Lilian Tomovich was the very first “chief experience officer” at MGM Resorts, and one of the first in the casino industry, a job that was created at MGM in 2014 to help “understand the guest journey.”
Tomovich, who spent 20 years in marketing, recently talked about her pioneering position with Stephanie Overby of CMO. Tomovich thinks that more companies should be looking at what she looks at.
“There’s no company on the face of the planet that shouldn’t be intimately trying to understand the guest journey and customers’ pain points and how they can make it better,” she said.
Tomovich moved from MasterCard marketing to something much more tangible. “In financial services, you’re dealing with an intangible product that distributed through banks and [managing] the end user was more challenging,” she told CMO. “This was an opportunity to work with a company that has this real-life guest experience and see how I could shape that. I consider myself the luckiest marketer in the world because I get to touch everything from restaurants to entertainment to hospitality.”
MGM was inspired to create her position because, in a heavily competitive market, it wanted to “best differentiate ourselves through the experience we deliver to our guests.”
She said, “My teams takes a holistic approach to the customer experience by looking at the guest journey, from beginning to end, in order to deliver the kind of exceptional experiences that will drive results.”
Coming from outside of the hospitality industry actually made her job easier, she says because she wasn’t saddled with the “how things have always been done,” legacy.
Tomovich is proud that she “I introduced a more disciplined and data-driven approach to managing our media spend that we implemented a year ago.”
A big challenge was that the hospitality business is slower than other industries to embrace innovation and technology. “Most of us in the U.S. have been checking into our airline flights in our pajamas from home for more than a decade, but the hotel business has only started exploring mobile check-in over the last few years. There continues to be a huge opportunity to drive innovation in the digital guest experience,” she said.
However, other industries can also learn from companies like MGM: “[O]n the casino side of our business, we absolutely know who our best customers are, and we spend a lot of time providing relevant and timely offers to them, recognizing what their needs are, and understanding how they spend their time with us.
Noting that MGM is “aggressively working to attract more Millennial customers,” who don’t like to sit at slot machines as much as their elders, she says MGM has worked to launch more nightclubs with top DJ’s, day clubs and pool parties. Such customers are also not as attracted to buffets. “They like communal tables and small plates and food and drinks that they can share on Instagram. So we’ve introduced new food and beverage offerings,” she says.
She argues that the best opportunity will come in leveraging “technology to provide better service to our guests.”
