Mr. Tarasofsky

Website / Online Mechandising / SEO

Optimizing User Feedback

By Jerry Tarasofsky, CEO, iPerceptions Inc.

Your site could and should encourage feedback from your users. It makes sense to hear what people have to say. The more you listen, the sooner you can create a user experience that really connects.

Feedback is particularly important for the marketing team working on your site. They need to listen carefully to their audience. They need to understand what your users want and what they need in order to understand what upsets or pleases them. After all, if you don't know whom you are talking to, how on earth do you know what to say to them?

At the end of the day the key objective of most web sites in the hospitality sector is help boost revenues as an alternate reservation channel or to support and enhance the organizations marketing and advertising efforts as well as strengthen the organization's relationship with its customers. And because relationships are dynamic, what web site users need today to build a strong relationship with your hotel may be different from that of tomorrow.

By continuously listening to and responding to what users like and don't like about your property and/or its e-commerce media, a strong relationship is created that turns users into repeat customers and repeat customers into loyal advocates - in effect, your users become "in the trenches" visionaries for your hotel as well as advance scouts and pro bono consultants so to speak.

The key to building such loyalty is not only discovering these previously invisible connectors, but also knowing how to use them to increase the bond between the organization and the user. The deeper the bond, the greater the value each brings to the relationship, and the stronger the brand.

When organizations regard users as long-term assets, they maximize this exchange of value. By listening to users, responding to them and collaborating on what the relationship means from their point of view, an organization not only increases the web site's ROI, it gains other valuable benefits such as user advocacy, brand loyalty and trust.

With so much at stake, it seems strange to me that so many hospitality organizations pay such little attention to collecting feedback from their visitors.

If you are a smart businessperson you realize that by listening to what your web users are saying you can quickly learn who your web visitors are and collect valuable demographic information about them such as the purpose of their visit and how often they travel etc. For each of the 'communities' of your targeted customers, you can learn about their likes and dislikes and their level of overall satisfaction with your site and even your hotel. You can ask questions that reveal what they hope to accomplish on your web site. Are they there to make a reservation or to seek additional information about rates? And finally you can learn why these key-targeted communities of customers do the things they do on your site and most importantly what will bring them back to make an online reservation?

User feedback is a valuable business intelligence tool that no web site owner in the hospitality sector can ever afford to ignore. As I said earlier, it's amazing to me how many sites are created (or re-created) without anyone stopping to ask the people who really count -- the customers -- what they need. It may seem obvious but when it comes to the web, there's often a huge disparity between the site owners viewpoint of what it needs to communicate and what its audience is really looking for. A site organized by functional departments is usually useless to customers who don't care what department something's in. They just want a problem solved. On the other hand, a highly creative site might be completely wrong if your customers are looking for comparative room data, or interactive assistance in making a reservation.

So how do you find out what your users want? To begin with, you first STOP and listen to what they have to say. You need to be able to create a framework that allows you to collect the data you need.

The web offers you a unique opportunity for taking the pulse of your present guests and prospective customers. Something that is prohibitively expensive in the real world. On the web, technology allows us to automate the process of collecting user feedback so that each and every customer gets a chance to be heard -- at an extremely low cost compared to traditional marketing research methods. We know from our experience working with twenty-six of the leading brands in the hospitality sector that incoming customers who answer a few short questions can deliver valuable attitude and usage data quickly and relatively painlessly. This data, when collected and organized using a strategic framework, also acts as a benchmark against which all future web updates and changes are measured. And what is even more interesting and exciting is the ability to also move your traditional "in-room" guest satisfaction surveys online using tools that mirror your online user's experience. Imagine the information and insights you'll find when you are able to integrate online and offline research into one database.

With the growing influence of "users" in today's on-demand society, hotels must learn how to adapt and continually satisfy the need of their users if they wish to remain competitive and maintain or grow their share of market. I believe that customer feedback can be used to build and maintain a relationship between a hotel and its stakeholders and in fact, understanding, interpreting and correctly responding to this feedback is the key to successful business and solid branding. It is about a promise of assurance and a perception of future excellence that leads to establishing a solid customer relationship and ongoing user loyalty.

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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