vital from the call center side to know when promotions and campaigns are coming.
They are what "makes our phones ring," she said. "So it's very important. We take our monthly calls very seriously."
Jenna Villalobos, senior vice president of commercial strategy for Outrigger Hospitality Group, said it's important that communication goes two ways because hotel companies can often get valuable insights from contact center employees.
"The hosts who are answering the calls are the closest to our customers," she said. "They can hear their emotion. They can hear what the customers are asking for. So when we have something happen in the market or we're dropping a promotion or we have a new web product, the first thing we do is work with the call center hosts."
Anita Travis, vice president of the global contact center for Outrigger, said her team has weekly calls with "key revenue leaders" to align on strategy.
"It's important for us to understand what the strategy is so we can cascade that down so agents not only know what's in it for them as far as what we're trying to accomplish but also the 'why' of what they're doing with a specific campaign or promotion," she said.
Panelists acknowledged contact center employees have difficult jobs that require a high level of customer service skill — often taking dozens of calls a day that require a consistent, high level of energy.
Because of that, they acknowledged it's important to make sure contact center employees are properly compensated for doing their jobs and making sure incentives line up with strategy and goals.
Villalobos said Outrigger's contact centers are judged on various metrics, including average speed to answer, revenue per call and conversion rates, but it's important to keep key performance metrics properly targeted.
"I have seen KPIs go awry when they're too abstract or they're too hard to measure or they don't honor the profitability of the business," she said. "It's best to keep it simple and to make sure it's in alignment with the overall enterprise goals."
Travis said it comes down to making sure you know how to "prioritize profitable calls."
Getting things right for the contact centers can be especially important for revenue and distribution teams because the channel is still the highest average rate, Hayashi said.
Daigle said getting the right sales incentive in place is a continual challenge, but it's vital that employees are rewarded in a way that's simple, clear and timely.
"Sometimes we get so caught up in the numbers that we just make it so difficult for them to understand the incentives, so they don't engage and they're not bought in," she said.
That includes giving contact center employees monetary rewards for upselling to premium rooms or driving demand to specific properties in need of it.
"The great thing about having a really good relationship with the hotels, as well with a revenue-management team, is sometimes they come up with ideas ... that are in fact a meaningful and measurable and achievable incentive," she said.
The hotel industry is currently struggling to keep up in compensating the most successful contact center agents relative to other career paths, Villalobos said.
"One thing we've done is basically we want to pay you for what you sell, so we've put a lot more emphasis on if you reach certain thresholds, we're going to pay you more," she said. "And it's hard when there's fast food chains paying $17 to $19 an hour. That's unfortunately the starting wage for a lot of our distribution posts. The other thing that I always struggle with is — no disrepsect to sales or social media managers — but we have agents that sell more than some sales managers. ... So I think we need to think about how we incentivize, how we compensate revenue sales agents because it's getting harder and harder."