Making mistakes is all right, and in fact, you should commit mistakes in order to learn and rectify them.
But sometimes even a minute goof-up can demolish your credibility, resulting in the loss of existing as well as prospective customers. Thus comes into play the hotel direct feedback which a lot of hotels use these days for customer retention and improved revenue. Most of the dissatisfied customers won’t tell you about a bad experience at your Hotel property. Instead, they will talk about it with other people, further hampering your hotel business’s growth.
Therefore it becomes crucial to register your customer’s feedback for multiple reasons.
When you ask for a customer’s feedback, it shows that you care about your guests. This is an important Customer Touch point. It makes them feel important, thereby strengthening the customer relationship.
This is one of the strategies to gain the trust of the customers, and convert them into returning clients by joining your customer loyalty programs.
Secondly, you cannot keep a vigil on each and every aspect of your hotel business. A customer’s perspective can reveal shortcomings or furnish new ideas to add value to your hotel business. Customer feedback assists in combating these situations and there are with technological advancements, hotel feedback management software is easily available to hotel managers.
Now that you know the importance of customer feedback, it’s time to discuss the ways of streamlining the procedure of collecting customer feedback. Once you have inducted these strategies to improvise customer feedback procedure, you will collect better responses, necessary to take your hotel business to new heights.
Check out the following strategies and implement them as soon as possible.
The Art of Preparing Questionnaires
While the hotel feedback software can give you all templates for feedback forms, hotel managers still need to personalise them for better results.
The feedback is all about extracting relevant information from the clients.
Now it’s up to you to decide what’s “relevant” for you, whether you want feedback on staff services, food & beverages, or availed facilities.
The aim is to obtain unbiased information so that you can improvise accordingly.
You can either ask clients to simply jot down their overall experiences or you can prepare a set of questions, the latter being preferable.
While preparing a questionnaire, ensure it is short and crisp.
The customer is not willing to spend more than a few minutes on the feedback. Besides preparing a concise feedback form, you can consider the following recommendations as well:
- Include a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions, the former allows customers to elaborate whereas the latter has a limited scope of answering.
- A set of multiple-choice questions assists customers in choosing a relevant answer, without stressing too much about writing a suitable response.
- Focus on asking objective questions that can be answered in a couple of lines, where the customer can decipher the query by simply glancing at the question.
Making customer feedback an Integral Part of the Brand Experience
Availing feedback should be an inevitable component of your hotel business operations.
You should consider it an opportunity to enhance customer experience, by making it an integral aspect of the brand experience.
You can either ask customers to fill out printed feedback forms or simply connect with them via an online medium. The former allows you to register customers’ views while they are present on the premises.
The online ways of availing feedback, such as sending survey forms via emails, render freedom to the customers to fill out the forms at their convenience.
You can automate and organize the complete procedure by using hotel-related software deployed for managing various business operations.
Instead of boring and complicated survey forms, create and send visually-appealing forms, comprising less text and more visuals. Blend in different colors to make it attractive. In addition to this, feedback forms should be responsive and mobile-compatible.
Know How Much to Ask for
You cannot ask a person, who came for dinner, to devote 15 minutes to fill a feedback form. But you can ask a customer, who spent a week in your hotel, to fill out this form.
Prepare feedback forms according to the customer experience, keeping into consideration the duration of stay, nature of stay, type of services availed, and so on.
You can maintain the records in the customer feedback software, and it will automatically generate and send feedback forms to the customers.
Let the Hotel Customers express themselves
Setting up a predefined list of close-ended questions may confine the scope of availing desired information.
It’s better to create a questionnaire that allows customers to write open-ended comments. A customer is able to describe his or her experience in an elaborate manner when given the independence to do so.
Once you have received feedback with exhaustive information, you can deploy text analytics technology to determine KPIs that influence the customer experience.
Conclusion
Returning customers at your hotel property are willing to spend more than new customers. Incorporate these strategies to deliver a seamless feedback experience to the customers arriving at your hotel.
If you are willing to respect and implement customers’ views and preferences, you will become a fully-fledged, customer-oriented hotel, thereby gaining credibility and generating higher revenues in the long run.
And with technology everywhere, good hotel feedback management software is easier to find than it has been ever before.
