Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #288: Hotel Technology that Makes Your Staff More Effective | with Ryan King
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #288: Hotel Technology that Makes Your Staff More Effective | with Ryan King === David Millili: Welcome to a special HITEC episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Make sure to follow, like and subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, we have on Ryan King, the SVP of Americas from Shiji, and we're coming to you from the Shiji Cafe and Marketplace right outside the trade show floor. How you doing today, Ryan? Ryan King: Pretty good. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Steve Carran: Absolutely. So Ryan, I know this isn't your first HITEC. How many HITECs have you been to? Ryan King: I'm not sure I can go back and count how many. I can tell you that the first HITEC I ever went to was in 20- 2012. Now, to every one through subsequent, but that was my first one. Steve Carran: You're probably in the double digits. Ryan King: Yeah. Steve Carran: Probably around there. David Millili: You haven't been to back to back, but what makes you keep coming back to HITEC? Ryan King: You know, it's a great place to connect with customers and new prospects alike that are really looking to use technology to help move their business forward. Recently everybody's been talking a lot about the guest experience, so that seems to be the focus right now. What can we do to improve that guest experience? It's really the center of everything that most of the conversations have come around. Steve Carran: Yeah, I agree. And it feels like hospitality has invested on technology, but the service side is lacking a little bit, and it feels a little bit more fragmented with some siloed technology. What do you think the industry got wrong, and is it time to rethink the model? Ryan King: I think we rushed a lot of things into help staff because we had shorting prob- shortage of staff problems, so we rushed in solutions to help. But to your point, they were fragmented. There wasn't a lot of buy-in. The actual property teams that were supposed to use them didn't necessarily know how to execute them well, and nobody really had this master vision, so you ended up with disparate systems that are doing one thing. So a bar might be doing something, but housekeeping's doing another thing. The front desk is doing something else, and they don't connect that whole experience. And where I think that's most observed is when you have a, when you have a hotel that has rushed some of these things forward, 'cause they sounded good, and they're using them, but they keep sitting there going, "We keep getting bad reviews, and yet we've invested," to your point, "We invested in technology to help us, but now it's hampering." It's not actually coming together for a cohesive plan. David Millili: Mews suggests hospitality should happen wherever the guest is and not at the fixed touch points. What actually changes operationally inside a hotel when you start designing around that idea? Ryan King: The idea behind Move is really getting the guest experience more engaged. For the longest time, when you had to check in, it was a very transactional experience. There is a piece of furniture between me and you, and I couldn't, you know, couldn't interact with you. I didn't want to interact with you. I'm just there to put my head down and say, "Are you checking in?" With modern technology, we're promoting this idea that you can meet the guest where they are. Why not meet people as they're walking in? Turn this into a magical moment. So with modern technology, you can run things on tablets. So that's not just about the front desk, it's also about in other parts of the hotel, so in the restaurant, in the bar, in the spa, especially where we've seen resorts. We're seeing more food and beverage upsell opportunities happening and greater revenue increases with the same amount of staff. So happier guest, happier staff, because they're getting tipped more, happier comments equals happier hotel, happier owner. And that's really the concept of Move. Let's put the technology in the hands of the people. And if I take that pool episode, we have a customer that has a massive pool deck. Well, they used to walk around and they'd ask for people's orders. It would take five minutes to get all the orders. Then they would walk another five minutes back somewhere into a corner to go get to a station to put the order in, and then they would hang out back there waiting for the order, and then they would walk back out. Now they're just putting it in. They actually put a runner that will bring those out while the person keeps walking around getting more drink orders, and the runner and the person's going those two chairs over there, and they're just seeing the speed of service has increased so much. That's a little thing, but each of these little things start adding up. We have another customer who did a really great job of what I think is implementing Move around the front desk. Lines started forming. They had somebody come out of the side with a tablet, went to the line, and start saying, "Oh, are you checking in? Let me go ahead. I'll run you in." Yeah. And it's that moment that you change someone's perception. Service nowadays is about small moments of magic. Right. And where you can provide those touches, you can actually make a new loyal guest, and that's really how technology should work. It's in the background. It shouldn't be like it's front and center, but it's enabling the guest experience to become more magical. So that's the whole purpose around Move is let's make your staff more effective. Steve Carran: Very smart. