We're discussing how to build sustained scale customer
relationships and we're speaking with Sergio Techcera.
He is the Director of Global Operations with the Shiji.
The Shiji provides software solutions to enhance guest
experience and help the hospitality industry with their
servicing needs. In terms of technology around
the guest, how large is the company?
Altogether, there's about 1200 employees at this moment just
outside of China. We have a huge base in China as
well. We have offices all over the
world from Australia to Malaysia to Singapore to three here in
the US and opening a few more over the next few months.
There's a reason behind that. We are global that we try and be
a local company no matter how big we get and you cover a range
of different types of industries and companies within that.
Correct everything from your restaurant, from your restaurant
within the hotel, to your golf and spa to your golf courses.
We literally cover a lot anything that is hospitality
related and has a guest involved.
You're working with high end customers, which means they have
very high end expectations of you.
When you work with demanding guests, you and yourself become
demanding of your providers and your partners.
So it's a chain reaction. We are also demanding as well,
but that kind of it kind of fits into the chain that way.
And so therefore the customer relationship, customer loyalty
aspect must be extremely important to your business.
If you understand your customer's business always
needs, that's half the battle one.
It's so easy to say that, but the execution, especially in the
industry in which you work, hospitality must be so complex.
If you talk hospitality, my computer down is down, means I
have a queue sitting in front of me.
I have 17 people facing me. I have a list of screaming
customers in front of me going, where's my room?
I can't get into my room. So technology needs to be a
little more seamless. It needs to work and it needs to
be reliable. When you think about the
customer life cycle, establishing that relationship,
sustaining that relationship, ensuring loyalty so that the
customer comes back, broadly speaking, what are your
strategies for approaching that life cycle?
We are moving into a different age of technology, the customer
before when it came to hotel solutions, it was very sticky.
Once you've installed something, very hard to get out of it, You
know, training staff, there's a big disruption that happens when
you change technology in a hotel.
It's stressful, there's a lot of change, management involved,
process changes and it's pretty big.
As technology has evolved, this has become a lot easier to
change. People are adapting a lot more
to change, so we've had to change our mindset as well.
It sounds like there's a very significant digital
transformation aspect to this. There is the hospitality
industry went through a huge transformation.
I think it was probably the industry that got impacted the
most With Pandemic, you think about it, everything had to
change and it hated to change pretty quickly.
So everybody was looking for new technologies.
We need to be able to do more remote checkins.
We need to have that distance. But how do you achieve that
without losing the contact to the guest?
It's a key element to this. So technology evolved incredibly
in the last 2-3 years. The demands of what people need
and the competition that's existing at the moment has
forced the hoteliers to rely more on their technology.
It's not just about having a solution to checking the guest.
But it's a solution to understand the guest.
So again, it's another dimension of working closely with
customers, collaborating with customers to really understand
what they need and then of course their ultimate customer
who is the. Guest Exactly.
And that is the best way to achieve something is if you
understand the whole journey and understand the end goal of what
your customer needs, the better you are able to deliver.
What a customer needs. So therefore you have to put
yourself in the mind of both your customer, the hospitality
chain, hotel, whatever it might be, venue as well as their
customer. Correct.
As part of a hospitality service provider, the first thing I do
in the hotel. I'm looking at the room at
everything else. I'm looking how is this
operating? Oh, that's interesting how
you're doing that. Oh, your card works nicely and
it's very strange. And I'm not looking at from a
technology point of view, but I'm looking at it from an
experience point of view and learning and it comes in as a
second nature. I think all everybody that's
come from hospitality, that's probably the first thing that
they do. So I consider that putting
myself as a guest. And understanding, OK, what is
happening now is a trend. And keeping up to date on that,
we need to offer protection, we need to offer Peace of Mind and
we need to offer seamlessness to that experience.
Now let's go back to this notion of customer relationships and
retention and scaling all of this.
