Insight #022:The Best Digital Solutions Are the Ones You Can Adapt

In just a few short years, the hospitality industry has evolved into a digital landscape where consumers demand more convenience, faster service, and better offers. To keep up, some businesses make the mistake of chasing every trend with a new piece of tech.

If you scramble to invest in lots of different flashy tools to try to impress your guests – but end up with a fragmented digital system that doesn’t integrate properly – then you’re not going to be able to operate efficiently. Ultimately, that is going to hurt your business and your customer experience.

Instead of aiming for dozens of “perfect” solutions to fill each need right now, John Laporte, TASK’s President of North America, encourages hospitality brands to look for a platform or ecosystem solution that can be customized, adapted and scaled alongside your changing needs, whilst keeping the core data and operational foundations stable.

“Tech is constantly moving. We’re seeing new ideas taking hold and others lose steam every year. What businesses need right now is to be prepared for the unknown. Investing in an agnostic or flexible solution with a robust API stack is what CTOs are calling out for – and it’s this kind of adaptable approach that will set them up their business to meet future customer expectations.”

Connected data is the key to adapting quickly

“Above all, follow the needs of the customer,” says John. If you aren’t leading with your customer experience at the forefront of your development, then you risk embarking on a costly journey in the wrong direction.

Ultimately, customers show us what they want – and it’s up to businesses to make sure those options are readily available, fairly priced, and backed with quality. If you’re really listening to the changing needs and wants of customers, then you must keep moving and innovating alongside them. And to do that, you need tech to support that constant momentum.

Your guide to knowing where, when, and how to adapt your business all centers around your data. While most businesses understand the importance of customer, transactional, and sales data, few actually have an integrated system for collecting, storing, and analyzing that information in one place.

That’s where the value of a genuine platform solution comes into play. Working within a centralized digital ecosystem means that all your touchpoints and data are collated into a single source of truth. This makes it far easier to gain an accurate, real-time understanding of what is working and what isn’t. Based on that insight, your business can make better strategic decisions to pivot your offerings or your services to suit current demands and preferences.

But to enact those changes, it helps to have a connected API stack

John explains, “IT leaders are saying they want a cloud system that can be agnostic with regard to endpoints. They want to be just an API integration away from anything that they want to bring into their system. That means they can build their future as they need it.”

Historically, digital architecture has been pieced together, with different tools provided by different vendors. “These Frankensteined approaches,” says John, “don’t have the integration, flexibility, or capabilities that you need long term.” They are just “point-in-time” solutions that are fragile and take a lot of work to keep them operating problem-free. They also struggle to seamlessly connect your data in a way that helps to create a single source of truth and unlock future operational efficiencies such as real-time decision-making.

With a robust and flexible API stack, businesses can bring in the components they need at any given time, and they can be seamlessly interconnected with the rest of their digital infrastructure. At the same time, these capabilities can be scaled up or down to allow for smoother growth in the future. “That vision is exactly how TASK was built, with a robust API layer between our transaction cloud and any and all applications or devices.”

Your tech is the center of your evolution

To stay competitive in the market, a hospitality business must build better efficiencies and improve the guest experience in parallel. The approach also needs to be integrated and aligned with your business’s operational backbone. A centralized solution means that your technology can help to guide the future growth and shifts of your entire organization, at the same time as supporting the ‘now’.

Kerri Linderboom, TASK Group’s Plexure Division Customer Success Manager, calls this the ‘North Star’ of digital development. “When we work with businesses, we operate in a partnership, and we work towards a holistic transformation. That means considering how your marketing, customer management, and backend operations all connect through your technology. They should all be working and changing together helping you reach that North Star more effectively.”

But if your digital system isn’t designed for seamless adaptation and expansion, you’re not going to be able to pivot quickly enough to respond to the changing needs of your business and your customer.

Adaptation, when it comes to your digital framework, is all about leveraging a system that supports long-term evolution. Approaching your technology from this point of view will help you avoid taking costly avenues to follow fleeting trends and filling your system with frankensteined tools and siloed data. That’s the power of a total digital ecosystem, where the framework is built specifically to allow integration with future capabilities, to centralize your data, and to support a combined approach to transformation.