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can't be effective with silo technology. This is true. And there are so many hotels that are operating with disconnected systems, whether it's a PMS, POS, payments, and that affects the guest experience. What do you think the consequences of operating a hotel with fragmented technology, and what can we do to fix it? Ryan King: Well, we still see it all the time. You know, everybody's talking about cloud, cloud, cloud, but you still have a lot of people running on-premise applications. On-premise applications don't communicate well. They silo information that they have, and it makes it difficult to get that information out, especially when you start talking about the property hub, whether that is the property management system you're using or the point-of-sale or even the spa system. Whenever you have all that stuff siloed, you can't understand what's going on for the total guest experience. Maybe the front desk is okay because they knew something here was happening, but actually they didn't know that that guest had a reservation in the restaurant, so they're not saying anything about it. They're not greeting that person. Where hoteliers have to go is they need to look at how they bring the information together, and that really is this move to the cloud. We all talk about it. A lot has, I would say, happened in the last two years, and some of that is the fact that the cloud providers are getting better at what we're able to do. One of the things that I think we've mastered in the last couple years is an easier change. It was always like this heart-wrenching, oh, God, I have to change these operational systems. Like, that's gonna put a lot of stress on it. So we've gotten that down into a little bit of a science to say here's what we think you need to do. Here's how we'll execute this. This is what your team's gonna see. And when we bring that to a property and they actually digest it and we get the buy-in from the staff, not just the IT people, but from the staff, we find the adoption just happens like that. And those magical hospitality moments are actually owned by those teams that want to adopt this. So really, you have to get consensus built at a property when you make change like this. When you bring it all together in the cloud and you have the different systems talking to each other, that's when those moments of magic hospitality happen. And you've got to start connecting these data silos. If you don't, you're gonna get left behind. Steve Carran: 100%, 100%. And with AI, data is so much more important these days to have not only data, but clean data. Ryan King: The way that the LLMs are looking at how they recommend a hotel to stay at is they're looking through a lot of what the guest experience comments are right now. Yeah. So if you aren't getting people to say good things about you, all of your Google AdWords and all of your SEO is gonna get left behind because you're not. My sister's a great example. She had a whole conversation with ChatGPT about her visit coming to Mexico City, where she should stay, why she should stay there. Well, what type of beds do they have? Well, why is that a nicer walk to the Starbucks? So it's that type of behavior that we're seeing from consumers that is gonna make it more important that hotels have a handle on who they know their guest is, how they're making the stay better, and what they're doing to get the guests saying good things about them so that that's picked up in the conversations. David Millili: Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So as technology expectations continue to evolve, what do you think hotel technology leaders need to prioritize over the next five years to remain competitive? Ryan King: Oh, gosh. There's so many competing priorities right now, and we're talking about AI, and it's such a buzzword. I think it's one of those things you have to think, what is going to help move the needle? What is gonna make a difference? AI by itself is not gonna move the needle. But purposely and thoughtfully placed moments of development will help. What we're doing with AI is really trying to think about how does it help orchestrate something in a property? How does it make somebody's life easier? How does it make the technology more flexible? So I won't go into a few things because we aren't ready to launch them yet, but we presented a couple stuff last week to a new prospect, and they were blown away. They said, "This is gonna change how we can do everything on property." So that's the type of thing we're trying to look at and say, how do we keep ahead? And as I said earlier, it's not just about the technology because while we're ahead right now of ... And I ... Not to sound boastful, we've been told by others we're slightly ahead in where we are with the tech, but it's how we're delivering it. And we think that's what's gonna separate us because we're investing in people. We really launched our customer success team here in the Americas this year, and we're doubling down on it. We're hiring up more people to take care of the current customers. Not to be support, we've got good support, but it's to sit there and visit with the customer, say, "What are you struggling about? What do you want to do? How do we hear from you that you want us to do something? But also, how are you adopting the system?" Hotels have turnover. What can we do to help with that turnover? What can we do to help make sure the tools we gave you you're able to use? You know how to actually turn that piece of technology into something that's