Thank you to everyone who joined us for our most recent free webinar on Reviews and Online Reputation Management best practices. We have held this webinar several times this year, and each time the content has been updated and well-received by attendees. As we do after every session, we are providing you with both the webinar slide presentation as well as video recording so that you can review the material covered. The assets are below:
Thank you everyone for joining us for our webinar yesterday. Also, we'd like to say a special thank you to buuteeqfor co-hosting the session with us. In case you missed the webinar, here is a recording of the presentation, a copy of the deck used and a compilation of Twitter notes.
If you have any questions about buuteeq's digital marketing services, please email info@buuteeq.com.
Also, please subscribe to the blog for more tips on how to manage your hotel or brand's online reputation and social media presence.
Finally, please take advantage of all the free content that we develop for hoteliers by visiting our Best Practices page and signing up for future Webinars with us. And, if you liked what you saw and would like pricing information or want to learn more about Revinate, please let us know by e-mailing info@revinate.com.
Just a few years ago, hotels relied on a manager’s close
watch and traditional guest satisfaction surveys to uncover which employees made
a difference in a guest’s stay. Today, with the popularity of reviews and
social media, employees that go the extra mile are easily surfaced in guest
comments and in social media posts. Because of the transparency of online
reviews, hotel staff is more aware of their impact on guest satisfaction and
many hotels are experiencing a surge of great service.
Unlike traditional satisfaction surveys, online review sites
and OTAs allow consumers to write free-form reviews, rather than requiring them
to rate topics most important to the hotel. As a result, consumer reviews tend
to be about the topics most important to them. When it comes to positive reviews,
guests tend to write about the staff-members that exceeded their expectations.
For example, I recently wrote a 5-star review for W Hollywood and said, “If
you’re used to great service, you won’t be disappointed at this hotel. A
special shout out to Zachary, the concierge, who is amazing at his job.”
In many morning stand-up meetings, General Managers are
recognizing these employees in front of their peers and applauding their work. Human
Resource Directors are printing and taping up online reviews that mention staff
members by name or title in back rooms. And, spot bonuses or rewards are often
provided as extra incentive to line employees who go the extra mile and are
written about when guests share their experiences online.
While not typically described as adaptive to change, the
hospitality industry has done a tremendous job adopting this new method of guest
feedback. Online review sites were originally created as a consumer platform
for sharing travel experiences but today are being used by savvy hoteliers to
uncover great performance and areas for operational improvement.
Entire companies, like Revinate, have been created to make the analysis of online
reviews as simple and user-friendly as possible. Using sentiment analysis
technology, hoteliers can drill down into dozens of categories and related topics
to isolate just the snippet of a review that discusses a certain topic, such as
housekeeping, check-in, or spa. Drilling down into the details is critical
since overall review scores only help you understand overall guest sentiment. But
while a guest might give your hotel four stars and be satisfied overall with
his experience, he might have been disappointed by the laundry service and
valet. When you spend the time to understand what guests don’t like, you have
the opportunity to improve your business and improve your ratings, which we
know thanks to a Cornell University study released in November, 2012, effect
bookings.
And, when it comes to employee performance, no tool is as
useful to a GM than sentiment analysis for holding departments accountable for
performance and ensuring departments are recognized for great service. In
addition to being able to set goals around the percentage of positive mentions,
sentiment analysis allows management to see trends and whether operational
changes are making a difference in the eyes of guests. And, since most people
write reviews shortly after their stay and analysis is done in real-time, you
can measure success in real time, which is quite a change from the days of
traditional guest surveys.
If you haven’t yet created a culture of caring about online
reviews at your hotel, there’s no time like the present to begin. Online
reviews are free to access, sentiment analysis tools pay for themselves in time
saved, and when employees know reviews are being closely watched at the
management and brand level, you are sure to see an uptick in warm smiles,
attentive gestures and personnel that go the extra mile.
