Concierge

Concierge services are one of the fastest growing small businesses in the USA. Born from the long tradition of the hotel concierge and their promise of ultimate personal service and local knowledge, these new concierge businesses are sprouting up in all the major metropolitan areas, promising to help manage the busy lifestyles of their corporate and personal customers.

Critically, the concierge service proposition is fundamentally aligned with the principles of one-to-one marketing, i.e. building learning relationships with customers, maintaining a dialogue, differentiating the proposition and ultimately anticipating their needs. For this reason, it is surprising that the concierge business concept has been grasped by small business start-ups alone. Huge potential must exist for larger organisations to offer such value-added services to their market offering, especially in commoditised markets where service innovation is perhaps the only route to new competitive advantage.

In today’s competitive job market, employers are finding they not only need to create a safe-and-supportive environment for their employees, but they must also give employees benefits that help them balance the demands of work and personal commitments. Some companies have found that their employees are putting in so much overtime and working such long hours that they don’t have enough hours left in the day to attend to personal business. Employers in certain fields, such as insurance, banking and manufacturing, have found that offering help to their time-stretched employees can boost productivity, making this a workplace perk that benefits the business as well as the workers. For this reason, more employers are offering personal concierge services to their employees.

As consumers switch to new electronic methods of communication, and as they buy things faster and assume more control over their buying experience, they will start to display new and different behaviours. Then, income, location and demographics will be less important than access to technology and bandwidth as predictors of customer behaviour. Because concierge businesses rely on developing a close trusted relationship and excellent insight into their customers, they are capable of capitalising on and providing greater behavioural understanding than can be achieved through traditional market research and database analysis.

A concierge company or the modern name as lifestyle management companies are those serving members with duties similar to those of a butler or a secretary. Think about a concierge as someone who can attend to the little and the big details of life for people who don’t have time to attend to the details.

Previously, personal management and information services were the preserve of the very wealthy. Now, with falling data processing costs, cheaper direct channels of communication and the wider and easier availability of information on the internet, these services can be delivered more economically, and are within the reach and affordability of a wider audience.

There are two main reasons this is such a growing business; One, people have a limited amount of Time; secondly the economic stability of our country right now is such that people have more money to spend.

Some Statistical Facts:

  • The average Indian worker spends 50 hours a week on the job
  • There are nearly 48 mm dual income families in India
  • Executives waste the equivalent of about five weeks each year trying to find missing items
  • Finding and keeping good people is the primary worry that keeps executives awake at night
  • The wealth management market in India will have a target size of 42 million households
  • There are nearly 1 mm expat community staying in India
  • There are nearly 18.3 mm credit card users in India
  • It is mandatory to have concierge services independent from the reception to become a member of “The Leading Hotels of the World”

A recent survey by the non profit research organisation families and work institute reveals:

  • 36% of workers say they often feel completely used up at the end of the workday
  • One in five full-time workers is concerned about the lack of balance between their work and personal life such that he or she would accept a pay cut to have more free time
  • 85% of workers have daily family responsibilities to go home to
  • 53% of married workers living in urban cities have spouses who are also employed
  • One in seven real estate buyers prefers to have a concierge desk in the new buildings
  • 70% of all parents feel that they don’t spend enough time with their children
  • 50% of the people feel that most weekends are consumed by errands and housekeeping

Source: Internal data

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