The Revinate Blog

Understanding Voice of the Customer Data

It is widely known that online review feedback has become critical to the success of hotels and resorts. Users' reviews are not only influencing other travelers' booking decisions but are now informing management practices at the property level. While negative feedback is being leveraged for training and retraining programs, positive feedback is feeding into employee recognition programs. In fact, guest reviews might be the most powerful data a hotel has at its disposal, yet it’s often not utilized to its fullest potential. 

If you are already a Revinate client, you have access to one of the most powerful solutions for understanding guest sentiment; it’s called Sentiment Analysis. This sentiment analysis assigns a positive, neutral or negative score to everything that your guests have written about you. The analysis not only shows you your property's overall sentiment scores - which include numerous drilled down categories of feedback, as seen in this example - but also offers insight into how each of your competitive set hotels are faring when it comes to online reviews.

You can imagine then why this tool is so important. By having the ability to report quantitatively about feedback that is unequivocally qualitative, you eliminate the impossibly unapproachable property-level task of manually digesting countless reviews and then telling your boss, without a sliver of doubt, what percentage of people think positively about your beds or check-out process, for example. To ensure that you have this data, Revinate partners with widely renowned Clarabridge to provide their fully integrated technology solution into our platform. As 7-year industry veterans working with companies such as Disney, Microsoft, and Walmart, they are truly market leaders, capable of understanding customer sentiment across a wide array of industries. We were lucky enough to have John Armstrong, partner director at Clarabridge, with us for our recent webinar.  

How Clarabridge has become such a widely recognized thought leader in the customer experience management (CEM) analytics space (or otherwise referred to as VOC, or the voice of the customer) is largely due, as Armstrong pointed out, to the company's beginnings. Recognizing a need for better unstructured data analytics around what customers were saying about and to companies, Clarabridge early on placed a heavy emphasis on making a powerful concept of  “text analytics” business user friendly.  After years of heavy research and development investment, the company has perfected the process of understanding syntax and context through their natural language processing (NLP) engine. 

In the hospitality space, this patented NLP solution allows us to capture and interpret the customer experience in a very interesting way. For example, by breaking down each review and parsing out within each sentence the incomplete clauses, the solution can understand which words are linguistically related to other words and, in turn, allows for facts to be accurately extracted. The solution's structured data joiner is able to analyze the unstructured text - to look at all the comments that are positive, negative and neutral - and help understand where the comments are coming from and which topics are most popular.

Once the data is processed, Clarabridge's hospitality suite allows us to understand what topics users are talking about and who is saying what in a variety of languages, setting the stage for assigning customer sentiment at a very granular level. Going back to the previous sentence example - "the beds were soft and the manager was kind" - there are a variety of modifiers and negators that, when included in the context of a review, can change the sentiment scoring of a particular topic. There are close to 500 of these exception rules as Armstrong pointed out in our webinar, and are constantly being looked at and added to the platform as they arise. This eleven-point spectrum of hypothetical customer sentiment analysis is shown below.

It is interesting to note that, outside of the hospitality context, the same words can take on divergent meanings - depending on the industry or data set context. For example, the word thin in the hospitality bed category is usually associated as a negative term (e.g. thin bedroom walls, thin sheets). However, in the hardware category in the technology space, the word takes on a positive association. This enlightening differentiation between industries demonstrates that there is a subjective element at play here when scoring sentiment, as not all words can resolutely take on a positive or negative connotation.

To account for this, Revinate customers have the capability, when this finite sentiment scoring isn't definitively black or white, to tune the positive, neutral or negative score assigned to a score that is more accurately reflective given the entire context of the review. Knowing that a hotel review typically speaks to a wide variety of topics and can wildly vary in sentiment for each respectively, Clarabridge's natural language processing scores each of these moments throughout a review before assigning an overall sentiment score to it. 

The beauty of this entire sentiment analysis process is that it yields action-based results that are helpful for any size of hotel property. Irrespective of the review volume that your hotel may receive, the ability to isolate and interpret the numerous topics being addressed in your reviews - both current and historic - is hugely valuable. This feedback can be used by just about anyone on the property-level, from the Front Desk Manager to the Director of Human Resources, and shared just as easily, with both staff internally and across social media.

As evidenced by many of the success stories that our clients have shared with us, sentiment data has become critical for implementing operational changes for property-level employees and ownership groups alike. At the property-level, one client is using the data in department training sessions, taking all review mentions about their Concierge team and creating hypothetical scenarios that have been chronicled in online reviews. From an ownership perspective, a second hotel client has presented pages of asset-related review data to their owners in support of their case for capital improvement investments. Uniformly, it is evident that taking a proactive look at your review sentiment score will only augment the operational successes your hotel is currently enjoying and is a painless task worth actioning on a consistent basis.

The Guest Satisfaction Survey Blind Spot

Last night I caught up on a Cornell Hospitality Industry Perspectives titled, ‘Making Customer Satisfaction Pay: Connecting Survey Data to Financial Outcomes in the Hotel Industry’.  As the title suggests, the research finds a correlation between guest satisfaction and financial performance. Said another way, happy customers do come back, and they often spend more money on their next trip.

    “The survey proves that customer satisfaction directly bears on repeat purchases and on the likelihood of making recommendations.”

While I wasn’t too surprised with the findings of the study, I was happy that the study had been done so I can defend the importance of monitoring and tracking guest feedback as it can predict future bookings. But more so, I was fascinated by something else the authors wrote about how this information is often requested:

    “Hotel comment cards provide a quick and easy way to generate feedback. But they typically     obtain low response rates, provide anonymous feedback, and often lack important details for     analysis such as the date of the stay.”

