It’s that time of year when Deloitte publishes its annual tech trends – and they’re out for 2020.

We have sifted through the 132-page document to find those trends that are most significant to hotels when it comes to the guest experience. To make it accessible, we’ve extracted the three key trends and how they apply to guest satisfaction and their stay experience.

Let us help you to prepare your hotel for the tech future. ‍

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Digital experience with real human-centric interactions

Digital experience continues to drive the technology transformation in 2020.

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“Digital experience is the interaction between a user (customer, partner or employee) and an organization using digital technologies”

‍Liferay

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Early in 2018, the Global CIO Survey (Deloitte, 2018) revealed that 64% of respondents believed digital technologies will influence their business in the next three years. In fact, companies are moving from traditional marketing to focus more and more on interacting with customers across a plethora of channels. Where print and postage waned in favor of email, email is being thrown in the junk in preference for digital messaging apps.

In this new decade, the digital experience will evolve with a focus on human-centric interactions continues those that are more personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Ones that feel human, they are relevant and touch the needs of the recipient.

There’s a growing trend of CMOs and CIOs working together to find new technologies to manage the digital experience. Meanwhile, marketing relies more heavily on data, migrating from a focus on customer acquisition to enabling greater human experience, making experiential marketing an actual reality on a daily basis.

The awakening of personalization brings us a new era of experiential marketing, which concentrates on individualization and customization. Grounded on data, each customer can be understood as an individual with different preferences and behaviors. New experience management tools (such as Guest Messaging) utilize technology to identify the best way to deliver customer service to the right person across physical and digital touchpoints, enabling companies to engage with customers in a personalized way at scale, and providing a truly satisfying experience with each and every human.

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“Imagine a world in which a brand knows who you are and what you want, and can deliver the product, service, or experience that best suits your needs seamlessly and in real time, across physical or digital channels. This world has arrived”.

Deloitte

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Technology to detect human needs – understanding the individual

Watch out for cognitive technology (big word) in the 2020s because it will push the digital experience to a new level. Cognitive technology is a field of computer science that mimics functions of the human brain through various means, including natural language processing, data mining and pattern recognition (techopedia) – enough to blow our minds!!!

Cognitive technologies, such as AI, machine learning, automation, and neural networks, etc. respond to humans more appropriately, and can come across like it’s a real human. Previously, technologies weren’t able to understand human emotions/behaviors. With the innovations nowadays, human-centered design (HCD) techniques “add an EQ to technology’s IQ”. HCD is used to detect human emotion and understand human needs, thus to respond to the needs without requiring actual human giving instructions – Woah!!!!

Nowadays, we are already living in a world where humans directly engage with machines, but we keep losing a very valuable element, human connections. That’s why more and more companies are requiring to add the human touch to their products and services through technology. We expect more than cold, repetitive, unemotional answers from machines. Instead, we want machines to understand us as an individual and treat us like a friend. New cognitive techniques are enhancing our capability to anticipate and respond to human needs, and the acquisition of cognitive technologies will develop a competitive advantage for companies.

For Hotel Guest Messaging, AI helps hotels to cater to guest needs. When hotel guests ask questions via messaging channels, specific keywords can be detected and designated replies will be triggered automatically. At the same time, hoteliers can personalize and design the wording, tone, and communication channels while aligning with brand personalities to engage with guests as friends. Compared to non-human and slow response emails, Guest Messaging adds to hotels’ competitive advantage via warm and quick actions, whether it’s proactive or reactive messaging.

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Build and maintain service agility for a competitive market advantage

Deloitte’s report talks about Architecture Awakening, which feels more like some abstract thought from Gwenyth Paltrow’s twitter feed – but let us help you put it into the context of the hotel…

The technology stacks need to enhance the guest experience – it’s all orchestrated – so each system and application needs to talk to one another to make the best use of a diverse range of tech. This is the system architecture.

Forward-thinking companies are rebuilding their technology stacks by focusing on autonomics, instrumentation, and cloud-native tooling. What’s more, they embrace agile techniques and flexible architectures that can help them compete in a rapidly changing world.

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“System architecture can be a competitive differentiator in the digital economy. This is why more companies will elevate architecture to a strategic priority in the coming months. By prioritizing this important yet often misunderstood function, organizations can build and maintain the kind of architectural agility that often gives younger competitors a market advantage.”

Deloitte

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We expect to see more companies hiring system architects and prioritizing system architecture to build full technology stacks applied in business operations. More importantly, the system architecture is expected to deliver real value to business instead of just looking good by having it.

Infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, or function-as-a-service are some of the examples of architecture. Having an orchestrated tech structure brings a lot of benefits to the organization. To name a few, optimizing operational costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

Guest Messaging is a platform within software-as-a-service. Bookboost makes itself open to connections, is very easy to connect to existing hotel environments (e.g. property management system), making it possible for System Architects to establish a tech stack that fits their own environment.‍

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Take Advantage of the Tech Trends

Facing the ever-changing business environment and fast-developing tech trends, hotel managers need to extend the vision and think ahead. They should see further by identifying potential opportunities, organizing reactions, and taking advantage of the latest trends to transform them into strength.

To do so, hoteliers can work with tech providers to be prepared for the digital revolution. Bookboost focuses on providing Guest Messaging solutions to hotels, including hotel chains, independent hotels, hostels, and serviced apartments. Being an open and highly connectable platform, Bookboost will add advantage to the hotel’s current tech set, and help hotels take the lead in fierce competition.

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If you want to know how to surf upon the tech trends 2020, talk with us!