This week, TripAdvisor announced new property dashboard features, which are
available to all business-listing subscribers. According to TripAdvisor, the
property dashboard, accessible via TripAdvisor’s Management Center, “highlights
the key metrics you need to measure your property’s day-to-day performance,”
including competitor metrics, local market trends, cumulative page views and
more. The review site published an extensive guide on this new
functionality, which is worth a read.
What we find most valuable about the new property dashboard
is the additional insight into your page visitors that it provides. This
information should not only inform your special offer strategies for the site,
but it provides hard data when evaluating your online reputation management and
distribution efforts. As social marketing and revenue management converge,
review site data will mutually benefit everyone’s revenue optimization efforts.
Here are some property dashboard highlights:
Visits to Page: This
report allows you to analyze traffic to your page over time. With the influence
of TripAdvisor in the booking process, this data will allow you to see which
periods of the year see higher bookings driven by TripAdvisor, compare performance
from one period to the next, and benchmark traffic changes after a listing
change has been made. It’s important to note that if your property doesn’t meet
the requisite review threshold, the report won’t be available.
Your Visitors: This
data offers demographic information about visitors to your listing. This
intelligence can help you better identify your target market, create a special
offer that is more relevant to your audience, and determine the average length
of stay of your guests.
Your Competitors: This
overview provides a comparison look of your business listing versus your
competitors. This perspective allows you to see how your special offers and
photos compare to other properties in your competitive set. TripAdvisor defines
your comp set as the two properties above you on the Popularity Index and the
one below you.
Your City: This
report shows you the number of TripAdvisor visitors researching your location
each week. This information is useful because, by comparing your ‘visits to
page’ data with ‘your city’ statistics, you can determine your property’s
virtual market share of search.
Snapshot: This
final report provides you with very basic, high-level information about your
hotel’s business listing – total number of reviews and management responses as
well as overall ranking and rating. For a more granular look at review volume,
ranking and sentiment, Revinate customers should rely on Revinate’s online reputation dashboard.
As a proud TripAdvisor
partner, we applaud TripAdvisor’s release and know that it will provide a lot
of value to business-listing customers. While TripAdvisor is the largest review
site, hotels must pay attention to all reviews submitted by travelers.
Accordingly, Revinate allows hoteliers to access and analyze comprehensive
review data across dozens of review sites and OTAs. Clients have access to
in-depth analytics about their properties and self-defined competitive sets.
Revinate customers also benefit from accessing sentiment analysis reports,
which segment and score specific review topics (e.g. housekeeping) and
benchmark those scores against each competitor.
Nevertheless, TripAdvisor’s new dashboard is a useful tool in the hotelier’s
toolbox and, when used in conjunction with Revinate, can make online reputation
management even easier.
The part of my job that I cherish the most is talking to hoteliers about their experiences with social media and online review sites. Because I have always been a prolific review writer and reader, I love to see the other side of the coin and I often marvel at how a consumer platform has become such a powerful source of information for businesses.
Today, a client who recently saw me speak at a conference about responding to reviews came to me with a challenging problem. He wrote:
I have a guest who was highly intoxicated upon
departure (and during the stay) even making some lewd remarks to our
Front Desk Staff. Upon departure, he did not check out, but
rather walked away. During the room check, we found that a hairdryer was
missing from the room so the guest was charged for
this item.
You
mentioned that I can inform TripAdvisor of guest names if they threaten to write a bad review, as a form of blackmail. This
guest said that he will write a bad review if we do not refund the
money. I looked for it on Tripadvisor, but couldn’t find it. Can you
please advise me? Also, if he does write a review, are we allowed to say that he was “highly intoxicated upon departure?
