"User Disengagement" and Reimagining Technology - Matt Welle, Mews

Josiah: 0:00

What is user disengagement And why is it a powerful concept when it comes to hospitality technology? Stick around to learn more from the CEO of one of the industry's leading technology companies. Matt Welle is the CEO of Mews, a hospitality technology company, and he and I connected recently after I saw a post from him about a slightly unusual approach to building technology that I thought you might need to know more about. In this episode, you're going to learn about that, as well as hear his advice for evaluating technology and what excites him the most about technology in our industry today. Here's Matt.

Matt: 0:58

I've actually recently deleted TikTok, and it was painful because I loved it. I was so obsessed with it, but the sole purpose of it was to capture my attention, and it did that so incredibly well. But that's a B2C brand, right. That's your goal because it's a free app. You need to capture them so you can serve them as many advertisements as possible. When you build a B2B business, you don't need to capture advertising revenue. There's no need for me to capture the users endlessly at a screen. When you walk into a hotel lobby, however, you get in the queue at a desk and then you will get ignored because they're typing in your passport details and your credit card details in some screen, and it drives us insane.

I'm like why are we still doing that? I don't do that in Uber. I get in a taxi, s o you gotta get out And I don't ever whip out a credit card. I don't need to type in my pin number on a machine anymore, and that's where we started at the time we've always seen how we measure this because the goal is really for a hotel employee not to be looking at a screen but to make eye contact with the customer at the desk. And I remember when I was working at Hilton, there was a brand standard that says you must acknowledge the guests three times with eye contact or something like that it said. So they had to force the users because the system was so draining that you had to force the receptionist to look someone in the eye. And I was like, really you need a standard to teach that. That's what hospitality is, and it isn't even hospitality, it's just acknowledging the human that's on the other side, but it isn't creating a remarkable experience. So that's kind of the backstory of it.

Josiah: 2:28

love it, and my understanding is you call this philosophy or this approach "user disengagement"

Matt: 2:36

It's not the sexiest term, but I think engagement is pretty clear And we're like we don't want that, like this system should do as much as it possibly can in the backend. There are always things that you need to do in a system, but if I can cut 50, 60, 70% of the tasks you need to complete in it, I basically have user disengagement, because there's no need for me to have my eyes on that screen. So suddenly you get receptionists who need to talk to humans, and that is a whole new thing that you need to teach them because it is like we've been training hoteliers to ask for passports and credit cards for decades now. And what happens if you suddenly get this time back? you have to actually know how to create remarkable experiences, how to have those conversations with customers, and I think that's where a whole reconfiguration of hotels will have to happen around. What do you do with these employees? If you're a budget brand great, then you have less staff on the desk, because that's where a large chunk of your cost goes. It's about getting guests into the room as fast as possible. But if you're a luxury hotel, really you should retrain those team members to have these real conversations with customers about why are they in the destination and what can you do to add to their experience of the destination, and that's a very different thing than passport and credit card.

Josiah: 3:51

It certainly is, and I guess, for those listening to the show, what are the implications for hiring teams If you have a great technology system like Mews on your property, are you hiring different people then?

Matt: 4:04

I think so. I remember the first hotel we did. This is ten years ago and I was much younger and less grey back then, but we basically built this system for the hotel of Richard's family And I was working at the hotel. We needed a paycheck so I'll take a sales job at the hotel and then he was on the other side, the creative director, and we did the hiring for front desk and we just said let's hire the ones with personality, we'll teach everything else. And you really get a very different experience when you don't look for people with experience with the legacy systems because they will be looking for a system that they can type data into because that's what they've been trained to. But if you step away and say, no, actually I want the person that smiles, that is genuinely engaged, then suddenly you get a very different perspective because you don't need to train them to be a data entry system that knows every short key cut on a keyboard to get through the system as fast as possible. But yes, you do need to look for a different person.

Josiah: 4:58

That's great. You work with and see so many hotel and hotel brands around the globe. Does any client or hotel you've come across have an especially good integration? That or not integration, but the implementation of technology that speaks to the themes that you've mentioned about almost user disengagement and they're doing a really good job with us.

