Creating Unique Guest Experiences across multiple brands
The Challenge:
As one of the worlds largest hotel groups, the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) operates 7 major hotel brands: owning, managing or franchising over 4,500 hotels in over 100 countries.
IHG approached Engine to help them design and deliver a group-wide guest experience development project across their brand, to further the delivery of excellent and consistent service experiences.
The work began with a pilot project with one brand to establish an approach, which could then be used to guide the senior teams across all brands and regions (EMEA, AMER & APAC).
The Approach:
Engine worked with the core team to define objectives and to pilot an approach with a single brand team - Holiday Inn - to define differentiation, the ideal guest experience, key opportunities, and to involve stakeholders from different departments and regions in this development.
Participants in 2-day workshops in each of the 3 regions used highly empathetic tools such as mystery guests, personas and analogous service experiences to assess the brand’s ideal guest experience. Engine collated the workshop outputs to identify areas in which to focus change and delivered a description of the ideal guest experience. Holiday Inn used this work to review their service standards and to refine their plans for future innovation.
A sorting tool to help define brand experiences
In this process, tools were tested and refined, and everything brought back to the direct clients for the next stage of development. The outputs from the pilot were reviewed and taken forward to a more central department where development could be progressed consistently across all brands.
Defining the Guest Experiences for all brands
Working intensely with the direct client team, Engine built upon the tools used in the pilot and created a detailed programme to enable all 7 brands to simultaneously develop and deliver their guest experiences. With distinct personalities, histories and markets, the brands had very different needs and were at varying stages in their evolution. The process was designed to satisfy these needs and to provide tools to communicate their values and future plans in the same way.
A set of distinct service behaviours was defined to guide delivery and frontline staff behaviour. Challenges of cultural differences, language and brand identity were embraced from the beginning, and all parties felt involved and valued.
Overview of the back-end factors needed to produce the ideal experience
The Results:
The culmination of the year of collaboration resulted in 4 key deliverables for each of the 7 brands:
• A defined Experience for each brand
• A set of initiatives for achieving this Experience
• Long-term plans for implementing change
• A programme for training Branded Service Behaviours.
One of the key success factors throughout this project was feasibility. IHG had to be able to action anything proposed across hundreds, sometimes thousands of hotels. Engine worked closely with all the Global and Regional teams and the subject experts to deliver work that is being used and developed across the globe.
All 7 brands have been working together within the same project, along with regional brand teams, HR and technology experts. This resulted in coherent frameworks being put into place that work for every brand, and a new process being implemented throughout the organisation to continue development, focusing on Guest Experiences.
