Mr. Tarasofsky

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

The Wired Hotel: Online Strategies to Strengthen Customer Loyalty

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

The revolution in marketing and business affairs that has placed the customer at the epicenter of all strategic and tactical thinking has become so mainstream that the acronym CRM can be tossed around in television advertisements (see Microsoft's recent ads) without any need for further explanation. From top to bottom, sector to sector, it has become increasingly clear that everybody "gets it" and that the voice of the customer has its place at even the highest level of decision-making. This is particularly true of the hotel industry, where loyalty is king and customer feedback goes a long way towards the maintenance of competitive advantage.

But even the most sophisticated combination of clickstream data, usability reports, and attitudinal information might not be enough to know your website visitor completely. Time and seasonality are always at play, subtly influencing the mood of your visitors. You might have paid for the most detailed and elaborate study of your site visitors, something that really gets into their hearts and minds and allows you to measure their satisfaction, but if the data is three, six, or nine months old, is it really pertinent anymore?

Let's look at a situation that took place recently involving one of our hospitality clients. Hotel X had been measuring its visitors' satisfaction on a continuous basis for about 6 months. The picture that had emerged was fairly rosy; all aspects of the site experience were trending above the third quartile relative to the industry index.

Then one day, one of Hotel X's online managers was checking the live results for his site and saw that the score for site navigation had dipped substantially in the most recent week. He alerted one of our analysts, who then drilled down on the open-ended commentary to discover that a broken link, buried on one of the secondary pages so that it escaped the notice of the web designers, was seriously impinging on visitors' ability to move around the site. Hotel X's website design team fixed the broken link, and the navigation scored climbed back up to its usual level the following week.

The important point here is that, by constantly being attentive to visitor feedback, Hotel X was able to fix the problem expeditiously, before any significant collateral damage could occur. Indeed, because remedial measures had been brought to bear so quickly, the attributes measuring loyalty, brand strength, and brand referral were unaffected by the problem.

Typically, we see that problems with some aspect of the website experience-whether it is the site's content, interactive features, or pricing options-only affect brand perceptions after several months of inattention. If Hotel X had been receiving customer satisfaction reports quarterly or bi-yearly, they might not have been able to act in time to prevent brand depreciation.

It is my belief, therefore, that the most important weapon in the arsenal of any customer-centric hotel chain is the ability to capture visitor feedback on an ongoing basis, rather than in periodic snapshots. Periodic snapshots are better than nothing, but they are simply not agile enough to pick up the movements and shifts in the collective customer mood that occur not yearly or monthly, but daily and hourly.

There is another reason why an ongoing data capture is superior to a periodic one. By constantly capturing, you will be able to build seamless threads of data and warehouse them for use in strategic and tactical planning. This way, you will be able to observe the highest-level trends in customer satisfaction, but you will also have a sufficient amount of data to be able to notice less discernible trends or more muted visitor chatter, which sometimes point towards the next big challenge or opportunity. Each of us knows all too well that, in a knowledge economy, data is paramount.

Building data warehouses through constant capture will also allow you to benefit from economies of scale. While there will be an initial setup fee for any such study, the real cost of capturing will lessen as the number of data points increases. In this way, it's not that much more expensive in relative terms to capture 10,000 data points than it is to capture 1,000.

But putting aside the fiscal calculations, I really can't emphasize enough how important it is to capture the full spectrum of website visitor opinion, from the areas of majority consensus to the little nuggets of minority dissent. And the only way to do this is to put in place a collection system whereby data can accrue constantly and build to critical mass.

In every aspect of life-be it politics, religion, art, business, or sports-the next big thing rarely starts with a bang. Instead, it starts slowly. First, a few people talk about it, then the movement gains more adherents, and, finally, it builds into an inexorable avalanche. At that point, the bandwagon effect takes over.

The best example I can give is in sports. Let's say you have a football team who did really poorly last season. The new season starts and the team wins its first three games. The die-hards and the experts can tell that this team is significantly improved. But the rest of the public doesn't know yet; indeed, in the public consciousness, this team is still saddled with the stigma of losing. But, by the time this team has gone on to win its division, even the most casual fan has embraced it as his favorite.

Trends in customer satisfaction work in a similar way. Sure, periodic snapshot studies will allow you to discern the very high-level trends occurring among your website visitors. They may even be robust enough to allow you to drill down on some of the smaller issues around which consensus has built. But you will be hard pressed to stay on the cusp of the emerging trends in visitor satisfaction.

By capturing and listening incessantly, you can devote the appropriate attention to macro-level trends in visitor satisfaction. You also have the flexibility, however, to devote manpower to tracking emerging issues and nascent ideas. The old adage says that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. By latching onto incipient problems before they attain critical mass, you can save yourself time and money down the road.

At the end of the day, it all comes back to getting value and return on investment. Customer-centric hotels all know the importance of capturing the thoughts and feelings of their clients at every turn. Taking the next step forward, however, means keeping your ear to the ground constantly and not listening in spurts. In this way, you will be able to quarantine problems before they can have a negative impact on your brand and you can stay attuned to both the majority and minority voices in your visitor base.

Jerry Tarasofsky is CEO of iPerceptions Inc. Its webValidator® "captures the voice" of the online customer, helping companies learn more about their customers. Using a comprehensive perceptual framework to evaluate key elements of the visitor experience and, algorithms and modeling to identify attributes that drive satisfaction. The webValidator solution turns data points into easy-to-understand strategic and tactical decision support. iPerceptions’ clients in the hospitality sector include Crowne Plaza, Omni, Savoy, Wellesley, Homestead, Radisson and Holiday Inn. Mr. Tarasofsky can be contacted at jerryt@iperceptions.com Extended Bio...

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