News for the Hospitality Executive |
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by Zach Conen
March 2013 As is wont to happen from time to time, we have stumbled upon another "silver bullet" moment in the ongoing effort to effectively measure and enhance customer experience. The magic solution of the moment involves taking advantage of the free feedback that customers provide on social media and review websites such as Facebook, TripAdvisor and Yelp and utilizing one of the available online tools to "scrape" and analyze that feedback in an orderly fashion. There has been a good bit of chatter about the value of using this approach and the technologies that enable it to replace more conventional means of measuring the guest experience. To completely butcher Shakespeare, I come not to bury social media analysis, but to praise it. This is the ultimate application of the old customer service axiom that any feedback from a customer – positive or otherwise – is a gift. The process of "harvesting" the online feedback from your customers into actual structured data and analysis allows you to reap those gifts on a scale previously unimagined. At LRA, we are actively using these tools to provide additional insights into the analysis we provide from quality assurance audits, mystery shopping and customer research programs, to great effect. The ability to gather and analyze free-text has been a valuable complement to everything we do to help our clients understand their customer experience and how it impacts future customer behavior. What makes me nervous is the rush to replace.
If
nothing else, we have learned time and again the silver bullet of
customer
experience understanding doesn't exist. Like any of the other methods
of
customer experience data gathering, this one has its strengths and
limitations. At LRA, we recently concluded a study on
travel habits,
surveying more than 3,500 recent travelers in North America. One of the
topics
covered was use of social media and review sites. The findings were
revealing
in terms of how impactful these tools are in travel decision making.
Understanding what people are saying online and how to effectively
drive that
conversation is very important – 84-percent of those surveyed indicated
that
they sometimes check reviews online before planning a trip and
35-percent
indicated they were very influenced by those reviews.
Another interesting tidbit involved the
words or themes that
were most influential in deciding whether to book or not. Again, no
shock – if
"cleanliness" came up as a negative in more than one review,
90-percent of respondents considered it a deal-breaker. On the flip
side,
"cleanliness" noted positively in more than one review led 78-percent
of those responding to indicate they would be "much more likely" to
consider that property. Traditionally, the hotel industry has looked at
"cleanliness" as a cost-of-entry item,particularly in the upscale and
luxury segments. At a certain price point, you aren't getting any extra
credit
for having a clean hotel…but you can certainly lose a guest quickly if
you
don't. While it may still be the case that delivering a clean hotel
room may
not inspire brand loyalty, what this shows is that an overt message of
cleanliness will influence customer trial across the full
range of hotel
segments. So very clearly this online feedback is
influential and very
clearly it behooves companies to understand what is being said in an
organized,
quantitative fashion in order to better impact the experience of your
online
"influencers." But who are these influencers…and are they really
representative of your customers as a whole? In the LRA study, while a huge majority of
travelers are
checking online reviews, only 33-percent are actively contributing to
that
dialogue. And within that subset, young (under 35) females are far more
likely
to be posting than any other demographic segment, so relying on this
data as a
proxy for your customers overall can be misleading. In addition, those
same
female travelers are far more likely to be checking online reviews
before every
trip (54-percent to 39-percent)…and far more interested in comments
about
cleanliness…and far more likely to book a room based on cleanliness,
leading to
a circular, self-fulfilling analysis tool if utilized in a vacuum. When combined with other data streams that
capture a more
representative sample (survey research) or execution on specific
performance
standards (audits, mystery shops), you get a clearer picture of what is
important to different guest segments and how you are delivering in
those areas.
And, more to the point, actionable insights on how to a.) meaningfully
influence the influencers so that people give you a try and b.)
meaningfully
influence the actual customer experience so that people come back. The Lone Ranger never limited himself to one
silver bullet,
so why should you. Use 'em all. ______________________________________ About the author: Zach joined LRA with ten-plus years of sales and marketing experience in the sports and entertainment industry, most recently as the Assistant Athletic Director for Sales and Marketing for the Temple University Athletic Department. Prior to working at Temple, Zach was the Director of Ticket Operations for the Reading Phillies, managing attendance increases in each of his five seasons with the Double A baseball club. Zach has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania in American History and a Master of Business Administration degree in Marketing from Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management. LRA Worldwide is a leading research and consulting company in the emerging discipline of Customer Experience Management (CEM). We work with our clients to help them design and deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences in order to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, and company growth and profitability. In LRA’s 30-year history, we have grown from a provider of customized quality assurance evaluation programs for the hospitality industry, to a leading CEM consulting company offering a variety of client solutions. The evolution has been driven by our clients asking us one question – "How do we get better?" In response, we have built a range of performance measurement, research, training and consulting solutions to help them do so. Today, we are a growing company operating in more than 120 countries throughout the world, helping clients such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Hyatt Hotels International, Anantara Hotels & Resorts and InterContinental Hotels Group deliver exceptional customer experiences. Every touch. Every time. For more information, visit us at www.LRAworldwide.com. |
Contact:
Zach Conen Senior Vice President, Sales & Marketing +1.215.449.0304 [email protected] |