How to better kick-off a customer centricity tour, than in a hotel that claims to be totally different. The rebel of hotels. CitizenM. Our tour has already finished, and now I'm sharing with you how it started :)
And yes, the story is impressive. Founded from the idea that a hotel experience should be designed around guest needs. What an idea ;-)
They first stripped down current hotel experiences. They figured out what the top frustrations and irritations are when traveling. The list put a smile on my face, because yes - really annoying things on that list:
They looked close and hard to today's and tomorrow's traveler. Their behaviours, their wishes, they really made a great effort to truly understand them. Then took the list of frustrations into account and designed a hotel experience around it. Some of the ideas they integrated really put things upside down.
I have never seen more technology used in a hotel that adds so much efficiency and fun. It starts when you first walk in. A few take aways:
Guests at citizenM are citizens, employees are their ambassadors. CitizenM operates from a flat organisational structure. Their employees are completely wrapped in the CitizenM culture, and are passionate about their customers.
This starts at the recruitment process. They don't have job interviews, they organise happenings. They make people do workshops and work together, and from those days they recruit new ambassadors.
New ambassadors receive training to be a great barista, to be a great cocktail shaker, but mostly they are trained in how to interact with customers. They learn what they can do to be the hero of the day.
CitizenM is succesfully a new hotel experience because it combines this extreme customer focus, a great internal culture and the technology-layer as the finishing touch.
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