Lithys 2017: Hilton Suggests - Surprise & Delight

In 2016, HiltonSuggests Team Members sent out 10,975 responses to travelers around the world. Our Twitter account also grew to over 11,000 followers.

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Company:  Hilton Suggests                                                               

Entry submitted by: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) 

Social channel: https://twitter.com/hiltonsuggests

Lithy category:  Surprise & Delight

Hilton is one of the largest and fastest growing hospitality companies in the world, with more than 4,900 properties comprising over 800,000 rooms in 104 countries and territories. In the nearly 100 years since our founding, we have defined the hospitality industry and established a portfolio of 14 world-class brands, including our flagship Hilton Hotels & Resorts brand, which is the most recognized hotel brand in the world. 

Our campaign that ‘surprised & delighted’ our customers

As resourceful as travelers are, they often look to their social networks for direction as they get ready to explore or even while traveling. This extends far beyond their need for a hotel. It is about finding unique experiences, sources of insider knowledge, and learning from friends and networks that live there locally, or have traveled there. Hilton built the @HiltonSuggests concept to connect these questions to something their team members do every day – extending the light and warmth of hospitality – and applied it to delivering travel tips one tweet at a time.

Hilton Team Members connect with travelers around the world, to answer travel questions that a person has tweeted, in a very personable and local way. Even when travelers are not looking to Hilton to answer their questions, @HiltonSuggests enables us to surprise and delight them with our approach of actively listening, taking the time to respond, and delivering a customized tip for where to go, what to see and where to eat based on their interests, from a local perspective.

Developed around our Team Member’s local know-how and desire to explore, every recommendation is provided based on real experience. This program comprises more than 110 team members supporting over 110 cities globally, in locations where our Team Members are delighted to share about their favorite pizza spot, where to find the best sushi in town, or tell you about services like a yoga session, a nearby gym or great hiking trails.

Our goal, strategy and tactics

Our drive is to surprise and delight travelers around the world in a meaningful personal way that lives out the vision of Hilton’s founder, to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality… one tweet at a time.

Team Members proactively listen for travelers asking questions about where to go within specific city they support. They join conversations as a guide and resource. By listening for any travelers who are asking generic or directed questions, we can determine if and how we should respond.

We initiate our listening and response funnel through Lithium Social Media Management (SMM) for Service to delight travelers with unique local perspectives from actual locals. Unlike most brands that listen to enable customer response leveraging their brand name with a few key words, we stretch the bounds of typical social listening. Our focus is on ALL travelers inquiring about key cities mentioning any of the keywords that we have established around “travel excitement”. This layer of listening, which includes phases like “Looking forward to” or “First time in”,  helps us get the best mix of tweets for our Team Members living and working in over 110 cities around the world.

Just as important as the execution, we also focus on building @HiltonSuggests as a community of Team Members that are local and global experts. Extending trust in their insights, we are constantly collecting feedback as they connect with Twitter users in real-time. Most adjustments we make to listening within specific markets or the program are driven from their ideas and findings.

In many cases, we find that @HiltonSuggests becomes the first and only respondent to questions posted, and as such, becomes a welcomed resource, which leads to fun short-term interactions and compelling long-term relationships with the Hilton brands.

Our results

For @HiltonSuggests, our key indicator for success is focused on how many travelers’ tweets are reviewed and we respond to. We also look at which Team Members are most active so we can celebrate our key contributors.

In 2016, @HiltonSuggests Team Members sent out 10,975 responses to travelers around the world. Our Twitter account also grew to over 11,000 followers.

Not every tweet that mentions a city is looking for a recommendation, so our team also reviewed and closed over 60,000 tweets last year that were not responded to for other reasons such as, “sports” or “television show” reference.

This program is focused on surprising and delighting travelers with new tips, and building new meaningful interactions with Hilton and its local experts, there are currently no direct ROI measures tracked for @HiltonSuggests.