As of July, 2009 the company is operating approximately in 74 nations, with 3,000 hotels and over 500,000 rooms across all brands. Hilton has specifically developed a branding strategy that capitalizes on the company's intensive commitments to measuring customer satisfaction over time and then re-aligning internal service processes to capitalize on unmet needs (Balmer, Thomson, 2009)
Hilton's Core Strength in Analytics At the center of Hilton's ability to respond quickly to unmet market needs is their ability to gather, analyze and then put into context customer satisfaction, competitive pricing, price and revenue management, and local market data into differentiated service strategies. The high levels of customer loyalty even in the midst of one of the most severe economic recessions globally in decades makes this strength of the company all the more visible (Barsky, 2008)
The use of best practices or those approaches to managing performance over time is critically important to Hilton as they have created an entire analytics framework by which they evaluate their efforts to attract new guest and retain existing ones (Enz, Siguaw, 2000). These best practices or optimized approaches to first measuring guest expectations and then responding to them through a series of concerted strategies is the foundation of the strategic framework Hilton uses to manage its many brands (Dube, Renagham,1999)
Hilton management realizes that in order for their global workforce to continually be aware of and attempt to surpass expectations, the cultural value of performance must be engrained in the company. The use of best practices or those approaches to managing performance over time is critically important to Hilton as they have created an entire analytics framework by which they evaluate their efforts to attract new guest and retain existing ones (Enz, Siguaw, 2000)
Hilton management, across all of its brands, has also seen that guests form very solid levels of brand loyalty when their expectations are met the majority of the time, during the majority of interactions they have. This has been supported by empirical research into the foundations of how expectations are formed and reinforced over time (Hawes, Mast, Swan, 1989)
From a managerial standpoint this is one of the primary motivations at a strategic level for Hilton being so committed to analytics. They are attempting to continually keep the internal culture of the company including its internal expectations of performance based more on actual face time with guests and less on attempting to inflate internal measures of performance (Munck, 2001)
The example provided is just one of many strategies of concentrating banding on unmet needs as measured through periodic measures of customer satisfaction through the use of SERVQUAL-based surveys (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1988) has provided Hilton Hotels with a significant amount of customer-based data on which to define strategies on. Hilton's differentiating use of customer satisfaction data as the basis of building more profitable brands that include higher levels of customer loyalty is considered to be among the strongest in the hospitality industry (Nordling, Wheeler, 1992)
During the summer of 2009 when many of the properties who during other times of the year get the majority of guests from business travel are seeing an influx of guests who are traveling on leisure. This segment requires an entirely different mindset in terms of service, as their SERVQUAL surveys (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1988) have shown
For Hilton management, the frameworks used to measure and manage expectations are critically important to managing their brands. The fact that business travelers, the most profitable customer segment for Hilton, rely not on price but on loyalty to determine where they will stay on each business trip (Yesawich, 2006) underscores how critically important these dynamics are to the hotel chains' profitability as well
They are striving to create a high level of ownership for customer expectations being met or exceeded, because in accomplishing that, trust will be retained. Once trust is retained and grown, loyalty to a brand is achieved (Young, Wilkinson, 1989)
According to an article entitled Data Driven Hospitality," it is no coincidence that Hilton is the most expansive company in the industry. The article asserts that the success of such expansion has been dependent upon the customer relations strategy that the company has developed called OnQ (Kontzer)