A few years back, Gartner reported that collecting guest feedback can increase upselling and cross-selling success rates by 15% to 20%. In that same report, they found that guest feedback can also help decrease the cost of retaining those buyers.
Obtaining feedback from your guests is a critical part of understanding and growing your revenues. Offering you direct visibility into your guest’s preferences, implementing a feedback program can give you the tools to tailor your hotel to your guest’s unique needs and improve revenues.
With a plethora of industries starting to integrate real-time feedback programs into their business strategies, it’s becoming a vital tool for staying ahead of trends and on top of guest satisfaction. In this blog post, we explore the range of benefits that can come from a successful feedback program, in addition to looking at ways you can implement it to drive optimal results.
The Benefits Of Obtaining Guest Feedback
As mentioned, a feedback program when leveraged correctly can provide any hotel with a number of benefits. From increased revenue to more motivated teams, here, we outline a few of the top benefits.
Feedback Can Help You Deliver The Best Experience
A successful feedback program can give you the tools to provide the best experience and cater to niches you may not be aware of within your guest persona. Whether you use a self-serve platform or simply ask a guest their opinion, listening to what your guests have to say can give you the information you need to better cater to them.
Say, for example, if a significant number of guests prefer vegan food, you can adjust menus or options available to future guests. This will provide greater variety for these guests when they dine at your restaurant, leading to a more pleasant stay and deterring them from finding another establishment that does cater to their vegan diet.
Feedback Streamlines Operations
With feedback from your guests, you can gain insight into team member performance and the overall quality of operations. If room service delays are frequent during busy weekends and impacting the perception of service by a significant number of guests,, a feedback program can bring it to your attention and help you resolve the issue to improve upon the overall experience.
Feedback can also bring your attention to overachieving and underperforming team members. By getting feedback that highlights the quality of service your team is providing, you can have meetings with certain individuals or teams to improve performance. If it’s an overall team issue, you can additionally hold regular team training sessions so your employees are always performing their best.
Further, if your feedback solution includes analytic capabilities to read comments and determine trends, you can be more focused on what matters most. Training can be an expensive element of hotel operations and understanding the service issues driving the greatest degree of guest dissatisfaction allows you to be more focused. Being more strategic in what training needs to be deployed means less time and money being spent on comprehensive training programs, something your team members and budget will both appreciate.
Feedback Motivates Teams
Team members want to feel valued at work and they want to know that the work they are doing is actually serving a purpose. By obtaining feedback on a job well done and sharing it with team members you encourage them to continually strive towards delivering the best service. In addition, sharing negative feedback from a guest can help isolate areas where they can improve upon their skills.
If you implement a strong real-time feedback platform, you can even showcase team member performance immediately after a guest rates the experience. This gamifies the experience in real-time and allows them to make right of a bad situation.
Feedback Can Help You Become More Personal With The Guest
A highly used tactic for engaging guests is personalizing the entire experience. This is because, over the years, personalization has proven to retain guests and build a stronger relationship between brand and guest.
Personalisation involves understanding each guest and their unique needs and then adjusting each aspect of their stay to fulfill those needs. Using a guest feedback program can help you gain insight directly from the guest so you can personalize their stay accurately. What’s more, if a guest uses their name or room number during submission, your team can take note and use those preferences during future stays to ensure long-term loyalty.
Obtaining feedback clearly has some major benefits which can directly impact your bottom line. However, when implementing your program, there is a lot to consider to drive those optimal results.
If you’re thinking of implementing a feedback platform in your hotel, here are some simple steps you can take to drive a successful program.
How You Can Start Receiving More Feedback
Encourage Guests To Use Feedback Devices
It’s common sense that in order to obtain feedback, your guests have to be giving it. A successful program starts by encouraging guests to actively provide feedback.
The first step to achieving this is by making the process to submit feedback simple. Questions should be easy to answer, surveys should be available on the device of the guest’s choice, and they should be able to submit feedback at any touch point in their journey. The easier it is for guests to submit feedback, the more likely they will do so. Further, the more feedback they provide, the more data you acquire to better analyze your hotel operations.
In addition to making the process simple, you can encourage guests by having your team actively engaging them about the service. If a guest is checking into your hotel, have the front desk mention how vital their feedback is and how they can submit feedback at any point of their stay. This breaks the ice, making the guest feel more comfortable and more likely that they will submit feedback.
Test Out Different Areas
In the management of a hotel, you probably know that there are key areas of your establishment that get more traction with guests than others. Spaces like the concierge desk, the restaurant, conference areas, gym, or near entrances and exits are all areas that guests gravitate towards.
When implementing a feedback platform into your establishment it’s important to pilot key areas of your hotel so you can obtain the most data from your guests. As a best practice, try switching locations every 2-3 weeks, once you’ve tested your most used areas, look at your data, and leave the collateral or method of feedback gathering like a kiosk at those most used spaces.
Implement Feedback In Real-Time
When looking for a platform or method to receive feedback, look for one that can give you results from guests in real-time. With a real-time feedback platform, you can make changes and identify at-risk guests immediately. This ensures that all guest issues are resolved promptly before reaching social channels and increasing the likelihood of the guest returning in addition to improving your Net Promoter Score.
Leverage Technology
Branching off of the last point, implementing a program that is technology based is critical to not only receive feedback within seconds of submission, something that can take weeks with paper-based methods, but also to manage and analyze data after the fact. With a provider like Benbria, you can leverage multiple online and on-site feedback gathering tools within the Loop Pulse™ suite. Whether you want to use a public podium or countertop touchscreen kiosk, add quick surveys to your mobile app, or web surveys guests simply access via text or a website, providing a variety of means can help you measure every critical point in their journey.
With a superior feedback platform, you’ll be able to collect data from multiple locations on an hourly, shift, and daily basis. This allows you to understand current trends and issues, so you can immediately identify what is needed to improve service delivery and operations.
For many industries, implementing a feedback program is becoming the tried and true way of delivering an exceptional guest experience. Whether you choose to ask in person or have a feedback platform in place, having that insight will help drive guest loyalty and earn greater revenues.