gonna help make you money. Steve Carran: Man, I think more tech companies need to listen to their customers like you guys are doing. Absolutely. The feedback you're getting I'm sure is incredible. So you've talked about hospitality beyond the counter. If I walk into a hotel five years from now that's fully adopted that model, what does that look like for not only the staff but also the guests? Ryan King: I think a lot of what's gonna happen is how you're meeting the guests. And different people want different things. When I'm on a business trip, you know what I want? I want very little interaction with staff. I wanna be able to check in on my phone. I wanna be able to order something on my phone. I wanna do all those things. When I'm on vacation, I want interaction with people. I'm now spending my own hard-earned dollars, and I'm nowhere to be, and I want to find other things out. So where I see things in five years is hotels that adopt things well will be able to enhance that experience touchpoint when people want it, but give them the option to be able to help themselves where they want to. That's, I think, the evolution of where good tech and great service are gonna intersect. Because in hospitality, no matter what you do, the basis of where we are in hotels, it's a guest-facing experience. There will be some places that try to go all automated. When you look at certain sectors of the industry, and I think of a customer we're working with right now, their business is extended stay. They're very mid-scale. All of their hotels are pretty much the same. But what they're finding is the guests wanna be able to come and go. But when they need something, they wanna be able to get an immediate response, and they wanna do it on their phone. They don't wanna pick up a phone and talk to an operator. They wanna be able to text somebody and say, "I want three towels." And then somehow the hotel has to figure out how to execute that in a very timely and quick manner. Right now we still have a little bit of that. I've done it with a couple of the brands where I've said, "Can I get this?" And 30 minutes later I'm calling and saying, "Hey, I messaged you guys on your app, and can I get a blanket up here?" And they're like, "Oh, sure." Okay. So having that execution become flawless, whether it's in person or whether it's through a technology means, will be the evolution. That's where I see really the magic that will come back to hospitality. The bar keeps getting raised up. Guests are gonna expect something. In five years we don't even know what the expectation is quite yet. It could be that we read the minds, and when you walk in the room the lights dim to what you're thinking, and the heat comes on, and the curtains open. There's gonna be wow moments, but there's gonna be the little bits of guest interaction along the way. David Millili: So what's next for Shiji? Ryan King: What's next? Right now we've really been focusing on shifting our development organization into an AI mindset. But it's not how can we rush things with AI in, it's about purposeful and thoughtful ways that we can enhance how a hotel operates. So we're listening to our customers a lot. We're hearing where their frustrations are with technology, and it's really the inflexibility of things. Like going to a big system that has a whole bunch of options and sitting there and saying, "Well, that's not really how I wanted to do this, and you're forcing me to make an SOP this way." It's more about, "This is how I want to do things. How can you help me do that?" So our development teams, we're actually re-interviewing, let's call it, to put certain people into key roles to go back and make sure that we're rethinking how the tech goes. On the other side, it really is doubling down on the understanding of what our customers want from us because while we're providing them good tech, like I just said, we're also finding that they need help on the execution. We talked a little bit earlier about they bought a bunch of stuff a couple years ago, and they aren't really using it. We're seeing that right now with a lot of hotels, and that's why the customer success team has become such a front portion of what Shiji is doing because we're going in more like a consultant. So we're a partner. We're gonna go in and help you. Sometimes it's not even really our solution. It's saying, "How are you guys doing this?" Right. And that's where I think things will evolve. We've really tried to figure out what is gonna benefit the operator, but how is the operator gonna say that to the owner? So many of our customers now are like, "I gotta justify this to my owner." Okay. And we've now been doing this for a couple years. I think where we'll be in another year is being able to show an owner why you're doing this. How is this increasing the value of your asset? How is this bringing you better profitability? And how is this bringing you actual value to what you've done in bringing the different pieces of the building together? David Millili: Yeah. Oh, well said. Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Ryan, this is where you get to let people know how they can get in touch with you. How can they find out more about Shiji? Ryan King: Absolutely. Shijigroup.com, you can go there. You can always reach me at ryan.king@shijigroup.com. And we're here at Booth 434 with HITEC, and stop on by, and you can learn a little bit more about what we're doing to help others. David Millili: Well, that does it for this special HITEC Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. So whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thank you, Ryan. Ryan King: Thanks.