Matt: 5:19

Yeah, there are actually two really good examples that I love. So there's one that sits on the budget side of the spectrum, which is one of our biggest customers, called The Social Hhub. They are this big European group that has blended student living with short stays with the local community and they figured out a way to get these lobbies filled with people like you walk in and there's this buzz around it, and when you go and check into a room, there's an island of kiosks and you have one receptionist on the island And because the automation we bring, one receptionist can now man five units like check-in desks, because they're on the budget side of the spectrum, so you've really gained in having less receptionist. And then they repurpose those receptionists to do something different in the hotel. And then there's this really wonderful hotel that I is one of my favorite hotels - The Dylan - here in Amsterdam. It's this luxury hotel. If you come to Amsterdam that's absolutely that's how I want to say it's five-star boutique and you walk in and you can smell luxury. You can smell like you're in a different world. And I walked in recently and they completely reconfigured and they got rid of that big marble desk that they had in the lobby And they've now made really nice seating and they've gone completely mobile. They have receptionists in a luxury environments walking around with tablets and doing that really one-to-one, without the big barrier in between you. And it's because they're you know they don't need to go and enter lots of data on a tablet, which would be worse, right, if you have to enter the same amount of data that you did on a keyboard on a tablet, it would be worse. So they've really rethought it according to their concept And I think that's really the range within which you can work going all the way from budget to luxury?

Josiah: 6:57

What would be your advice for people in terms of how they shop for technology?

Matt: 7:02

The absolute start point is the core, which is the PMS. The central system has to be in the cloud. The legacy systems are going to die in the next three years. You see this massive push from the old-prem solution. So push into the cloud If you don't have an in-the-cloud solution. That's absolutely 100 percent the starting point. And it has to have an open API. The way you figure out whether the PMS has an open API you just Google the PMS name with open API and you'll probably find it either a page. If you don't find it, they don't have an open API, because open API means it has to be on the website, it has to be available for any partner. I think that's the really core piece. If you're looking to have integrations, just Google it, because it needs to be open so that everyone can work with it, and if it isn't on the website, it isn't open. I think that's the core piece to start with. Then it's about understanding what is your brand and what the experience you would love to have If technology wasn't blocking you from that experience. What would you envision for your hotel to be? If that's a luxury, like, hey, if I'm at a high-eat and I want to walk into a lobby and sit on a sofa and have that really luxury experience. You're looking for a mobile solution and maybe a concierge solution that integrates deeply with the PMS, because you want to help book restaurants and have those bookings dropped directly into the PMS. But if you're on the budget side, you're looking for kiosk applications so that you can make it incredibly seamless to get guests in the room. So it very much depends on the hotel that you're trying to be and the experience that you have. And are you looking to drive revenue or are you looking to cut costs? Like? those are the two big spectrums and you can do so much on both of those spectrums and you have to just really have sometimes taken that P&L and look at where's the biggest opportunity for me in my market because if I'm a city center hotel versus a hotel in the wilderness, you have very different needs as your business. But if you don't ever stop and step away from the operation, i think what is the concept of the hotel and what's the best possible outcome and how do I get there? You just won't know what you're looking for Because, honestly, in our marketplace, we have like 700 integrations. I wouldn't even know where to begin. So you do need, before you dig into a marketplace, just step away and write it down on a piece of paper like a memo to yourself. Like what do I want to achieve?

Josiah: 9:12

As you look at the world of hospitality right now, what are you most excited by and what opportunities lie ahead for hospitality?

Matt: 9:20

We've been for years trying to get people to be excited about technology and hospitality. It's been this very dead zone of innovation. It's been this very boring like I was talking about it yesterday When I entered hospitality 20 years ago. I feel so old when I say that They had to train me on DOS like this blue system screen that a lot of the new generations have never even experienced And I was like what is? this Like why is technology like this? And I feel we've reached this pivotal moment where suddenly there's excitement about hospitality And I'm hoping that we've contributed in some sense to that Like there's so many really fantastic startups And I'm just happy to see this new generation actually want to work in hospitality and try out new things, and that's the biggest thing. It's like you do not have to run some giant RFP to figure out which system is best, you just switch it on And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, you switch it off, you move on to the next one, whereas in the back in the day, you had to really make a conscious decision about what system you wanted, because it was a life decision. It could cost your career. Where that isn't the case anymore, and I think that's the most exciting thing, it isn't one thing, it's just the ability to just try things out And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, you move on to the next thing.