The World Health Organization declared the Covid crisis over in May 2023, but hospitality staffing remains a challenge. Even after increasing wages and other incentives, 76% of hotels responding to a May 2024 AHLA survey reported staff shortages.
At the same time, the UN’s Tourism agency estimates that travel returned to 99% of its pre-pandemic volume in 2024, with more than half of Americans planning to travel even more in 2025 than they did last year, according to IPX1031.
Against the disparity between staffing resources and customer demands, hospitality businesses must take the initiative by effectively anticipating customer needs and allocating technology and trained resources accordingly to ensure continued high-level customer experiences.
It’s a good thing hospitality IT teams now have advanced tools to anticipate demand swings and maintain high customer experience standards.
A Data-Driven Approach to Customer Experience
Getting on top of your resourcing needs means looking beyond the familiar ebbs and flows of customer service call volume. Modern analytic tools can provide that deeper perspective to help you anticipate service requirements on a per-customer basis based on individualized customer histories.
Imagine that for any given customer you can know their habits, their preferences, and their prior experience with your properties. Layered on top of in-depth volume analysis that can also incorporate variables like weather and other impactful current events, you then gain crucial visibility into resource planning.
Of course, as Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” – and most of us would consider a hurricane a prime example of that.
For one major hospitality client affected by Hurricane Ian, we stepped in after their on-site contact center was shut down. Within 48 hours of their request, we filled over 1,472 service hours across six days, ensuring their guests received the support they needed during a critical time.
Outsourcing to support increased call volumes is a familiar strategy, but that comes with its own challenges of matching additional capacity to need and ensuring continuity of customer experience. Analytics can help you understand how to meet those demands. Pairing those insights with an external provider who can support those fluctuations with high quality customer service is the next step.
The gig customer service model offers a compelling alternative. By tapping into this independent contractor model, hospitality brands can scale their support up or down as needed, ensuring customers receive prompt and knowledgeable assistance, whether it’s peak travel season or an unexpected surge in inquiries.
The Arise Platform, for example, has helped hospitality brands implement this model, allowing them to access a highly skilled, flexible workforce certified to act as an extension of their team. This approach ensures that businesses aren’t just filling seats during demand spikes but maintaining the quality of interactions that drive long-term customer loyalty.
Call volume management is certainly part of that equation. An ideal provider will work with you to understand how your service needs change throughout a season and have call center staff available on an incremental basis as those demands evolve. But this isn’t merely a numbers game.
Delivering a flawless customer experience means you must take the time to train your support staff, whether they’re in-house employees or not. The best outsourcing companies know this and are ready with solutions to help. By developing brand-specific training in accordance with your standards, your call center provider can ensure that their service partners act as an extension of your property.
A great call center partner will also incorporate plans for ongoing training and improvement. The goal isn’t simply to put a body on the phone, but rather, to ensure a consistent, continually improving customer experience, regardless of when a customer needs your support and who they speak with to get it.
An additional benefit of those focused training and improvement efforts is that they can create ripple effects. As an example, in 2022 my company brought this training philosophy to a major cruise client whose depleted sales staff couldn’t keep up with the crush of booking demands. After the training, revenue per booking average exceeded goals by almost 12 percent.
We then applied our experience to supplemental sales partners on the Platform who were brought in for extended support. Those additional service partners quickly hit close rates similar to that of their internal team, many of whom had five or more years of experience. When a strategy proves successful, it’s important to maintain and scale it.
While the post-Covid swings in travel demand and staffing supply persist and even if they went away tomorrow, we would still be susceptible to business fluctuations we can’t predict. We can’t anticipate everything, but we can equip ourselves with the resilience to weather the unexpected and deliver for customers. The best way to do that is by taking advantage of data analytics, and forming key partnerships, and incorporating them into a larger strategy built with flexibility at its core.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Padron is Chief People and Experience Officer at Arise. Robert is responsible for leading the Business Development, Client Marketing, Strategic Account Management, and Human Resources teams. Robert is an evangelist for the CX Platform Economy and believes wholeheartedly that a work-from-home platform must be a critical component of any organization looking to deliver world-class care. Robert has a proven track record of spearheading and delivering results-driven CX transformation for our clients in the Healthcare, Insurance, Financial Services, Retail, Travel, and the Telecommunications industry.
Prior to joining Arise in 2010, Robert spent 15 years at Precision Response Corporation as Senior Director of Client Services. Over his tenure there, he held multiple roles within organizational development, operations, client services, and project management providing him with a breadth of experience to understand the business holistically. Robert holds two bachelor’s degrees, one in business administration and the other in music from the University of Miami. He has a Master of Business, Administration from Nova Southeastern University.
