Ms. Jenkins

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

Using Online Surveys to Gain Insight into Customer Satisfaction

By Cid Jenkins, Vice President, ATG's eStara

Understanding customer needs has become a critical part of any online sales strategy. The best way for executives in the hotel industry to know whether their company is delivering on brand promises is to gather direct feedback from those their business depends on-their customers.

Increasingly, travel and hospitality companies are investing in fuller-featured, customer friendly Web sites. With the current economic crunch, everyone is fighting for their share of the customer pool. JupiterResearch estimates that $128 billion in U.S. travel will be spent online by 2011, still quite a lucrative market. As hoteliers look to provide the right online capabilities, it is critical to have a baseline understanding of your target customers, how they are using your site and what they'd like to see.

Savvy travel executives are investing in technologies designed to engage and inform browsers, mitigate hesitancy, improve closure rates and deliver more personalized and relevant experiences to consumers. Social computing solutions are making waves as evidenced by the MySpace page for Travelocity's Gnome or the Delta Air Lines blog. Similarly, leading travel aggregators have added ratings, reviews and user generated content to their sites to provide enhanced information.

It is imperative to identify a foundation that ensures site enhancements are in line with user needs and desires and simply not enough to employ new technology and hope it has the desired effect on customer perceptions. Hoteliers need to actively and directly engage guests online and ask them upfront in order to learn what investments contribute directly to earning patron satisfaction and customer retention. It is here that leveraging tried and true surveys are providing insight into customer behavior that can be applied to improve the overall online experience.

Surveying can be used to answer a variety of questions from how customers navigate a site to what makes them abandon midstream. There are a variety of tools on the market that help non-technical hotel personnel develop targeted questionnaires that are sent to customers upon any type of site transaction.

One example of a company that has done an exemplary job is Red Lion Hotels (www.redlion.com). Since 2005 Red Lion Hotels has used "click to call" services that offer customers the opportunity to directly connect with a customer service representative with the push of one button when they require personal assistance on the site. Following each call, Red Lion offers users the opportunity to participate in a post-call survey to garner feedback about their experience with the click to call program and to validate the service as a beneficial component of its marketing program. The survey functions as an extension of the Red Lion brand, so customers can participate as a continuous brand experience and the company can seamlessly integrate its messaging for a polished look.

This innovative use of surveying has yielded impressive findings:

• Click to call has been instrumental in reducing Web site abandonment by 13%
• 62% of users reported click to call drastically improved their online experience
• 69% of users preferred click to call to other contact methods (including 800 numbers) The beauty of surveys is that they can be used to define root behavior and serve as a gauge for improvements all the while providing instant, real-time results. Multiple hotel chains are using this type of technology to create a profile of their online customers and to generate immediate feedback on Web site changes. All of this is done with the intent of delivering the most relevant and useful customer experience.

In addition to surveying how a particular online technology, like click to call, might impact a customer's experience Web site surveys give hotels the ability to analyze and improve the effectiveness of their online "property" by asking for customer opinions about the online experience. Hospitality officials and marketing teams can then take this information to refine site usability and fix problems that could lead to site abandonment and customer frustration in the future.

Using rules-based triggers, such as time spent on a page, companies can engage customers with online surveys to have them offer feedback about their Web experience. Combining online surveys with reporting and analytics tools is an ideal way to optimize and refine specific product pages, promotional offers and customer support pages. Survey tools give hoteliers and hospitality executive's real-time insight into the needs and interests of their users through a simple, short questionnaire.

Web site surveys can help companies view the exact page where a customer has difficulty and decided to offer feedback. Most surveys route responses to the most appropriate department to determine the best response or escalation path. Data from online survey results can be aggregated across company sites, or by department, to offer insight into larger user experience trends and continually enhance Web site usability and experience. In doing so, a hotel makes the entire online reservations process easier and more enticing to its customers and hence, encourages them to form a positive opinion of the company early on. This is reflected in the feedback shared on popular consumer review sites...and, of course, in increased sales.

The benefits of surveys are two-fold: proactively soliciting feedback from customers helps to inform the fiscal or technology investments hoteliers are making and also encouraging customers to voice opinions and thus, becoming more emotionally invested in and satisfied with the brand.

According to Hospitality eBusiness Strategies, an internet marketing strategy firm for the hospitality industry, this year one-third of hotel bookings in the U.S. will be generated online and another third will be directly influenced by online research, despite being booked offline. With the investment that travel and hospitality companies dedicate to customer service, customer retention and web site management, new modes of providing the right buyer with the right information at the right time has become key to success. Travel and hospitality companies are beginning to realize the benefits of integrating surveys into their online initiatives to increase sales conversions and improve the overall customer experience.

In order to gain a competitive advantage and effectively capture the potential of the Internet for customer attainment and retention, travel and hospitality companies must implement strategies that both integrate the online channel into their companies' existing sales, marketing and communication channels, and recognize the unique and valuable characteristics of the effective online experience. With online surveys, companies can leverage first hand customer information that can improve economic benefits of customer loyalty and provide substantial performance improvements.

Cid Jenkins oversees strategic sales initiatives. For nearly a decade, Ms. Jenkins has been instrumental in developing eStara’s strategy in the travel and hospitality market while garnering extensive experience driving revenue for eStara's partners, which include companies like Continental Airlines, Hotels.com, Red Lion Hotels and Starwood. Ms. Jenkins' career began as Director of Business Development at GraciasDoctor.com. Her international business knowledge started at the Consulate General of Chile and International Sleep Products Assocation. Ms. Jenkins can be contacted at 703-648-8296 or cid.jenkins@estara.com Extended Bio...

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