3 easy ways to delight customers with SMS for hospitality

Advanced SMS guides 3 min read Mar 2021 |   Author: Team MessageMedia

Whether you run a busy restaurant in the CBD of a major capital city or a small bed and breakfast in the country, you’ll know the constant challenges of managing a diverse workforce while delivering superior customer service to attract return visits and boost your bottom line.

That’s where SMS hospitality solutions help out, offering you a simple, reliable and low-cost tool for managing staff rostering requirements, alerting customers to special deals, promotions and other attractive offers, and sending automated booking confirmations to guests. Whatever the size and scope of your hospitality business, we have the product to meet your everyday communication needs.

SMS for hospitality marketing

Special deals and promotions are great ways to attract new customers into your bar, restaurant or hotel and a fantastic way of rewarding the loyalty of existing customers for their patronage, encouraging them to return again and again. But your generosity is useless if those customers don’t know about these deals in the first place.

A very practical benefit of SMS alerts function is notifying your customers, both past and present, of these special deals as they become available, as well as giving them a sense of being rewarded for their patronage.

Another benefit of using SMS alerts in hospitality is that an SMS message is relatively unobtrusive while still maintaining the necessary degree of directness. Moreover, research shows over 90 percent of SMS messages are read within 90 seconds of being received.

SMS for staff management

A popular bar, restaurant or hotel can become incredibly busy very quickly, giving you the perfect opportunity to delight guests by delivering a superior service, which builds their loyalty and your all-important reputation. Or you could disappoint by falling short of their expectations through a lack of staff, leading to a poor experience with long wait times or mishandled orders, resulting in the declining reputation of your business.

This doesn’t have to be the case with staff rostering SMS alerts that allow you to notify your workforce of vacant shifts, fill them quickly and ensuring you have a full roster of dedicated hospitality staff to serve a full house of paying customers.

SMS for restaurant bookings, confirmations and reminders

Another simple yet powerful benefit of SMS in hospitality is the ability to send instant, automated booking confirmations to all your customers once their booking has been entered into your computer system. This can cut costly no-shows and maximise your room or table availability on any given date, with one study finding that SMS reminders can reduce missed bookings by as much as 50 percent.

Further uses of SMS alerts in hospitality include the ability to update customers on booking changes, loyalty program points or even sending courtesy messages to thank them for their patronage while encouraging them to contact you directly to provide valuable feedback.

Whatever the communication needs of your hospitality business, contact us to learn how our SMS hospitality solutions can save you time and money, and delight your customers!

For more on how SMS for hospitality can enable your business to grow, reduce no-shows and keep your workforce happy, check out:

• COVID-19: How SMS can connect you with hospitality employees