Guest Post: Why there's a business case for a digitised standards management platform

Adam Tuttle, co-founder of Yipy, shows Travolution where the value lies in having one

One of the most important (and undervalued) aspects of offering top-notch hotel guest services is consistency. It’s only through consistent levels of service and consistent experiential deliverables that a hotel’s brand is established in guests’ minds. Once the brand image is set in potential guests’ minds, hoteliers have even more work to do as they must ensure that they maintain their brand image and reputation over the long-term; after all, a successful brand takes years to build and only one bad experience to tarnish it – and with the popularity of social media and online reviews, one bad review can be enough to have a negative effect on your bottom line.

So, how can hoteliers ensure that they are delivering a consistent guest experience, every day, to every single guest – especially across a large portfolio of properties?

The only way to do this is to create and implement a regimented set of brand standards and operational processes and procedures to ensure consistency and quality across every aspect of your operations. It sounds simple but, historically, this has been one of the biggest challenges for hoteliers because of the lack of tools available to efficiently support the implementation and standardization of these processes.

Until recently, hoteliers have used a pen and paper to try to keep their brand and service standards consistent across their portfolio. Employees would be required to follow procedures down to the letter, and religiously document their progress; unfortunately, when things got busy, employees would often forget to track and log their work against the brand standards and, slowly but surely, consistency and service standards would start to decrease.

But it doesn’t have to be that way… technology is here to save the day (again)!

In today's highly competitive travel market, hotels can’t afford to be held back by outdated offline processes, as a hotelier’s ability to provide the best guest service (and pivot operationally as needed when service levels don’t live up to guests’ expectations) is key in standing out from the competition.

Today, digitising your operational standards is an operational imperative, as it will streamline your property’s efficiency, making standards accessible to your entire team and providing better data capture and reporting, improving brand consistency, minimising costs and enhancing the overall guest experience.

Before we dive deeper into the benefits, what does it mean to digitise your operational standards? Is it as simple as turning your pen and paper documents into PDFs?

Quick answer: no.

Digitising your operational standards solves two main pain points: it ensures consistent guest experiences and makes standards and compliance regulations more accessible to staff. To most effectively accomplish these two aims, hoteliers should implement a standards management platform that offers actionable insight by focusing on standards and observations rather than just forms or checklists. The platform must also track compliance metrics to make it easier and more efficient for hotels to remain compliant to all important standards.  

Now that we understand what a digitied standards management platform is, let’s look at some of the key benefits of implementing one at your property.

Improved compliance

One of the most important reasons to implement a digitised standards management platform is to more effectively and accurately manage your property’s compliance – not only to brand standards, but also government agencies and local leadership – at a more granular level. Your standards management platform should also integrate specific standards from organizations such as Forbes, allowing properties to be audited against the organizations’ standards quickly and easily.

In addition to providing an easy way to audit your team and property’s compliance metrics, a digitised standards management platform supports efficient training for new employees on compliance related topics, including local state requirements, food regulations and fire department codes.

Real-time updates and accountability

A very important outcome of digitising your standards is being able to pull real-time accountability reports on your team’s adherence to key standards metrics. Real-time is the key word in that sentence because without real-time functionality, you can’t properly implement and track new standards. Using a digitised standards management platform, your property’s leadership team can issue new standards quickly and easily to be automatically implemented across all properties in your portfolio. Once the new standards are implemented, tasks can be assigned and completion verified through automated tracking functionality, eliminating manual oversight and compliance tracking.

Data-driven decisions

Real-time access to your team’s performance through a digitised standards management platform also makes it possible to make better, data-based decisions that will support your property’s ongoing profitability and maintain high guest service levels. The platform collects, aggregates and analyses data at a more granular level, making it possible to quickly spot operational areas of improvement, prompting proactive action to address non-compliance issues before they become problematic.

Cost and sustainability

Today, sustainability is an important factor attracting for potential guests. Replacing and/or updating pen-and-paper standards binders is expensive and creates a significant amount of waste. By digitising your standards, you will decrease your operational costs and reduce your property's environmental footprint – a win/win in today’s competitive marketplace.

Brand consistency 

Using a digitised standards management platform, your property’s brand integrity is maintained through centralised management of guidelines, which are easily followed, property wide. Your standards management platform can delve into your team’s performance at a more granular level, uncovering points of failure that can be remedied proactively, rather than reactively.

While the hospitality industry is well-known for the high service standards and beautiful experiences that guests associate with their travels, these core values will be compromised without strong underlying standards and efficient operational processes – and the only way to effectively manage your standards in today’s increasingly competitive, online world is using a digitised standards management platform. Trust me, your bottom line will thank you for it!