Day: June 9, 2023

Guest service experience is vital in an industry as high-pressure and competitive as hospitality. Guests are spoilt for choice, which means that offering outstanding customer service can be the turning point that can lead to loyal guests who keep coming back thanks to impeccable, stress-free service.

In this article, we talk in detail about why guest service experience and management are so important and how guest experience insights can help you put your best foot forward.

What Is Guest Service Experience Management?

Guest service experience management is the process of using sentiment analysis to track and measure guest service satisfaction. The guest experience analysis platform ascertains the performance of different aspects of your business so you know exactly what you need to do in order to improve them and increase customer satisfaction.

To effectively manage guest experience, it is important to use a platform that can give you high-precision customer review analysis. Being in a business that can attract people from all backgrounds, it is vital that the tool is able to extract insights from a variety of data sources such as surveys, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, GoogleMyBusiness, etc.

It must also have native natural language processing capabilities in order to analyze comments and reviews in different languages.

Why Is Guest Service Experience Important?

A study conducted by Deloitte shows that 60% of guests who have a positive experience go back as return customers. This one detail in itself indicates how important guest service experience is for the hospitality industry.

Below you will find more points that showcase the importance of guest experience and how they can be used for business growth.

1. Build customer trust

Top-notch guest service experience can help you build trust with your customers who will be more than happy to give you recommendations and reviews. You can use this information to build better-targeted marketing strategies and make sure there is no discrepancy between what you advertise and what you offer. This further strengthens your credibility in the market.

Additionally, a machine learning tool can also help you segregate guest profiles by the different things they mention in their comments and reviews so that you can attract different types of guests through different tactics.

2. Become more competitive

Personalizing guest experience sets you apart in a highly competitive service industry. Customer insights from guest feedback data can give you ideas to strategically design personalized guest experiences based on not only guest profiles but also for occasions such as honeymoon deals, romantic getaways, corporate packages, leisure travelers, family and kids specials, leisure activities for the elderly, and so on.

3. Attract new customers

Insights from guest service experience feedback can tell you what kind of promotions will get you the most results through your email campaigns, digital advertising, and website/online offers. Once you have the insights and formulate a plan, you can use the guest profile data in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool to send push notifications and emails to the right guests, appropriately.

4. Increase sales conversions

With new tactics that you develop by listening to data-driven insights from a guest experience analytics tool, you can keep track and measure how many new and return customers you have, and what they have in common. This will help you find a pattern in customer behavior and figure out what aspects of your hotel, restaurant, or service are attracting them the most.

Is it the Spa facility, family-friendly services like children’s play area, daycare, or kiddie pools? Or is it your corporate facilities like conference rooms and workstations? Knowing what works best for you can help you enhance those facilities more in order to get more sales conversions.

5. Drive customer satisfaction

Guest feedback is a goldmine that you can take advantage of if you have a truly brilliant sentiment analysis platform that can sort and segregate guest experience feedback into granular categories of the degree of likes and dislikes. The best customer experience analytics tool lets you analyze not only comments and reviews on sites like Google, TrustPilot, or TripAdvisor but also gives you the advantage of analyzing detailed responses in surveys.

Thus, you get to use all kinds of data sources in order to understand what’s deterring your guests from having a good time at your business and what’s working in your interest.

6. Increase guest engagement

You should use different techniques to reach out to your guests before and after their stay. For example, Instagram social listening can give you insights as to what people want from a business in hospitality or what comments are saying while tagging you. You can do the same with TikTok insights.

Using social media also gives you a better opportunity to engage more actively with your guests and respond to mentions promptly regarding their guest service experience. This can be very advantageous, especially in case of a negative experience. It not only tells potential customers that you are aware of what’s happening at your establishment and you are taking responsibility for it, but also that you care what your guests think of you.

7. Maintain a loyal customer base

Loyalty points and incentives for being loyal customers can go a long way in capturing new clients as well. Offering a holiday discount to guests who have had a long stay before or offering additional services free of charge such as access to the golf course or Spa facilities, tells your guests that you appreciate their business. On the business side, this is a clever tactic because as research says, obtaining new customers is 5 times more expensive than maintaining old ones.

