‘Hapi’ About Hospitality – Salesforce and the Guest Experience
Guest: Bob Majliozzi, Senior Vice President of Commercial at Hapi
Salesforce hasn’t always been the go-to guest relationship management solution for the hospitality industry. While now, more hotels and resorts are adopting Salesforce to manage guest experiences, according to Bob Majliozzi, there’s no one software that addresses every aspect of this complex business. Generally, hotels utilize 12-15 different programs to manage all their operations and then have to compile the data manually. With that many platforms to consider, it’s hard to see the whole picture.
That’s where Hapi comes in.
As a middleware solutioning and consulting company, Hapi bridges this gap, opening up data flow between different software. This allows management and stakeholders to get a clear view of all their operations with ease. With Hapi, hoteliers on Salesforce can consolidate their data and take full advantage of the platform’s powerful relationship management tools and data-driven insights.
Check out the full episode to learn how Hapi can make Salesforce the ultimate solution for optimizing the guest experience.
Don’t have time for the full interview? Here’s what you need to know.
The Highlights
Let's unpack middleware a bit. When the person at the front desk of the hotel logs into their software they're not logging into Hapi, is that correct?
0:57 Correct. Lots of systems are used in any business but the hotel industry is quite complex in the way it's set up.
1:16 - On average 12 to 15 different systems at a minimum are implemented at a hotel and and most of them transact guest data. Hapi was built to connect to those systems and provide off-the-shelf ready out of the box integration to drive the data flow from those systems to other systems that need to consume that data and vice versa.
1:49 - There are lots of systems that are deployed in a hotel that don't all necessarily talk to each other. And some of them don't need to but when it comes to what Hapi is doing with Salesforce . . . capturing that guest transactional data and delivering it into Salesforce to create that unified view is critical.
2:40 - . . . the data that we're capturing from the systems that connect to our middleware, we can deliver that readily into Salesforce and leverage the power of Salesforce to action that data in meaningful ways and create those experiences.
In that whole process which different roles might you see Salesforce play?
3:29 - Salesforce [is] obviously very well known as the premier guest engagement, guest relationship management, [or] customer relationship management solution in the world—99 out of Forbes 100 use Salesforce for that reason. They're more advanced, more sophisticated, and more integrated than any other platform.
3:50 - The hotel industry has really lacked a really viable platform solution to connect centralized guest data . . . and utilize it with staff so the staff's informed and can better execute on guest experience and then leverage that data for marketing efforts and guest engagement efforts.
4:12 Salesforce . . . works so well in the true CRM space. Salesforce is a very wide platform. It can do a lot of things and there are some businesses that plug in the apps in the AppExchange to perform those functions in a fully integrated fashion on the Salesforce platform and use the ecosystem forever as much as they can. For hotels though, at least today, it's guest management, guest intelligence, and utilizing all the great tools that Salesforce has to manage that.
Sometimes collections of hotels are managed by a management company. Is this the kind of situation where the management company is the direct customer and user of Hapi on the Salesforce side?
5:15 - Yes and no. The hotel industry has some complexity to it that is unique. … the hotel industry has folks that own the hotel so real estate investment. Those owners hire management companies to run the day-to-day business and operation of that hotel. There are the major chains that franchise their name: Holiday Inn, Sheridan, Marriott, InterContinental, etc. . . . Those brands have tech infrastructure—loyalty membership, booking, distribution—that is quite powerful.
6:20 - There are a lot of groups vying for the way funds are invested in the hotel and so it gets quite complex when it comes to overall tech decisions being made.
6:34 - There are management companies that have . . . more or complete control over an enterprise decision like CRM, property management system, or central reservation booking engine to generate reservations for the properties. Then they leave it to the hotels to make other tech decisions—the smaller decisions so to speak.
6:57 - For most hotel companies, they are smaller brands like Four Seasons or Graduate Hotels . . . Those smaller brands have to make the right decisions for their hotels because ultimately they own the outcome for that brand regardless of whether they have various owners or single owners that own the properties. . . . They have the control to make those decisions and . . . those smaller brands that centrally manage everything for those hotels are the ones that are the best fit for Salesforce Hapi.
7:42 - Management companies are also a good fit again as long as they have the control to make those enterprise decisions.
It can be difficult for stakeholders and decision makers in these complicated scenarios to understand what tech they need to get the data to inform their management decisions. It must be complex getting everyone aligned on what is actually needed.
8:46 - Yes. If you think about an owner's objective if they own a property, they want to get the most value out of that property as they can. . . . if an owner is going to spend x amount in budget it's typically on stuff the guests can see physically. If you go down a few levels to integration and the benefit of automating data flow between systems, applying that to CRM and guest engagement . . . it's not as obvious to an owner.
9:14 - I think the industry's really starting to get a lot more sophisticated and starting to budget appropriately. That's the trend we've seen and the reason why Hapi and Salesforce have been so busy and successful. I think the industry's really starting to wake up to the fact that they've had limitations on the systems that they've had in the past.
It seems like Hapi is a set it and forget it solution. Once you get your integration set up, do your customers remember they're even working with Hapi? Does it just run in the background?
12:21 - I probably didn't emphasize this enough so in addition to the middleware solutioning that we provide to the hotel space and the connectivity to Salesforce, we're also an SI (System Integrator). We provide full implementation, training, ongoing account management, and customer success for the hotel companies . . . We are constantly working with the hotel companies to optimize their use of Salesforce. In addition to the integration, we also have apps on the AppExchange that enhance the out-of-the-box functionality for Salesforce specific to hotels and resorts.
These industry domains really do require a lot of consulting to go in and figure out all the details of how it's going to work together.
14:10 - Before Hapi, I was with one of the larger hotel-specific CRM providers for 15 years and I used to compete with Salesforce . . . Salesforce at the time wasn't situated and prepared enough for this unique industry, [but] I think Salesforce has absolutely done a fantastic job in reconfiguring the organization, creating a more dedicated focus team on hotels.
14:37 - Travel Transportation and Hospitality is the new division at Salesforce. It's relatively new, about two years now . . . They're excellent to work with—a lot of smart people there. Again, it took Salesforce quite a bit of time to start really being recognized as the go-to solution in the space and I think that started to happen last year . . . and we're continuing to build momentum there.
15:58 - Kudos to Salesforce for recognizing that they had to provide more focus in this industry. It's been great timing for Hapi because . . . we were starting to focus slowly on bringing Salesforce to hotels and that's when Salesforce made that change to focus more on hotels and it's been a great combination.
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