By the time you read this you’ll be thinking about shutting down your email, leaving a jaunty out of office message possibly mentioning mince pies and switching your eyes to a shallow fireside book or Christmas telly special.
But while you kick back and up your cheese intake to a percentage of body mass, what is your inbox up to in your absence?
This festive season we would like to implore anyone with a CRM system to buck the festive trend and show a little restraint. This year was the year of personalisation in the sector, with hospitality eager to show its guests how much it knew about them, how it really wanted to be friends, how it could create lifetimes of lovely loyalty by knowing more and more and more about you.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. The Cheers-style bar where everybody knows your name and what you like to drink is at the very core of hospitality, which is why the series chuntered on for years and evolved into Frasier, where beer was replaced by coffee and yes, how very prescient.
But the current scatter bomb approach to contact does not speak of a friendly relationship, it speaks of a harkening back to the early days of websites, where it was all about controlling eyes all the time. More eyes! All the staring!
That approach turned out to be no good for our eyes. And much as we like to think of the fun things in life, sometimes when we are reading our emails we are not also planning an evening out, or a children’s birthday party, or a wedding. We’re just reading emails.
And after you’ve visited a venue, do you really need to be filling in a comprehensive review of every aspect of your meal/party/night spent unconscious? No you do not.
So this festive season, think about the relationship you want to have with your guest. Do you want to pester them every day until they set up a secret email address they don’t tell you about? Until they block your number? We have all forked over more personal data than is sane, maybe 2025 should be the year that some of this is deployed and we see some thought go into communication. No-one wants to come back from the break bursting out all over. Unless it’s cheese.
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