To not only survive, but to thrive in the 21st century will require a whole new business and management strategy approach in every aspect of the hotel management systems.

　　I feel that hotel GM's and their management teams have been put in a difficult position. They are continuously thrown into rapidly evolving business environments with inadequate and antiquated business strategies, resources, and systems for properly navigating their hotel to a stronger competitive position. These ever-changing and very challenging business conditions have created smaller margins to work by, stiff competition, an overbuilt industry landscape, and getting your entire organization on the same page requires the work of three full-time GM's. In addition, your customers continuously elevate their expectations of what they perceive as value for their loyalty and etc.

　　I am very empathetic to what hotel management is up against on a daily basis, especially since the beginning of the 21st century. If you would allow me, I'd like to utilize the analogy of a survivor's guide in explaining some of these customer experience design elements that I think are so critical for hospitality management to be aware of for growing their hotel business in this new century.

　　In my most recent article: From Which Century Are You Operating Your Hotel? I discuss in great detail that customers have a new perspective in what they perceive as value in the marketplace for their time, wallet, loyalty and how the hotel industry can ill afford trying to compete utilizing 20th century business models and strategies. Customers’ perceptions and preferences have evolved both externally and internally out of the 20th century, and the industry needs to consider new approaches and strategies that properly align to their customers’ ever evolving expectations, needs and desires if they want to maintain brand relevance with their customer segments.

　　What do you use to guide your company?

　　The first article of importance in your survival guide is a compass. This compass is made up of your foundational guiding principles, that allow you to always take your organization and business in the right direction as well as bring the brand values into alignment with the brand promise of the business for creating customer driven hospitality culture. This can also help you establish organizational and operational goals for creating a strong platform for your service excellence program, service values development and the overall SDS/ system for delivering service for enhancing all your customer service initiatives as well as all your other business disciplines from HR to marketing.

　　Foundational principles can differ from organization to organization, but I think there's a group of essential ones that always seem to point true north, that every organization finds to be pertinent to their success. It starts with the mission and the vision statement, leading to your values, passions, purpose and your organizational commitments that your business stands for and on. The key, though, with a customer experience design perspective is to make sure these foundational principles are focused outwardly-in, versus inwardly-out when it comes to the intention or what you want them to represent to your organization and business for creating a customer focused hospitality brand. This may require the expertise of a customer experience design specialist, as organizations tend to have a blind spot at times, when it comes to being truly externally focused on their customers' expectations and needs. I featured an article on this subject back in the spring called, Why Doesn't The Hotel Industry Love Its Customers, that I think will help create an understanding on why businesses have a tendency to be internally focused and fall into a silo-ism culture of management and operations.

　　If you present me with a business that's lost their way when it comes to their customers or people, I'll show you a business that is either not using their compass, they never had one or, it's in desperate need of recalibrating with a higher level of significance on its importance to the enterprise’s ability to make decisions and build their business around their customers and people. "If you don't know who you are and what you stand for, then how do you know which direction to take your business in." (Brett Patten 2012)

　　Can you see the big picture?

　　In the 21st century survival guide, the second item that is required is a set of binoculars. This allows management and their entire organization to view their customers more clearly coming into your organization, versus the bifocals that you may have been using in the 20th century that only allowed you to be focused internally on your functional business offerings, policies and procedures, which could have created a blind spot in your organization for seeing the big picture when it comes to creating the total customer experience as the value proposition for your business. In an article I wrote earlier this summer entitled, I Believe The Hotel Industry Is Suffering From Wallet Vertigo, I share a real life experience on the subject, to help create a stronger insight for industry professionals.

　　Did you lose your map?

　　The third element you will need in your guide is a map, a customer map. In a recent three-part article series called, A New Strategy For Enhancing Your Hotels’ Business Models Performance, I talk about five stages you have to consider in your business model for mapping out your customers' experience. Starting with:

　　Pre-game. The customer’s needs. Or the pre-journey.

　　The customer’s expectations/wants. The journey anticipation.

　　The actual engagement of the business experience/the stay and the connection.

　　Customer reflection of the entire experience/the end result/how it made them feel.

　　Post-game. The impact, positive or negative memories/the customer take away.

　　In the articles I talk about, shifting or aligning your current business strategies with a customer experience strategic approach in how you move toward developing every single business discipline within your company. I believe for this to happen, it's going to come down to where GM's and their management teams put their level of importance on creating the total customer experience as the value proposition in the business that focuses on achieving a more emotional level of engagement with their customers. This has the potential to generate a memorable connection with the hotel brand throughout these five stages of the customer's journey.

　　What it's truly going to take!

　　To achieve this, GM’s will have to take everything into account in their business and consider if it adds or detracts from the total customers’ experience narrative and not solely base their decisions on a purely financial perspective as the deciding factor. This will take a little discipline at first because of our 20th century business mindset, which tends to have a stronger focus on the brand value of the business ( i.e. the worth of the brand to the company, which can be considered an overly logical business approach.) and the brand equity (the significance associated with the brand by the customer, which may be considered a purely product driven business focus, in a sense a make and sell business perspective), which will only create a short-term preference or usage with your customer segments toward your brand. This rarely achieves a favorable percentage of long-term customer loyalty conversion rate, i.e., a poor ROI on the present business model's value proposition, or the hotels business management system strategic approach.

　　The GM's will have to consider what drives those equity positions of value in their business equation. I think customer loyalty will be generated in the 21st century by the experiential brand value of the business, in how it makes customers/people feel about themselves from their total experience with the hotel (as a little side note, to this subject matter, also holds true for your employees when it comes to building loyalty with your organization on every level of your company), not just by certain individual elements or aspects. I believe everything is compounded on one another in the customer’s perspective, and not just a case of simple addition and subtraction. That would be, again, a 20th century business perspective to think that way. A 21st century mindset is a cumulative compounding effect of the total customer experience for achieving customer loyalty, trust in brand and brand relevance with your customers.

　　This will require a 21st century perspective around the total customer experience that has a conceptual design aspect for taking everything into account to make the guests feel good about themselves. It goes beyond just the functional logical aspects of the business. It's not necessarily about the value associated with the brand or the product offering. Again, that would be a 20th century survival guide approach, and not one that will have you seeing the forest through the trees when it comes to your customers and your ability to thrive in the 21st century business environments.