Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

The Wired Hotel: Web Site Design & Customer Satisfaction

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

When you get right down to it, your web site is just another extension or variation on your actual hospitality property. Visitors must be able to easily navigate their way through your site and find what they are looking for. As with any hotel, make it difficult to find the front desk and you'll probably never get too many guests making a reservation. Visitors must be able to easily access information about rooms, rates and amenities and they don't want to be kept waiting - again, no different than if they were in your lobby and could not find the front desk. Hit the mark in these key areas and most likely you will provide your web site visitors with a satisfying and positive web site experience - one that will encourage repeat visits and build loyalty. Miss on any one of these key web site customer experience criteria and you run the risk of not only encouraging visitors to abandon their visit, but you can also do potential harm and damage to your brand and the loyalty and positive goodwill you've invested in the bricks and mortar world.

Good web site design is all about creating a positive customer experience and the benefits of a positive customer experience will not only enhance the image and value of your brand, it will impact your bottom line. We have in our work with hospitality properties including Choice Hotels, Radisson and InterContinental Hotels, positive proof that those customers who rate their overall experience as good or excellent more often than not refer friends and associates to the site as well as become brand champions. This leads to increased look to book ratios and declines in reservation abandonment. Remember this and ask your web team if they are benchmarking customer satisfaction. If not, I'd recommend you start immediately

The equation is simple. Solid web site design leads to a positive web site experience. In turn that positive experience leads to enhanced customer satisfaction. The first step in understanding if your site's design is enhancing or hurting overall customer satisfaction is to measure and quantify your visitor's overall web site experience. This process involves watching what visitors do on your site - something that can be undertaken using a wide range of behavioral analytics services including the new free web analytics tools from Google. More importantly, although behavioral analytics tell you what is happening on your site, it is critical for you to obtain insights into the "why" behind this behavior.

And that is not as difficult as it sounds.

The first and most obvious way to understand and interpret the "why" is by listening. Your actual web site visitors are the best and most reliable source of intelligence. If you are able to capture and quantify their voices, that information becomes a stylized road map for improving site design and for benchmarking future web site enhancements. Solid web site design is not about cool colors or flashy slide shows. It's about satisfying a visitor's need and listening.

Listening today means more than just asking for feedback though that is still critical and something that I encourage everyone to do. In fact, if you do not have a systematic procedure in place for capturing and monitoring feedback, you are missing a critical marketing component to ensure your web site design meets the wants and needs of your site visitors. Every touch point or opportunity you give visitors to interact with you is another opportunity to build and enhance your relationship with them. But remember just collecting feedback is not enough - more on that later.

In todays "reverse-flow" marketing world where consumers have the freedom to voice their opinions and discontent anywhere and everywhere, capturing their voices and listening is now more critical than ever. As well, the explosive growth of consumer generated content including blogs, and opinion sites is a reality that has changed hospitality marketing forever. In this new landscape where consumers control the way marketers talk to them and with the click of a button can share potentially damaging and negative comments about your hotel with million of other consumers, you must be able to immediately and continuously tap into this cacophony of voices and interpret what is being said. Several of our clients are using technology from a British company called Repindex to retrieve millions of verbatim discussions about their brands from blogs, news groups, news feeds, chat rooms, and travel feedback sites. Working with our clients, we use this technology to organize and segment this massive amount of open-ended text into key concepts or themes helping them create a picture of their brand from the consumer's perspective. From there it's up to the interactive teams to take that information and act on it.

So listening and feedback go hand in hand. Now back to design. Once you have captured the voices of your online visitors, you should be monitoring that information on a weekly basis to identify potential problem areas with your site. Is it loading too slowly? Is it easy to navigate? Is the depth of the content sufficient to provide adequate answers? Monitoring feedback and capturing the voice of your online visitor can address all of these issues.

No matter what method you choose to listen to your customers, it is also important that you continue to do so on a long-term basis. It may cause more harm than good if you initiate and then fail to follow through with a "listening" program

Communicating with, and listening to your site visitors and guests in addition to providing insights into what elements are critical for solid site design also allows you to gather a wide variety of other extremely important information that could be helpful in evaluating the success of your site and related initiatives.

Use the information gathered from your site to gauge brand awareness and effectiveness with your most valued customers and discover if your brand delivers on its promise in your customers' own words. Use feedback and listening to determine what site visitors really want from your company. If you are lucky, you might even obtain a nugget of information that becomes the source of a new service or product offering.

By listening to your site visitors, you open a channel that allows you to tap into your their hearts and minds to discover the issues that matter most to them. You will know who, when, and why visitors are coming to your site. You'll have a perfect understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your site and what changes will enhance your visitor's overall level of satisfaction. If you know there's an issue with your site's navigation, technology or content, you can deal with it. The sooner you identify a problem, the more quickly you can respond to it.

We are living in an on-demand environment and listening to what your customers have to say has never been more critical.

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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