Tell us about the technologies that you use to make all that
happen. Although we are a hospitality
service provider, solutions provider, we are still a
company. We still have our needs, our
measurements. We need to understand how our
growth works. We need to understand our
customers habits. We need to understand their
service needs as well. We need to identify trends.
We need to anticipate that there is an issue if we are going to
be a local. Company providing local support
to our customers and providing services to our customers.
We need to have the abilities to 1st identify them of course, but
also understand what are our customers, Who are our
customers, what do they have from us and what do they need.
The more information we have about our customers, the better
we can service. Their needs.
And that goes from everything from the sales, the marketing
process right through to at the end of the day to your finance
needs. Where does Zoho fit into this
landscape you've just been describing?
At the end of the day, we still need to operate as a business
and our demand that is driven from the customers in terms of
partnership and working together with our customers, we expect
the same thing and this is where Zoho fits in.
It's a good partnership that we have.
Have the support and it helps us drive our business really in
terms of from our CRM, our sales teams, our marketing teams,
campaign management helps us convert with the customer
conversion and customer retention in a lot of things end
data. When we did partner up with
Zoho, it was a very natural evolution there coming.
What are the Zoho products that you're using?
We started with people, but it quickly evolved.
We moved quickly into CRM and desk.
We then put campaigns in marketing forms.
We need to understand our data a little bit more.
So we brought in analytics in the process of gathering our CRM
data and now let's compare it with our service data.
But they listen. And it's incredible how their
development and evolution is actually pretty impressive.
I've actually been following Zoho for years and they really
do listen and they really want customer feedback.
They really do care. Let's jump back to these
customer relationships. What are the principles that,
for you, underlie the establishment of these strong,
ongoing relationships? The partnership and relationship
and the way that you communicate, work together and
listen to your customers is key. If you do all those together,
the retention almost. Happens naturally.
Now you've mentioned data several times and you mentioned
that you're a data-driven organization.
Can you tell us about the role of data in all of this as well?
So one of the projects that we currently working on is how do
we use that data, what else can we bring in to it to help our
organization work better. And it's just small things, but
it's great that you have this great sales analysis.
But there are other factors that you need to consider.
Great sales have sold 50 million in there, but then you go and
look at the other side and you go oh, why have we only
installed one customer out of those 50 million.
And then this is where the analysis comes in and if we can
improve that whole journey and if we understand the customer
journey from end to end and not just look at it at sales numbers
and you know support numbers. But look at it as a whole.
That improves our efficiency as an organization, but also a
response how we work. So you're looking at the data to
help guide you through the entire customer journey?
Correct. So the more we have in there,
the better it helps us to understand what that journey is.
It's interesting that in our organization, our journey is
sometimes pretty different, if you think about it.
You are my customer as a golf resort is very different to my
spa customer. The needs are different.
They all want to achieve the same thing in the service of the
guest. The needs, the requirements, the
sales cycle is completely different and the end results
and the requirements are also a little bit different.
So let's talk about personalization then, because
that's really what you're alluding to, using the data to
understand the customer regardless of their specific
environment. At the end of the day, if you
look at a lot of noise, it never makes any sense.
So you always try to elude to patterns.
You're trying to elude to trends.
Only once you identify a trend can you look into it deeper.
But if you focus on a lot of noise, it doesn't really help
you in making decisions at all the time of going into
spreadsheets and. Pulling all this data and
spending 60,000 hours of mine work to try and find come to a
solution that now takes you 5 minutes nowadays.
It's incredible change. I do remember times when a
revenue manager used to spend, you know, hours and hours
looking OK, we've made this much, this is what I'm
forecasting and everything else. You now have revenue management
software where it just goes in there and says, well, you should
sell your rooms at this amount. And this is how you make the
best profit. So this has been a big shift in
this with data. I think this is the next level
with analytics tools as well within the hospitality industry.
What are the Zoho tools that you're using to help you with?
This mainly analytics on this, they've come up with something
fantastic actually, which is the data transformation.
It's kind of a little bit of a godsend, spanning mistakes,
inconsistency of data. It's tricky.