I can only image how much money the hotel industry as a whole is spending to measure guest satisfaction. With more than 15 years of product marketing experience, I absolutely believe in feedback and actionable data, but I am starting to question the vehicle with which many hotels acquire this data.

While satisfaction surveys have moved to the Web, the methodology seems to have remained the same for many years. I recently looked at a hotel satisfaction survey and there was no way that I was going to complete it without the prospect of winning an ipad factory. Why? In the age of social media, the surveys seem archaic to me. For one, social media has trained me, for good or bad, to do things quickly. I check in. I tweet in 140 characters. I update my status. I no longer have the patience to consider how I feel about tens of different amenities and services. It’s no wonder that response rates are low.

Second, I want to provide my feedback my way.  What I mean by that is that I want to comment on things that made my stay exceptional or disappointing. I don’t want to comment on things that didn’t stand out in my mind. If my check-in was smooth and I didn’t have to wait, my expectations are met and I don’t feel the need to report on it. But I do want to tell the hotel that in the elevator going up to my room an exceptional staff-member told me about a great new restaurant that opened up down the street and offered to make a reservation for me. I want to report that when I ‘checked in’ on Foursquare the concierge found me in the lobby and offered to buy me a drink. Entering these stories in a comment card seems useless since it’s clear that these are quantitative tools looking for aggregate data.

This freedom of expression is why sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor are becoming so popular.  I read hundreds of reviews every day and most people are like me. They like to mention the details that make a hotel stay special or disappointing.  They don’t want to fill in holes about the mundane. They want to tell stories. And hotels need to read, and learn from, these stories.

I don’t think that guest satisfaction surveys are going away any time soon. Every hotel has already deeply operationalized GSS measurement and it has become a critical data source by which hotels are measured and operational decisions are based.  Executive bonuses can hinge on the results, as can branding. That said, I do think that hotels absolutely need to supplement their survey cards with a program to manage and track information from online reviews.

Why? For one, traditional guest satisfaction surveys are a very private affair. The survey cards are kept locked away and the results are only discussed internally.  However, it’s the public online reviews that are actually driving bookings and brand - - not traditional surveys. If brands don’t pay attention to what guests are saying about them publicly and engage in the conversations, they are missing out on potential sales and branding opportunities.

The good news is that many hotels are already managing online reviews, either manually or with hosted software solutions. But too many hotels are still ignoring this feedback channel.  The ones that move now and operationalize these metrics will be at a significant market advantage when the rest of the industry catches up. In such a highly competitive marketplace, where everyone is looking for an edge, this information channel is a massive area of opportunity for hotels. And once hotels start paying attention to this vast, free and public source, I don’t think they will ever go back as it’s like seeing color in a black and white world.

Business Intelligence Platform for Hoteliers

When I first started working in the hospitality industry, I was constantly searching for terms that I had never heard before. 'rev PAR', 'OTA', 'ADR'... As I dove into the language of hotels and learned more about the challenges associated with the industry, I realized how important it is to have vertical solutions such as Revinate. Why? Hoteliers have very unique challenges and needs. Very few industries are winning and losing sales as a result of online reviews to the degree that hotels are.

This industry demands customized solutions. The value chain consists of owners, asset managers, brands, management companies, and hotel operators to name a few. All these folks need data presented through their specific lenses/functions. Companies that aren't laser focused on hotels can't give every constituent what it needs.

Hoteliers across the value chain need to know how the public perceives their hotels and their competitors. They need a platform to engage with their influencers and see whether the effort pays off. They need to know how their reviews are effecting their market ranking. They need to track their success on Facebook and Twitter and know how new hotel programs and policies are working. But how do you characterize a software solution that does all that?

At a briefing last week with Forrester Analyst, Henry Harteveldt, we saw our solution through the fresh eyes of the travel industry's leading expert. In the first few minutes of seeing Revinate, Henry said, "it's Business Intelligence that you're selling." We have been grappling with our 'category' for a while because we do more than a listening platform or a social media monitoring platform. We are also way bigger and more powerful than a data aggregation service.

I love the idea of being a 'business intelligence' provider for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, we do provide business intelligence. We like to think of our solution as the next generation of Guest Satisfaction. We can tell you, on any given day, what people are saying about your hotel and how you stack up against your comp set on dozens of different measurements that impact customer loyalty and sales. Hospitality is an industry that's already adopted and operationalized traditional Guest Satisfaction Surveys as a critical data source. Today, with online reviews impacting booking and brand more than other other factor, Revinate is as critical, if not more critical than traditional GSS.

Second, no one likes to take risks, especially in this economy. Business Intelligence gives you the data you need to make informed decisions. Our customers have used the data in Revinate to determine whether they need to refurbish rooms, or change parking rates or the internet policy, to name just a few uses.

Third, the hospitality industry likes to standardize on solutions. Just look at the Smith Travel Research (STR) Report as an example of a solution that has been adopted by virtually every hotel. The STR report is a quantitative report showing hotels how they benchmark against each other across key operating metrics. Revinate's goal is go deeper by providing qualititative data in addition to quantitative data, allowing hotels to know how people feel about their properties vis a vis their comp set, city, market, segment or brand.

Finally, and most importantly, business intelligence isn't something that's just used by one department, such as PR or Web. It's something that benefits every department across all organizations. So here's to Revinate, Business Intelligence solutions for hoteliers.