In today’s technology and hospitality landscape, guests have easy access to almost everything they could want to know about your hotel-and one of the most impactful pieces of information they can access are online reviews about your property. From Booking.com to TripAdvisor and Hotels.com, there are lots of places where reviews about your hotel can be left for potential guests to find.
And with close to 95% of consumers reading online reviews before deciding to make a purchase, guests are paying attention.
With so many hospitality options and an abundance of information, a bad review can be the ultimate deciding factor on whether someone chooses your property or finds somewhere else to stay. In fact, you could lose up to 22% of customers if prospective buyers find even one negative article on your services. With so much riding on your online reputation, it can seem daunting trying to discern how to track feedback and ensure positive experiences. But it doesn’t have to be.
There are ways to be proactive about hotel reviews and prevent future negative ratings. By ensuring efficient service recovery, for example, you can not only get ahead of bad reviews, but raise overall guest satisfaction scores as well. And Quore has tools that can help you with just that.
How Early Complaint Resolution Helps
If you can fix an issue for a guest or resolve a complaint before they leave the hotel, you can expect better reviews.
The Harvard Business Review cites a study conducted for the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs which found that 54% of consumers facing a service problem with an estimated cost over $100 would only stay loyal to a brand if they were satisfied with a company’s resolution-and only 19% would repeat a purchase if there wasn’t a satisfactory resolution. Consumers, guests in this case, are more likely to leave a negative review if they’re not satisfied with the level of service they received.
The key to speedy resolution lies in setting realistic guest expectations, catching problems as early as possible and resolving guest complaints before they check out and head to the keyboard to leave their review. It’s backed by research! A study by Genesys found that 29% of consumers valued first contact most in interacting with customer service or customer support.
So how does this help with online reviews? On average, satisfied customers tell nine other people about their experience-and, on average, when they’re unhappy, they tell around sixteen. Translate that to the ability to quickly and easily vent excitement or grievances on review sites, and you can see the danger of letting a guest complaint go too long or go unnoticed.
Better Service Recovery, Happier Guest
In this modern age of technology, reviews aren’t the only thing made digital. Hotels can now utilize software to help better manage service recovery and decrease incidence response times.
Quore’s suite of tools provides users with data tracking and guest-complaint management that helps hotel staff better track and respond to guest issues so that complaints are taken care of swiftly. Plus, overtime, Quore’s trend analysis allows you to catch potential issues before they can happen.
With Quore, General Manager Thom Druffel and Guest Services Manager Logan A. Smith saw immediate improvements in service recovery at the Holiday Inn in Nashville. After implementing the software, they were quickly able to more accurately identify property-and department-specific data trends and respond to guest complaints swiftly, before the guest checked out.
It also allowed the hotel to spot a pervasive lighting issue that was affecting guestrooms because of Quore’s work-order tracking. Previous methods of maintenance and room-management tracking didn’t allow for this kind of analysis-everything was on slips of paper and it wasn’t easy to spot analytic trends. But new software solutions like ours allow for easy trend analysis, because all information across departments is logged in one place.
Tracking isn’t isolated to work orders either. Quore’s Complaints app allows users to track guest complaints and input details such as compensations, including rewards points or monetary values, and any notes on the issue or the guest, so you and your team can better understand the nature of guest complaints and how they’re resolved.
Once a complaint is logged a task can also be created to remind GMs to check in with the guest directly to make sure that they were satisfied with the resolution, and their stay, before they leave-and, likely, before they write a review.
The Quore system automatically creates escalations for guest-requested work orders and housekeeping needs too, to ensure priority is assigned to guest initiated tasks, reducing response times across your property or portfolio. Guest requests are placed at the top of your team’s To Do list, so you always know which tasks are most important to address in a timely fashion.
This allows properties to get a good idea of clear time frames for maintenance and guest requested needs so that when a guest requests something the team can let them know how long it will likely take and set clear, realistic guest expectations. This further helps to reduce the possibility of negative reviews, because setting realistic guest expectations goes a long way toward curating satisfactory guest experiences. When a guest gets less than they expect, they’re automatically let down, but when a guest has realistic expectations and gets what they expect-or more, for that matter-they leave happier.
Get Ahead of Things, Reduce Negative Impact
With the right tools, you can stay one step ahead of complaints and make long-lasting improvements for the future. When you stay proactive, you can improve overall service and reduce the chances of negative reviews and their impact.
Employing a software like Quore to help with trend analysis and manage and track service recovery makes it easy to see clear data and make decisions for improvement. It also allows you to set realistic guest expectations from the get-go, which goes a long way toward improving guest satisfaction overall. So, while negative feedback can make a big impact on your hotel, there are things you can do to make sure that you navigate the treacherous terrain of online reviews and come out better on the other side.
To learn more about how Quore can help your hotel, visit our website. And to find other helpful tips, case studies and industry articles, check out the rest of our blog!
