Mr. MacKenzie

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

How To Choose A Digital Listening Tool to Gather (And Act On) Guest Feedback

By Josiah MacKenzie, Founder, Gradigio Group

Online guest feedback is one of the biggest opportunities hotel companies have today for improving product quality and maximizing revenue. Yet too many hotel executives do not have the adequate supporting technology to take advantage of this opportunity. This article will provide some criteria to help you select a tool that fits your needs.

As a busy professional, you can use your limited time going from website to website to see what your customers are saying about your hotels. Or, you can use technology do the data collection and focus your attention on taking action on the feedback you receive. Today, the best providers in this category go beyond just aggregating guest feedback, and are focused on creating analytics that provide deeper insights into feedback on the social web. These business analytics support a wide range of hotel management decisions in the areas of sales and marketing, quality and operations, guest loyalty, and revenue and distribution.

To identify the right solution for your situation, consider the following questions when evaluating products on the market.

What data types does the tool aggregate and index?

Reputation software must collect a broad range of both qualitative and quantitative data to be truly useful. The best tools make data depth and quality a priority, and are designed to continually index information from a wide range of sources.

Collecting reviews from just a handful of the top review sites means you will miss opportunities. The web is all about the “long tail” of information – and a lot of travel discussion happens on niche sites catering to people in specific regions or with similar interests. These smaller travel review communities may be very influential in someone’s buying decision, and cannot be ignored. You must be quickly aware of any mention of your hotel, regardless of where it is posted.

What is the international coverage?

What websites, languages, and countries does the software collect data from?

Travel marketing is becoming increasingly international. Whether you are managing a single property or a large portfolio of hotels, true international support is crucial. There are a vast number of regional OTAs and hotel review sites that are major sources of information for millions of travelers. These are both country-specific like Holidaycheck in Germany or Atrapalo in Spain – and also region-specific like Venere, Laterooms, Holidaycheck, Zoover, and Minube in Europe.

Will the tool you are considering support data collection from all relevant sources?

Does the company have the right development team in place?

A focus on engineering and development will ensure the tool will grow with your organization and adapt to market changes. Because this industry is evolving so rapidly, you need a partner development team that can keep up and keep you ahead of the curve.

When considering a partnership with a hotel reputation management software provider, try to determine their development philosophy – as well as their product roadmap for the future. How do they decide on new product features? Will they continue to innovate quickly?

Also ask if their developers work from the company headquarters or if product development is outsourced. Outsourcing works in some cases, but better results are usually obtained through a committed in-house team. Close communication between developers, account managers, executives and people from your organization is important for providing you with the best possible product.

What type of training and support is offered?

As with any new tool or technology, internal adoption may require a substantial amount of training. Make sure that the software company you partner with offers a strong training program, providing support and assistance along the way.

Try to find a tool that allows you to generate usage reports by user – so you can identify which of your team members might need more training to get the most possible benefit from the software.

The best companies will have a strong focus on education. Not only during the customer onboarding process, but consistently as the months go by. Things change so rapidly in this area that you need someone to stay on the forefront of innovation and teach you how to profit from changes in travel behavior. Ask: Does the tool enable communication and collaboration among staff members?

Effective digital communications today requires involvement from all departments. You need a tool that encourages this, and makes the process simple and straightforward. Participating on the social web is much more than just a function of the marketing or PR department. Insights you gather from guest feedback online can be used among the management team and can also help front-line staff do their jobs more effectively.

But for this to work, you need software that can share insights and reports among team members. Make sure the tool you select provides position and role-specific reporting functionality – and the ability to share these insights with colleagues.

Is a powerful workflow system integrated?

In keeping with the point above, it is very helpful if the tool provides full workflow functionality. When a general manager receives an online review, she needs to be able to assign it to the appropriate team member for resolution, pass along any additional information, and then track the progress of that issue to completion.

Ideally, this will be more than just an “e-mail review” feature. It’s easiest if you can work within a dashboard that tracks progress of each item.

Will it keep my team engaged?

Does the tool you are considering offer the ability to export reports in an attractive fashion? Can you print out data for your weekly meetings that instantly communicates the online status of your hotels? Can you schedule email notifications to everyone – from general management to quality and operations to sales and marketing to revenue and distribution?

