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Managing Customer Service in a Digital Age - The Example

Maurice van der Heijden

TNS UK

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The Digital Age challenges for hotels

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The Hospitality Business – Everyone has an opinion!

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Our Research: How are Rating sites used?

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50% use rating sites

10 % write on rating sitesTravel Blog Writers

Travel Blog Readers

Use 3.5 sites per trip

A lot of people use them, not a lot of people write them……

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The Digital age – Multiple Dilemmas

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A minority influences a majority, how can you reach these influencers?

How can you create more influencers, so their views will represent your service offer better?

Do rating sites help you improve your customer service offers?

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Can you use Tripadvisor for customer service improvements?

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TripAdvisor• Feedback can be about anything

or nothing• Feedback is not spread

consistently over hotels• Feedback is not always reliable• Feedback is timed randomly

• Excellent for marketing purposes

Real-time customer feedback system• Questionnaire touches all

aspects of service• Feedback is gathered in relation

to number of guests• Feedback is timely• Feedback comes from people

that have used the services

• Excellent for improving customer service

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The case study

Improving customer service with a Real-time customer feedback system

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Our journey towards customer satisfaction with Scandic 2008

Based on their ethos of Quality Everywhere, Scandic wanted to drive guest loyalty. They decided to do this by supporting their hotel management in understanding guest satisfaction and to directing improvements

TNS started a monthly guest satisfaction survey, done on-line, with a simple portal and monthly reports.

Scandic used this very successfully for a few years, but started to run into limitations of the method.

2012

It became clear that:• The time gap between feedback

and experience needed to be a lot smaller in order to get better feedback to support operational changes

• As part of the commitment to quality, they want to get feedback from all guests

• They needed a tool that could identify negative guests quickly and provide them with a system to remedy this immediately

The Real-time Feedback System was introduced

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The basic principles for Scandic

• Potential Users of a Feedback Management System differ widely within any hotel group:

• Reservation department;• Hotel Management;• Front desk;• Food & Beverage• Event Planning.

• Scandic’s philosophy is about Quality, but clean and simple. Any tool has to embody this, both in appearance and use.

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In line with the Scandic Philosophy

Fictitious data

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Simple and Actionable by Anyone – The Simple Bits

1. What should I do NOW?

2. Am I improving?

3. What do I need to focus on?

Fictitious data

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Simple and Actionable by Anyone – The ActionsFictitious data

Fictitious data

Fictitious data

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The Verdict so far

• The number of respondents has quadrupled with the new approach, giving more stable insights for individual hotels

• About 500 Scandic staff use the portal and results on a DAILY basis and are working to improve their customer service

• Scandic’s Customer satisfaction score has gone up year-to-year

• And……..it has impacted the digital influencers!

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Scandic’s customer service focus resonates with the travel blog community

“Each year TripAdvisor awards a Certificate of Excellence to hotels that have received excellent reviews from their guests. Only 10% of all the hotels represented on TripAdvisor have been given this honour. Forty of Scandic’s hotels have now received a Certificate of Excellence, accounting for almost 26% of Scandic’s portfolio”

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Improved Customer Service will drive Ratings and Brand Choice

Stay

Real-timefeedback

Better Ratings

More Guests

Improve

©TNS 2012

Managing Customer Service in a Digital Age - The Example

Maurice van der HeijdenTNS UK