Since you don't want a negative review at the top of your page without a response, I also suggest you respond honestly. The beauty of TripAdvisor is that you get the last word and people visiting the site are often smart enough to understand what is being said between the lines. Here is my suggested response:
While we read every review and take all genuine feedback seriously,
on rare occasions we do receive reviews that we know are not written with the
intention of sharing real experiences with other travelers. This review
was written by a guest that threatened he would write a bad review if
we didn't remove legitimate charges from his bill. We have alerted
TripAdvisor and while we are disappointed that this issue couldn't be
resolved while he was on site, we believe in the power of TripAdvisor to
inspire great travel and wanted to set the record straight. We do aim
to have every guest leave happy and are sorry that we couldn't please
this guest.
My goal was to stay level-headed and professional, show future guests that the hotel takes feedback seriously, but also explain why the feedback wasn't fair. Let me know your thoughts below!
Last week a link to the web page on the left was sent around the office. My immediate reaction was, "Ouch - how humiliating for the business." As a marketer, I immediately identified more with Fitness SF than with the Web shop seeking to be paid, although I also understand the frustration of not being paid for services rendered. The damage didn't end on the Fitness SF site. In fact, many people took to Yelp to continue the harrassment, giving the gym a 1 star rating and explaining that it doesn't pay its bills. As of today, the gym has an average rating of two stars. Prior to the Web page controversy, the gym regularly received four and five stars for great service and equipment.
What this example highlights is the power that the Web gives anyone to damage the reputation of a person or a business. Hoteliers are not impervious to internet blackmail. In fact, there is the potential of blackmail every time a guest has an issue and leaves unhappy, although for most, morals will overide the need for vengeance.
As we reported last month, TripAdvisor recently announced that it is stepping in and helping hoteliers who think they might be the victim of blackmail. Hoteliers who fear that a guest is going to write a bad review as payback for not giving him something for free, for example, can log into the owners center and use the 'report blackmail' form to explain the situation. By providing as many details as possible about the guest, TripAdvisor will be on alert for the review and will not post anything from that guest.
Obviously, the best way to avoid internet blackmail is to try to resolve guests' issues before they leave the property. If a guest has a legitimate grievance, make sure that you apologize, both when speaking to him and again via a card sent to his room. Most people recognize that everyone makes mistakes and a sincere apology can go a long way. If not, use your discretion with providing more.
Create a policy for grievances, detailing every issue that you can think
of and what you can offer as remediation as a first step and then as a
final step if the guest doesn't accept the first offer. Perhaps a free breakfast or drinks would help. Or maybe you can move him to an upgraded room. Then, make sure to ask if he is satisfied with your action. Once the guest says that he is satisfied, you can assume that he won't take it further. If he says that he is not satisfied, ask him what will satisfy him. Most people are too embarrassed to ask for more than they deserve.
But, if the guest does shoot for the stars, you can respond that you really want to ensure that he leaves happy, but you need to make sure that the hotel's response is in line with the seriousness of the grievance and there are policies in place to ensure that guests don't take advantage of the customer-service policy. If this is a repeat visitor or loyalty member with a legitimate issue, you might want to cave a bit more than a first-time guest. But if you sense that this guest will never be happy, report him to TripAdvisor and actively monitor your reviews across all review sites and OTAs in case it pops up. If it does appear on a different review site or OTA, respond to the review, if allowed by the site, apologizing again for not meeting his expectations and explaining that you did everything to try to meet his needs on site and regret that there was nothing you could do to satisfy him, short of giving him a free stay. Others reading the response will be smart enough to understand the situation. Then, make sure that you receive a flurry of great new reviews to push this one down the page.
During the webinar, we received a lot of great feedback and questions from the audience. One specific question that deserves a detailed response regarded which review sites allowed management responses. At Revinate, we're always paying very close attention to the ever-evolving policies for each travel review site - which sites allow public management responses, which sites allow private ones, and so forth. While not every review site's procedure for review replies is as user-friendly or intuitive as it could be, we'll always make sure that we make it as easy as possible for you to respond within Revinate.
As a Revinate customer, you have the ability within the dashboard to take action on incoming reviews and create some form of review response. In order to use this reply function in Revinate, you will first need to claim and create your Business Owner profile with each site. Once you have obtained your login credentials from the sites, you can start responding to your reviews with the help of our Review Response Assistant!