Make sure you can share information with staff members that need to be aware of guest feedback and satisfaction performance, but are unlikely to enter the application to look for the data themselves. For some members of your executive team, these external reports may be all they need. Maybe they don’t need to be checking a dashboard daily to see what online reviews have been received, but they do need to see the overall trends and actions that must be taken in their departments.

Ease of accessing the data is important to keep everyone using the tool. If something is too complicated, people will avoid it, and the tool will be useless. The user interface of the tool itself plays a role in keeping everyone engaged, but especially important is the ability to provide reporting for people who do not have the time or desire to login to the program.

Does it support true semantic analysis?

Semantic analysis is becoming increasingly important in the field of online reputation management. You need a tool that can gauge guest sentiment and allow you to act accordingly.

Semantic analysis is more than just a tool for reputation – it has powerful applications in marketing and operations.

For marketing, you can determine which parts of the guest experience are most attractive to your guests, and promote these in your communication. From an operational standpoint, semantic analysis helps you understand which parts of the hotel experience is most important to guests and make sure that investment goes into enhancing those areas. You can also identify any trouble spots and improve quality in the areas that need it most.

Will it help me attract new business?

Try to find a tool that helps you use the reviews it collects to attract more reservations. This can be done easily for individual sources, but the key is to collect reviews from dozens of sources and post the overall aggregate guest opinion of your hotel.

Customer confidence is increased by social proof. Posting a review summary like this on your website helps verify hotel quality, and makes visitors feel it is not risky to make a booking.

Special Considerations for Large Hotel Groups

Selecting the right tool to monitor and manage social media communication for a large group of hotels requires some additional special considerations:

Can the tool analyze data by groups and brands?

In managing a large portfolio of hotels, you need to be able to compare individual hotels, specific groups, and brands with each other and make assessments regarding their performance. This affects a number of areas:

1. Quality improvement – Will you be able to establish specific improvement goals for online reputation by property and track performance towards achieving these goals?
   
2. Accountability – Will you have a way to link a hotel’s online reputation performance to the hotel directors’ bonuses to align corporate objectives with guest satisfaction?
   
3. Competitive insights – Will you have the ability to gather competitive insights for each of these levels?

Especially for ownership companies and larger organizations, the ability to track hotels within a group is important for many management and investment decisions.

Does the workflow system support the needs of large organizations?

Large organizations face unique challenges when it comes to operations management.

While simplistic workflow may work at a small property, it can be exponentially more complicated when dealing with a large portfolio of hotels.

As mentioned earlier in this article, you need to look for the ability to delegate items, pass along support information, and then track the progress in resolution of each issue. Ensure the tool you choose is robust enough to support the simultaneous management of hundreds or thousands of issues at once.

Does it support the needs of each department manager?

Department reports combined with detailed competitive benchmarking can help to identify areas of improvement, set progress objectives and measure whether your goals are being achieved.

Make sure the reports generated are not too generic, and instead focus on relevant information that each department manager can use and succeed with.

Does the tool integrate well with my existing technology?

If you work in a large organization, chances are good the company has invested substantially in technology infrastructure already. You need a social media reputation tool that syncs well with these existing systems.

Tools on the forefront of innovation in this area offer the ability to import and export data between their tool and your existing software systems. This is important, as it can help you make pricing decisions that affect your profitability. You can compare guest satisfaction scores with historical pricing data and maximize profitability.

In closing…

Selecting a tool that meets the criteria outlined in this article will allow you to spend less time looking for the reviews, and more time interpreting, analyzing, and acting on them. By listening to guests and taking action based on their feedback, you will increase guest satisfaction and maximize revenue. This is the fastest route to gaining competitive advantage and market share.

Josiah MacKenzie is the founding owner and marketing brain of the Gradigio Group, a San Francisco-based collection of media properties catering to the hospitality industry around the globe. He also has roles in other ventures, with business interests in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia. Mr. Mackenzie has published over 100 articles, and has appeared in the Washington Post, MSNBC.com, and Entrepreneur magazine. His new book, The Savvy Hotelier's Guide to Hotel Marketing Ideas, reveals over 1,000 of the most profitable marketing tactics used by hotels. Mr. MacKenzie can be contacted at 415-671-6235 or josiah@gradigio.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.