Insights
The power of personalized guest experiences in the gaming and hospitality industry
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by Erica Skelly and Carrie Moeller
8/17/23
What makes an experience memorable? The convenience? The value? The thrill?
In the gaming and hospitality industry, it’s all of the above.
To deliver on that memorable experience, the puzzle pieces need to fall into place and the pieces look different for everyone. How can a brand impact someone’s individual journey to ensure their experience is the best it can be?
The answer: Personalization.
By now, we all know that personalization in any industry is imperative. Seventy-one percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. (McKinsey)
For the fast-growing hospitality and gaming industry, personalization is more crucial than ever. With the growth, guests now have an abundance of options to choose from, which means the industry has to be centered around service and ensuring the customer has all of their needs anticipated and met throughout their experience.
Connected guest experiences, a sure bet
Consider a guest, and the number of touchpoints they encounter during one visit with a gaming and hospitality brand. There’s research, planning, booking, travel (potentially), pre-check in, check-in, on-premises experiences (including active play, dining, entertainment, hotel, other amenities), check-out and survey follow ups – just to name a few.
With each guest’s journey being made up of different pathways, this can get complicated quickly. But with the right balance of data and technology working together your brand is able to share relevant messaging and pathways to align with their needs.
Personalization’s core definition is delivering the right message at the right time and in the right place (or channel). So, utilizing it to determine the next best action in a Hospitality or Gaming customer’s journey delivers on that memorable experience.
Better customer experience outcomes result in increases across key business conversions driving overall growth for the brand, in fact, companies that grow faster drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. (McKinsey) Service activities connected to personalization can drive convenience, ease of use and loyalty for the customer. Being able to surprise and delight customers with new experience recommendations, discounts and offers is just as beneficial to your customers as it is to your business. Below are just a few ways personalization can impact the gaming and hospitality industry:
- Increased guest satisfaction due to ease of use across digital and physical engagement touchpoints
- Increased revenue from bolstered conversion rates on owned channels such as hotel bookings, entertainment options, gaming, etc.
- Increased customer loyalty driven by relevant messaging for amenities, games, discounts, etc.
- Gaining deeper insights from customer experience performance metrics
- Unifying siloed backend teams into one enterprise customer experience
These benefits showcase how mutually beneficial a personalization strategy can be. Knowledge of the customer through key data points can truly balloon your business growth if configured to do so within your current tech stack.
Within gaming specifically, relying on a gamer’s inputs, game play habits and preferences can greatly improve their experience and lead to greater loyalty when utilized for rewards, populating key art as well as knowing what type of gamer they are. How do they play? What do they play? How long do they play? When do they play?
These could all be inputs to specific personalization use cases, for example if a gamer plays an average of 30 minutes but is incentivized by additional rewards, 1UPS, etc. Utilize this data input to create a use case that delivers a reward approximately 30 minutes into game play to extend their engagement duration driving more conversions, revenue and increased retention.
The opportunities are as endless as the data points your brand captures.
This is similar in hospitality, where there is a great opportunity to utilize real time triggers populating real time messaging while they are “on premise" with the brand.
As an example, we could use the check in touchpoint. A guest checks into their hotel (either in person or digitally) and they immediately get a notification (email, SMS or mobile push) showcasing their daily menus, entertainment, etc. If the hotel has additional historical customer data on this individual, the message could be focused on a particular amenity they’ve experience during past visits.
Ultimately, what sets businesses in the hospitality and gaming industry apart from the rest are their guest experiences which are driven by personalized, connected experiences throughout their journey. As technology evolves and these experiences become standard across all industries, it’s important to think about how your personalization will evolve and set you apart from your competitors. How do your customers interact with you now? What devices are they using to connect?
Personalization is a moving target and what surprises and delights customers today could soon become their baseline expectation. To avoid diminishing returns, it’s important to map out your personalization roadmap and put the foundational pieces in place to build next-level experiences.
At Horizontal, we are experts in helping our customers create connected experiences. To learn more about the importance of personalization in the gaming and hospitality industry, contact us