Luxury Hoteliers Magazine 1st Quarter 2018 | Page 89

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN THE LUXURY SERVICE INDUSTRY By Nira Lieberman The way forward for personalized, customized, and tailored services in luxury lifestyle and concierge management Personalization is becoming a reality across the service industry, and it is changing rapidly. As consumers begin to change, so does technology, and this correlation should be examined more closely to increase consumer engagement and loyalty. One way to engage consumers is to apply predictive technology which creates the ideal consumer interaction: “The ability to predict and understand consumer content goes beyond the basics of personalization, it uses behavioral data to tailor custom experience” (digital surgeons, 2017). There are new software innovations that are able to understand and cater to specific needs, making it much easier to give consumers exactly what they want. Predictive analytics has a very strong role in this industry because it creates a “future-forward human/machine hybrid consumer service reps that can further increase satisfaction” (digital surgeons, 2017). This makes a more seamless transition in which consumers won’t feel like the service is coming from mere data but rather a human, one-to-one customer service agent. So, what is the next step for luxury service companies? To go beyond expectations for their clients in order to understand and predict the demand of these high-end consumers before the service is even created. ILHA 89