But what does this process look like for each review site, and how do you go about obtaining said credentials? Rest assured, our rockstar Client Services & Support team is here to answer these questions:
TripAdvisorallows public management responses. Next to each review on Revinate you'll find the "Reply at Tripadvisor" link to respond to the review. To start replying, you must register as an owner at http://www.tripadvisor.com/Owners. Note that TripAdvisor also allows you to send a reviewer a private message which will be only sent directly to the review contributor.
Yelpallows hoteliers to post a public Owner Comment. Revinate provides a deep link next to each Yelp review. To start replying, you need to register at Yelp Business Owners first. Note that, like TripAdvisor, Yelp also allows private messaging to reviewers.
Booking.comallows hoteliers to only contact the author directly. The response is not public. These responses are private. Revinate provides a deep link next to each Booking.com review. You must register as a Partner to start replying at their Partner Center.
Google+ Local (replaced Google Places) allows for public management responses. The response is public and Revinate provides a link, "Reply at Google", that will take you to the review page in your Google+ Local listing. In order to reply, you will first need to Claim Your Listing. If you are having trouble verifying your Google+ Local listing, note that Google is now providing phone support for verification issues.
Travelocityhas a "Comment" button located at the bottom of each review to allow for management replies. This functionality also allows hoteliers to add photos and videos to the response. Use the "reply" link in Revinate to begin your public management response.
OpenTablereviews have a "Contact Author" link that restaurateurs can use to access their OpenTable management portal and contact the author directly. This is not a public response, but rather a private message that you can send to the author of the review. To set up your restaurant profile, go to the Open Table Restaurant Center.
Rakutenallows for public management responses on the Japanese site. Revinate provides a link that will lead you to respond. Before you start replying, a hotelier needs to set up an Owner Profile.
Trivagoallows for public management responses. Revinate provides a reply link and will capture the responses. To set up your hotel profile, please register on their Hotel Owner Page.
HolidayCheckallows for public management responses on their site. Revinate provides a "reply to review" link that will lead you to respond. To set up your hotel profile, please register at the Hotel Manager Page.
Zooverallows public management responses. Revinate provides a "reply at Zoover" link that will take you directly to the section to start responding. Before you can start to respond, you need to register as an owner on their Accommodation Owners Page.
HRSallows for public management responses. Revinate provides a "reply at HRS Portal" link and will capture the responses. To set up your hotel profile, please fill out an Application form with HRS.
Qypeallows for public management responses. Revinate provides a "reply at Qype/My Business" link which will take you to the Business Owners page to login. If you have not yet created an owners profile to begin responding, you can register on the Business Owners Page.
Wotifallows hoteliers to reply publicly to a review. Revinate provides a "reply at Wotif" link which will redirect you to the Suppliers Extranet page to login. If you have not yet registered as a supplier, you can register on the Supplier's Registration Request form.
Happy second #WebWednesday of the month to you all Revination! We hope your New Year is off to a flying start. Our year certainly has begun with a bang as we ready ourselves to both hit the road the next couple of months and also put on a series of webinars focusing on social media engagement and online reputation management. In the social space as a company, we've also begun a new series - "What's #Trending at Revinate" - that spotlights some creative ways our customers are using the Revinate social media dashboard. Next week, we'll go one step futher and reveal which hotels have been honored with a Revinate Hotel of the Year Award!
This week's roundup of must-read articles focuses on social media tactics to focus on when putting together your engagement strategies for the year. We hope you enjoy this brief but rich catch-up reading, and be sure to check back tomorrow for our story on how to drive social media engagement by learning from customer loyalty programs.