It's it's tough to, you know, when you have a huge amount of
data to manage all that and not have like 5 dedicated people
doing that. And the fact that you can
actually bring it from other sources.
You don't just have to rely on the Zoho products.
You can actually bring it in from anywhere and then you can
have your full analysis on it. So you know, for us as a
business, we see the importance of it and you know, see a CEO
actually constantly, he's got his dashboard now.
And he can actually, in five seconds he's got a full overview
of what's happening in the company in terms of sales and
everything else. So pretty felt powerful to.
So would it be correct then to say that data for you is the
foundation of not only understanding your business, but
understanding the customer, their habits, their
expectations, the patterns and the trends that are arising to
help you run your business better and to be more responsive
to your customers? If you can anticipate A
customer's need sort of like let me forecast my revenue, let me
forecast what my customer experience is, that would be a
great tool. It's having the ability to find
those and see those, identify those.
This is where data becomes key. There's no other way that you
can have a coordinated action unless you have something that
you can actually make a plan from, and that is what data
brings you it gives you. It gives you a start to where
you can plan to and then the ability to learn and to take
those lessons in order to scale and also Dr. consistency.
To me, scaling is helping the organizers organization grow in
a sensible way. To grow in a sensible way, again
you need to understand your patterns and your data patterns
to be able to make the right decisions of where you are going
to go. And this applies across the
region. You know, the products, the
region, the sales teams and everything.
How does the data help you drive customer loyalty and customer
retention? Can you draw that linkage for
us? Customer happiness.
Customer sentiment. You can also learn from your
lessons as well. This is the other thing, just
because I've lost 10 customers because I haven't talked to them
for 20 months, If I don't know that, then I won't be able to do
anything about it. So I'm going to lose another 20
customers at the end of the month.
But learning from your lessons from that data, that is the
other. The other part of it, so the
data then, is telling you the story of the customer at various
points in their lifecycle. Correct.
And again it comes back data from identify the customer
journey. How did I find you?
How did I convince you? How did I keep you and how do I
keep you further? And if you've gone, how do I get
you back, What strikes me as being very valuable, very
important is you have clear business metrics and clear
business goals, and that's your focus.
But then you're using the data to support the achievement of
those very specific business goals.
It's not just all about growth. There's no point in growing if
you're bleeding everything from the other side.
So it's the harmonious relationship that you have
during the customer journey that you know it's a lot of effort to
gain a customer. It's a lot easier to retain a
customer if you do everything right.
And if you look at cost analysis when it comes to it, how much it
actually takes to gain a new customer, it's actually, you
know what if you retain your customers a lot more, it's a lot
more efficient. We you know you.
It's a very easy analysis to do, again through data and of course
costs and marketing. You know, the effort of the
salesperson, the Commission, everything that goes in there.
Finally, you're a customer, you're on board, and then you're
working happily. If you don't upset them and you
keep them happy, then you have a customer for life.
Sergio, given all of this, what advice can you offer to folks
who want to use technology and use data to drive better,
stronger, deeper, longer lasting customer relationships?
I always tend to look and say what are we trying to achieve as
a business and what can help me achieve that in the best
possible way. Find something that's easy to
administer that hasn't got a lot of complexity on it, but make
sure that everything you. Do gives you the right output
because this is what you are looking for.
The data clean data to help you with the end result of what your
software implementation was. As we finish up, I have to ask
you this question. You have obvious empathy and
understanding of the customer. How do you translate that into
technology and data? It doesn't matter how much data
that you have, there is always a human element to this whole
journey that you have on that. So translation of technology
needs to be put yourself in people's shoes and it comes back
to asking that question, what do I want to achieve on that?
Don't overcomplicate it. Make it simple to use.
Because sometimes making it simple to use, you capture the
right information because people feel more natural about it.
How can I make your life a little bit better but at the
same time, you know, help the company drive forward, actually
caring? Exactly.
Sergio Techcera, thank you so much for speaking with us.
It was fantastic being here. Thank you.