An innovative move by Hyatt Hotel Chain, but there certainly is room for improvement.
Hyatt Hotels recently hopped on the twitter train by announcing @HyattConcierge, the first hotel company to use twitter as a dedicated channel for customer service.
With a quick tweet, guests—or anyone, for that matter—can find out if there's a good Mexican restaurant near the Grand Hyatt in Seattle, or when they should show up at the luxury outdoor fire pits at Park Hyatt Beaver Creek for s'mores. Customers can tweet all their concerns, questions or requests involving any property at any time because @HyattConcierge is staffed around the world with specially trained reservations center staff
With a getaway planned to the Park Hyatt in Toronto for my wife’s birthday I was anxious to give this a try. A few days prior I sent a quick message to @HyattConcierge and received a personalized reply within minutes. I was impressed.
The day of our stay, I sent a message requesting a suggestion for a new & trendy restaurant for dinner in the neighborhood of our hotel and quickly received the response, ‘ Try One Restaurant at the Hazleton Hotel' with a tinyurl link to their site. I was further impressed on a couple of levels: First at how quick the response came in, second, that they recommend a restaurant at another property.
I replied to @HyattConcierge, ‘ thanks for the suggestion but we had lunch there, can you recommend another?’ .......nothing, no response. Forcing me to send another new message asking the same question but specifying not to recommend One Restaurant, hard to do in under 140 characters. And there it was; the kink in this innovative move – it doesn’t allow for 2 way conversation with the same agent on the same topic.
Now with this being a 24/7 worldwide service, I am guessing they are using at least few dozen staffers in a call centre environment to handle all the @HyattConcierge traffic at this point. As a result, my reply is probably getting picked up by another agent that isn’t aware of the previous conversations. Currently, there are only 1500 followers of @HyattConcierge. So, I guess the real question is, how will this work if more of the 9 million people in their loyalty program start to use it?
My key suggestion to @HyattConcierge > Have your agents issue a custom hash-tag to the query then create a search preference for that hash-tag in a program like Tweet Deck, Nambu or Tweetie. For example, for my query they could have used #patriquinpark or issue a hashtag id like #pat1234. This would allow the agent who replied to my first query to communicate with me on the topic.
In the end, we ended up making a reservation a real live concierge at the hotel who listened to what we were looking for and made the reservations for us.
- Tagged in: social media, technology, twitter, interactive, strategy
- Category: Social Media, Strategy