We've all been there before. As the resident social media, public relations, guest services or reputation manager for your respective hotel, there is a requisite, time-sensitive (and time-consuming) responsibility to address and respond to the majority of consumer reviews that come flooding in about your property. In most cases, this process demands first scanning the review for specific feedback to address, then liaising with your operations team to clarify any additional feedback to include in your review response, and finally laboring over the perfect response to publish which, by its very nature, can become repetitive and fairly standardized in parts. After all, there are only so many inventive ways to thank a past guest for contributing a review on xyz review site.
If you've parterned with Revinate, you already know that the scanning and liasing steps to this review response process are easily accomplished by utilizing Revinate's
'Actions' tab on the dashboard. Excitingly, we have taken the assistance one step further by launching a new feature that makes that final, time-consuming step of response creation just a bit easier.
Revinate's new Response Templates is a core feature of the new Response Assistant, now available to customers. With these Response Templates, Reinate Administrators can now load response templates into their Revinate accounts, which not only helps their respective teams follow brand guidelines with management responses but also saves valuable time. These templates are:
-Organizable by folders and recommendations for different kinds of reviews, whether they are positive, neutral and negative in nature.
-Easy to access and personalize as you and other users prepare and submit your responses.
-Fully integrated with Revinate's workflow ticketing system. When a Revinate user assigns a ticket to a team member, he/she can also recommend templates within the system as the team collectively collaborate on responses.
Once a few of these Response Templates are prepared and available for users, our Review Assistant toolbar seamlessly guides Revinate users through the process of selecting the right template for each respective review and also alerts our review tracking system once the review is posted in real-time so that you, as the user, know which reviews have been responded to even before the response is posted publicly by the review site. With many review sites taking several days or even weeks to post a management response, this new "Responded To" feature within the Review Assistant will significantly improve your workflow and efficiency when it comes to reputation management.
While we cannot understate the time-saving value the Review Assistant will afford, these new product features, particularly the Review Templates, will not replace the requisite need for crafting customized management responses to reviews. As we've written many times before about responding to online reviews, a completely cut-and-pasted public response will only make your customers less likely to book. Consequently, employ the Review Assistant features for exactly what they are: aids to your reputation management efforts.
Today we hosted a webinar on how leveraging online reviews and social media can help hotel operators capture more information about customers than ever before and use that information to improve hotel operations. For those of you who missed the session, we have a recording ready and waiting for you, as well as some key pointers and takeaways below. To watch the webinar at your convenience, please click here.
Why is Online Review Data Critical for Operations?
Hotels and restaurants that sign up with Revinate have taken the first step towards managing their online
reputations. But the real benefit is using the data that Revinate's technology solution provides to make operational improvements and base critical decisions on.
Online review data is critical for operations for four reasons. First, it is the best source of free, readily
accessible, real time data about your property. Second, the data's public nature means that it influences other peoples' purchase decisions so offering services and amenities that guests love and write
about will drive sales as more and more people visit online review sites to validate decisions prior to booking. Third, with sentiment analysis you can pinpoint what guests love and don't love about your property and identify where you
might need to dedicate more resources. Finally, the close analysis of online
reviews allows you to make better decisions because it’s based on voice of
the customer data, making guest satisfaction decisions from large capital improvements to small service-level changes easier for you to determine.
Why is Sentiment Analysis More Effective Than Traditional Satisfaction Surveys?
Many of you might think that the benefits listed above sound very similar to those of traditional guest satisfaction surveys. While we definitely see value in soliciting
guests for feedback, we think that online review analysis is the
next generation of guest satisfaction for a few reason.
First, closed-ended questions, such as
“please rate your satisfaction with the amenities in your room on a
scale of 1
to 10,” will not yield specific data about what a customer liked or disliked
about his room-based amenities. With traditional surveys, only a small number of
questions can be asked of each customer in order to keep response rates
high, which is inherently constricting. Moreover, survey questions only focus on areas hotels feel need to be measured, which can lead to missed topics that are actually more important to customers. Finally, in a "please tell us if we met your expectations" closed-ended survey scenario, a hotel that you have already stayed at and you know offers incredible
levels of service may score lower (e.g. they might "meet your expectation" - you expected great service and received it) than a hotel you had never stayed in and delivered amazing service (e.g. they "exceeded your expectations" - you had no expectations and were delighted). In an open-ended online review survey, this problem is averted, as the guest would attest to the amazing service regardless and have room to offer more detailed, specific feedback.
