Mr. Friedlander

Social Media & PR

How to Involve and Incentivize Your Team To Improve Online Guest Satisfaction

By R.J. Friedlander , Founder & CEO, ReviewPro

A recurring theme we see in hotels that are most popular in online guest reviews is that they make guest satisfaction a team effort. Continuously improving quality is coordinated between all departments by sharing online feedback and a plan for action. We see that the degree to which hotel executives take insights from reviews and turn this into measurable action steps for their staff is directly connected to how popular that hotel will be on the social web.

The Roger Smith Hotel in New York – widely recognized in the industry as one of the most advanced users of social technologies – understands the team effort required. Everything they do online – from creating content for publishing to selecting amenities to providing service – is coordinated among their entire staff based on guest feedback. For example, the inaugural edition of their online newspaper, The Jolly Roger, included advice on things to do in New York from the restaurant manager, director of sales, general manager, and an intern. Publishing this provides service to their customers and online audience. When it comes to online reputation management, review reporting is scheduled for key people throughout their hotel, providing a reminder to continually deliver remarkable service.

How can you involve your entire team in a similar way? Let’s look at some practical steps to get the right people involved in your guest satisfaction improvement plan.

Step 1: Establish online feedback sharing mechanisms

Create reporting systems to share guest reviews with your hotel employees. Set up alerts to notify relevant department managers of real-time information that requires a rapid response. A tool created specifically for the hotel industry, such as ReviewPro, will make this process much easier. Coordinated quality improvement requires giving the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make decisions.

Communicate success internally as part of your program to improve online reputation. Sharing positive reviews with staff helps to boost morale and keep everyone engaged in delivering their best work. This is a technique employed by citizenM Hotels – recognized by TripAdvisor as the trendiest hotel in the world in 2010 and 2011. Reviews are printed out and posted in the staff break room to constantly remind team members of the importance of online reviews to their business.

Step 2: Make operational decisions based on quantitative and qualitative review analytics

Review analytics should be used throughout a hotel team both on the quantitative and qualitative level. Quantitative analytics look at point scores (such as the 5-point rating scale at Booking.com), while qualitative analytics look at the contents of the reviews themselves. Both these measurements act as a virtual 24/7 mystery shopper to identify areas of improvement.

Quantitative analytics can provide insights into quality levels by hotel, department, or review source.

• Large brands are using review analytics to ensure their brand quality and service standards are being met by franchisees. They can compare performance with competing brands and look for opportunities to gain competitive advantage. They can make informed operational decisions based on customer feedback. They can verify brand-level marketing messages are in line with consumer perceptions, and measure brand equity to key competitor brands.
• On a group level, executives can quickly benchmark performance among properties in their portfolio to identify which are performing well and which are underperforming. They can track effectiveness of hotel management in increasing guest satisfaction over time, and compensate accordingly. (A few examples of this are mentioned later in this article.)
• On the property level, general managers can track progress in online reputation by department. They can identify areas for improvement and measure the degree of success each department manager achieves in making these improvements. They can also measure overall quality against their competitive set.
• The sales and marketing manager can use these review analytics by department to identify key competitive advantages to promote in advertising and marketing communications. Additionally, they can improve targeting by tracking levels of guest satisfaction by demographic, language, and region.
• The revenue and distribution manager can use quantitative analytics to identify trends in review sources, revealing new market opportunities or promising distribution channels.
• The director of operations can use these analytics as a “quality department in a box” (as our client Sandro Lucarini, Managing Director of Campus Cerdanya, said about ReviewPro), and prioritize actions that will make the biggest impact on online reputation.

Qualitative insights from semantic analysis also help hotel executives better understand consumer sentiment towards each aspect of the hotel that may not be revealed in quantitative analytics. Detailed insights can be gathered on aspects such as the location, view and noise levels to room size, cleanliness and quality. It is like seeing your hotel through the eyes of your guests. This provides vital insights for making operational decisions. Where is additional investment required, and what are priorities in renovation? Which departments need to hire more staff or conduct additional training?

Semantic analysis to understand sentiment can also guide marketing strategy. Instead of guessing what guests appreciate most about your hotel – and where competitive advantages exist – why not verify this with data from hundreds of sources: your customers. Apex Hotels, a group of contemporary, urban hotels in the UK, shared a recent example of this in action. While it initially seemed their food & beverage offers was a key differentiating advantage, a quick look at semantic analysis reporting revealed the location in central London was something guests appreciated the most. So their marketing team changed the direction of their communications, and began talking about all the attractions within walking distance. This new approach significantly increased the performance of their social media campaigns.

Examining trends in online guest satisfaction over time – using both quantitative and qualitative analytics - is a powerful way to engage key people throughout your organization.

Step 3: Reward performance with financial incentives

If online reputation is going to be a priority for your organization, think of creative ways to incentivize your team in this area. Tie compensation to performance. Apex Hotels, mentioned earlier, has an incentive program in place to reward staff for online reviews that mention the staff member by name. This encourages each team member to deliver remarkable, memorable service.

Melia Hotels International takes this concept to an even larger scale. A portion of the yearly bonus given to managers is tied to the Global Review IndexTM (GRI) created by ReviewPro to provide a single benchmarking score of online quality. Here again, linking performance to compensation signals your organization is serious about online reputation as a strategically important initiative.

Because ReviewPro’s Global Review IndexTM is comprised of quality scores from reviews in more than 65 of the most relevant traveler review websites, it is rapidly becoming the industry benchmark of online quality and guest satisfaction. Managers at more than 2,000 hotels worldwide are now viewing the GRI as one of their most important measures of business success, since online reviews are impacting everything from average daily rates to occupancy rates to guest loyalty.

Tying it all together

Whether the size of your organization requires one person to manage this activity, or you assemble an entire reputation management task force, improving online guest satisfaction must involve everyone within the organization.

Strategy typically begins at the executive level, and then requires a coordinator to oversee implementation. Something crucial to setup is department-specific reporting, so that insights gathered from review analytics can be used by each manager to increase performance. A program that impacts revenue and performance on a large scale requires a team effort, so make sure to set up the systems you need to make this happen.

R.J. Friedlander is the founder and CEO of ReviewPro. The company enables hoteliers to increase guest satisfaction and increase revenue by proactively managing their online reputation and presence in leading social media Websites. This is achieved by providing clients the analysis, customer intelligence, competitive benchmarking and automated reporting needed to help them more effectively manage their organizations. The companies solution is designed to serve the needs of individual hotel operators, multi-establishment chains and asset managers. Mr. Friedlander can be contacted at +34 93 451 0454 or rfriedlander@reviewpro.com Extended Bio...

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