Visiting Media CX SVP offers an expert tour of the hospitality sector’s CX needs
Two hotels face each other across a busy street, but one of them seems to be getting a lot more guests pouring in than the other.
At a surface level, there’s little difference between the two properties.
The more popular hotel hasn’t done any significant renovations.
It hasn’t introduced any new amenities.
Its special promotions and packages are more or less standard.
So what gives?
Kevin Huang knows, and he is ready to help the other hotel compete.
Last month Huang became senior vice-president of customer experience at New York-based Visiting Media, which offers technology designed to empower hospitality brands to sell more spaces and experiences in the most effective way possible. This includes SalesHub, which takes an immersive approach to closing bookings by combining traditional content with immersive assets such as 360-degree photos, 3D models, and CGI.
For Huang – who will oversee Visiting Media’s customer success, customer strategy, training and creative production teams – many hospitality firms and property owners need to spend as much time behind the scenes enhancing their ability to sell as they do building more attractive venues. Having worked in hands-on roles at properties like the Carlyle, he said he’s seen the challenges first-hand.
“When I go back to the beginning of my career, there were times when we were really under-resourced, and our tools were behind the curve,” Huang told 360 Magazine. “When I fast-forward to today and look at my friends and colleagues who are still in the (hospitality) business, the tools haven’t evolved that much.”
Visiting Media aims to change that by providing hospitality brands with applications that ease the buying decision for their clients. When a wedding or event planner comes in person to a property for a site tour, for example, there’s a lot that can go wrong. A room might not be ready, or the venue is already occupied with an event in progress.
Huang pointed to Visiting Media’s True Tour as a way to avoid those scenarios by offering virtual site inspections with immersive assets. Other features within SalesHub could help hospitality brands respond more effectively to requests for proposals (RFPs) and more quickly to booking requests.
Supporting customers goes beyond providing them tools, however. Huang also said it’s important to recognize how many people working in hospitality are trying to do more with fewer resources. This has always been an issue in the industry, but events like COVID-19 have arguably exacerbated the tendency for everyone working on a property to wear multiple hats.
It helps that Huang and many of those on his team have been in the trenches themselves, but he said Visiting Media considers itself an industry supplier but a hospitality company in its own right.
“What we deliver is SaaS, but we’re a hospitality company because we understand that your day might need a lift, and that we need to meet you where you are,” he said. “I want to continue leaning into that philosophy and that way of thinking about our constituents.”
That sense of kinship is ultimately what drew Huang to Visiting Media, he said – the sense of serving customers who you see as peers and not merely buyers.
“For me, it means that I’m going to get to work with a bunch of other hospitality people, and I’ve worked in this industry long enough and other to know that we are a different subset of people,” he said. “The way that we as an organization see ourselves translates into how we’re serving our customers. That’s really the hook.”