Online review feedback can be analyzed and measured through sentiment analysis technology, giving hotel managers a variety of ways to track customer preferences. A
major advantage to online review analysis is that you can delve into the data
of a sentiment analysis tool any time, rather than having to craft a question
on a survey and then wait for a response. For example, a traditional
survey question about guest room amenities may provide a level of satisfaction
from 1 to 10. But an analysis of customer sentiment about guest room amenities
becomes a great way to learn highly specific preference information. For example, Revinate’s
sentiment analysis tool can show sentiment about amenities in over ten detailed categories, allowing you to precisely identify what guests love and whether there are issues that might need immediate attention.
Management does not have to look far to identify hot button customer issues when looking at sentiment analysis data. For example, if a
property finds a room odor problem through analysis of reviews and then invests
in a new carpet cleaning service, they will want to measure a return. Depending on the frequency of reviews, they may see improvement in room
sentiment scores in as little as a few days to a week. Revinate’s sentiment analysis tool provides search
capability for words like “odor” and “carpets” to read specific reviews that
mention these terms. With
traditional guest satisfaction surveys, it would be necessary to change the survey, add an odor
question, test it, wait for sufficient responses, and then report the
results. The issue with asking such a detailed question on a survey is
that you may introduce question bias as customers think hard about the smell in
the room, when they might not have flagged it as an issue to begin with. If they were only slightly dissatisfied with odor they might answer that it was
a big issue because the question brought it to their attention. With
sentiment analysis, you only see the results of reviews where guests brought
the odor issue into the discussion, so their insights are more genuine.
Sentiment analysis can also help hoteliers identify trends
across time. A recent Revinate customer began highlighting sentiment
analysis information about staff service levels in their property-wide staff
meetings. By having detailed information about service levels by
department and sharing that information with the staff, they were able to see
significant gains in customer satisfaction. By showing increases in guest
satisfaction with staff month by month, the management was able to see the
trend continue as more employees could see the outcome of their increased
satisfaction focus. This customer moved their service sentiment scores
from 73% to 82% positive satisfaction and received a healthy bump in positive
reviews as well.
How Can Online Reputation Data Incentivize Better Staff Performance?
Using sentiment analysis to determine
compensation for hotel managers is another way to improve operations. Sentiment information can yield very specific details about service elements
and can improve the influence that performance plans have on management. Unlike
surveys, data is available quickly and inputs from customers are open-ended and
unbiased. Compensation structures can focus on monthly or quarterly
results and ensure positive attention to service issues more quickly. In
addition, because sentiment information is so specific, plans can be designed
to measure areas of weakness in a manager’s otherwise strong departmental
performance. Tying compensation plans to reviews is not a new trend and
reflects the importance of reputation management for hotels today. However, the level of detail provided by sentiment analysis means that every
service department from housekeeping to food and beverage can now be
incentivized individually.
The Bottom Line
Contained in public reviews and social media is a goldmine
of information about your hotel, your competitors, and your customers. One of the biggest benefits is a solid understanding of what will delight your
customers and this can translate into more profit. A Revinate client in
Mexico used sentiment analysis and reviews to learn what amenities would sell
the best at their hotel. Rather than engage in time-consuming and
expensive trial and error, they were able to comb reviews for suggested service
enhancements. These amenities led to more incremental revenue, more
positive reviews, and greater popularity. Simply put, social media and review data through sentiment analysis can show management the best places to allocate investment
resources to have the largest impact on guest satisfaction. Smarter
spending leads to greater profits.
To watch the entire recording of our webinar at your convenience, please click here.
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