How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
With 24 hotels and counting throughout the US and Canada, Loews Hotels & Co understands how vital the human touch is to delivering exceptional experiences to its guests.
At the same time, the company knows first-hand the important role technology plays in helping a company of its size stay organized, create time efficiencies and discover valuable business intelligence.
That’s why Loews utilizes Sprout Social to connect with customers on their communication channel of choice: social media.
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Loews Hotels & Co
Confronting complexity
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy Simon Kopec oversees the company’s social media team, working with a marketing manager who focuses on analytics and tactical execution across Loews’ primary social accounts.
However, each property also has its own dedicated social media specialist.
“For example, for our Loews Hotels @ Universal Orlando properties, social is handled by three individuals across what’s soon to be seven hotels,” Kopec said. “They have a single Instagram account that goes across all hotels, and each hotel has its own independent Facebook Page. Of course, there are situations with certain hotels where they may have additional social accounts running at the same time, so it’s all about partnership and collaboration efforts across all our hotels.”
Properties are split into two sub-categories: those under the core Loews consumer brand and Immersive Destinations, which are branded collaborations.
“All our hotels take the strategy outlined by the brand and are able to pull down from that,” Kopec said. “In terms of the tactical components, we do have variances when it comes to each hotel’s target audiences and marketing communication priorities.”
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Loews Hotels & Co
Supporting collaboration, driving adoption
With social specialists who handle multiple hotels and report into several entities, tools that support streamlined collaboration and communication are essential.
“We wanted a tool that could bring us together—that was one of the top priorities we were looking for in terms of a social media management platform,” Kopec said. “Having a platform which would allow us to collaborate, to have visibility into what’s happening at the hotels and have analytics all in a one-stop shop, that was one of the main reasons we went to Sprout.”
Ease of use was exceptionally important to Loews Hotels & Co as well. Regular promotions are the norm and using a platform that could be easily adopted by new team members was a must.
“It was important for us to cater to the various needs of our users, from the social media pro to a more novice lead to a new hire,” Kopec said. “Our workflows and how we gather content from different properties, it’s all through Sprout.”
Beyond a user-friendly interface and approval functionalities, Sprout’s collaboration tools also enable Loews to assign tasks across different teams, route incoming messages for proper and immediate response and measure workflow efficiency by analyzing how long it takes team members to complete tasks.
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Loews Hotels & Co
Streamlining engagement, simplifying workflow
Engaging with potential and current guests is as important to Loews Hotels & Co as maintaining oversight and optimizing efficiency.
“Our hotels are in the epicenter of their destinations, and we really want to build communities around them—it’s part of the ethos of the company,” Kopec said. “Whether it’s answering customer service questions or responding to an inquiry, we want to make sure we’re visible, available and relevant on the social channels our customers are using.”
This focus on customer care is vital, as social is the No. 1 channel for addressing customer service issues among Millennials, and the No. 2 channel overall. Additionally, 50% of consumers will boycott a brand if they receive poor responses on social, and 38% expect brands to respond to their inquiries within 5 hours.
“With Sprout we are able to get all our social messages in a single location, and not only see who we need to respond to, but know what actions have already been taken by other team members,” Kopec said. “That level of collaboration and visibility across multiple people wasn’t something we had before and was something we were really looking for.”
In addition to helping the company stay on top of incoming social messages, Sprout’s Smart Inbox empowers Loews Hotels & Co to monitor keywords, hashtags and locations to discover unique engagement opportunities. Along with Sprout’s publishing, analytics, listening and advocacy tools, these features helped the company consolidate the number of different softwares it was using in favor of an all-in-one approach.
“Previously we had a social management tool and a separate analytics tool,” Kopec said. “Having everything live in a single location, that was a big value proposition for us.”
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Loews Hotels & Co
Identifying opportunities, serving customers
Social listening in particular has been a major focal point for Loews Hotels & Co.
Using Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool, companies are able to tap into the world’s largest and most diverse focus group to evaluate brand health, discover competitive insights, access industry intelligence and more, all by analyzing publicly available social conversations.
“We use social listening to look for a lot of different things,” Kopec said. “The happiest of them all, obviously, is identifying opportunities to surprise and delight our guests.”
Kopec shared a recent example in which a woman tweeted at her friend about visiting a theme park in Orlando, asking for recommendations.
“We found the message using Advanced Listening, and we sent her a tweet with a number of links to our blog specifically about the travel needs she had mentioned,” Kopec said. “Included were articles about restaurants that are available within the park, an article about new attractions, some tips and tricks on how to get through the lines quicker, and which attractions to visit at which times.”
Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Loews Hotels & Co
Crafting strategy, strengthening scalability
Loews Hotels & Co relies on Sprout for more than software, however.
The Sprout Social Professional Services team provides customers with actionable insights, strategic recommendations and critical data to help them thrive both on and off social. In the case of Loews, this took the form of “report cards” for individual properties.
“We knew that on a quarterly basis we wanted to provide social leads and our field teams with easy-to-understand benchmarks in terms of what’s working best at their hotels,” Kopec said. “We worked with the Professional Services team to identify the key indicators we should be looking for.”
The company also turned to Professional Services for assistance with quarterly marketing campaign analysis to evaluate performance.
“The team at Sprout helped us realize we could maximize even more potential, walking us through what data might be useful based on their expertise,” Kopec said. “It’s not just the data, but the knowledge and experience and best practices Sprout brings, not only from an industry perspective, but from outside it as well.”
For enterprise companies, it’s not enough for software partners to provide valuable tools and services. They must also deliver them at scale.
“Sprout offers hands-on support, and is eager and willing to train our team,” Kopec said. “For enterprise-level companies with many team members, it’s important to find companies like Sprout that are there to support you. I can count on Sprout to be a reliable vendor, great supplier and true collaborator.”
At the end of the day, beyond all the bells and whistles, Loews Hotels & Co knows social media is about real-life connection.
“All this technology is a way to enable human behavior at our hotels,” Kopec said. “Removing humanity through tech is not what we’re about. It always comes down to how we can make your experience better. Everything we do, especially in the digital world, is looked at through the lens of: How is this going to improve the human experience?”
With the help of Sprout Social, Loews Hotels & Co will continue to empower its teams to deliver that human touch.
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