Hospitality is an industry as old as time itself, yet it has been one of the most notable forerunners in grabbing modern technology and running with it. The use of sophisticated project planning, high tech solutions, and streamlining techniques has led to some businesses in Europe creating 25% more revenue, according to Entrepreneur. Process mapping plays a key part in this and has played a crucial role in helping some of the biggest franchises in the world to find their success.
Enhancing customer experience
A big part of the success of a hospitality business is its ability to tailor the customer experience. Whether working to exacting gourmet standards or marketed as a fast service, customer experience must be tailored to the ethos of the company. Business mapping helps in this regard by providing an intuitive way in which to manage the customer experience, as outlined by Oracle’s business mapping summary. In the hospitality industry, this can be of particular interest. This approach allows restaurant or hotel managers to get into the fine detail of every step of the customer journey, such as individual room considerations or developing specific food pairings for wines. A high-end restaurant can look at its common meal combinations and develop a seasonal wine pairing rota, in addition to coffee and other flavor profiles. Expanding this to the hotel industry, each process can specifically map the entire visitor experience, from arrival to the restaurant, to room, creating a tailored customer experience and developing the profile of the business.
Expanding the business
Growth is one of the most important factors in any business, and in hospitality, it can bring huge brand benefits. Many of the biggest and best restaurants and hotels in the world are franchised, leveraging their huge growth into making the business a snowballing success. Process mapping makes a huge impact here by providing strict parameters from which new businesses can work, ensuring that your brand and product is replicated faithfully across multiple new premises. IBM raised the case study of Insperity as a great example of how process mapping helped to produce these sorts of changes. Through being able to access the individual aspects of each process and quickly find where changes need to be made to make growth possible, this company made their new products ready for market in a far quicker time. For hospitality, that means doors open at a greater pace.
Providing fresh innovation
Many businesses subscribe to Agile design principles in assessing and upgrading their systems. The hospitality industry is no different, and benefits even further from this approach; with business needing to be upgraded quite literally on-the-go, using agile principles is crucial. Using process mapping to take stock of the minutiae of a business and how its processes work makes the application of Agile principles easy, according to a Forbes business board. In hospitality, this can include rapidly breaking down the stages of the customer experience and cherry-picking ideas or improvements to incrementally improve the product.
Business process mapping is not restricted to the domain of stuffy offices. The hospitality industry, whether unwittingly or not, runs on a complex series of small processes that come together to create the customer experience. Breaking this down and finding what makes a business tick and how it can be improved is the function of business mapping, and is an invaluable tool in making permanent and positive change.
By guest contributor Jennifer Hole