8. Use guest insights to improve staff training

Guest service experience insights can also tell you important information about the quality of your staff and the service they provide. Based on guest comments, you can decide if your cleaning staff needs to be more mindful, if your kitchen is understaffed, if the reception is not being responsive enough, and if your online booking systems are not as efficient as you’d like it to be. Being on top of things before they escalate can help you manage your business reputation and enhance your brand experience immensely.

9. Streamlined operations

Guest experience review analysis can also help you streamline your operations for smoother task management. Whether it is special arrival requests, pet services, self-checkouts, restaurant bookings, or Spa reservations, you can keep a track of all these operations and make sure there are no issues related to them that can irk guests. This increases customer delight.

Repustate’s guest service experience analytics solution’s aspect-emotion co-occurrence capability gives you deep insight into these areas so you know how to improve things in a timely manner.

10. Sell additional services

Knowing your guests and their preferences can help you sell additional services to them. This not only adds an additional revenue stream to your business but also gives guests the opportunity to have something that is a bonus. For example, a gift shop, pet knick-knacks, a business center, tour and cruise packages, special diet menus, clothing and accessories, and makeup and hair services can all add towards making your guest service experience exemplary and thus attracting more customers.

11. Enhance brand perception

A very important reason you should measure and track guest experience is so that you can use the insights to enhance your brand perception. Brand perception is much more than just the service you provide but the feelings that a guest experiences after being in touch with your business.

Research shows that guests are peeved and not likely to recommend a hotel if there is a marked difference between what’s advertised and promised and what they actually experience. A customer insights tool can help you dodge a fiasco like this and ensure that your brand has a great reputation both online and through word-of-mouth.

12. Build lasting relationships

When you are able to connect with your guests in a meaningful way and cater to their needs even before they ask, there is trust built. This customer trust is the foundation of a lasting business and makes for a sustainable business strategy for longevity.

Through social media listening and performing tasks such as YouTube comments analysis, AI-driven survey analysis, Reddit and subreddit thread analysis, news monitoring, etc, you can find a treasure trove of guest service experience insights that can help you build relatable content for your marketing campaigns as well as personalized guest communications.

How Can You Measure Guest Service Experience?

You can measure and track guest service experience most efficiently through a machine learning platform that analyzes all data types from all data sources, across different languages.

Once the model is trained for your business, it will give you precise insights based on your guest experience, which you can use to build a better brand experience.

The platform measures guest service experience by following the below steps.

Step 1 – Data collection

You can input the URL of any review platform from which you want to analyze your customer experience. Based on your demographic or how you collect guest experience feedback, you can choose Reddit, TripAdvisor, Google reviews, or any other. You could also choose to upload your survey responses in an excel file.

Step 2 – Data processing

All the data from the various guest reviews forums including video and audio data is analyzed. All non-text data is transcribed and included in the text pipeline. This includes emojis.

Step 3 – Data analysis

Guest reviews and comments are now processed for sentiment analysis. The platform for guest service experience analytics applies several ML tasks such as multilingual natural language processing, semantic clustering, sentiment analysis, and such. Within seconds, it gives you overall sentiment scores for your guest experience and your business as well as for individual aspects such as price, rooms, service, convenience, cleanliness, etc depending on the data.

Step 4 – Data visualization

All the insights are now shown in the form of charts and graphs on a sentiment analysis dashboard. You can also set alerts in this dashboard for mentions and keywords.

The relationship between landlords and tenants requires honesty and accountability. But, that is not how things always pan out. As a landlord or commercial property manager, conducting thorough commercial space inspections is necessary foresight before a new tenant moves in or a current one moves out.

Why Are Move-In & Move-Out Inspections Important?

Creates Traceability Of Conditions

You can never be too sure how long tenants will call a rental space home. By the time the lease is over, it can be difficult to remember the initial condition of the space.

Having a move-in inspection protects you from accountability over damages caused by the tenant. With all the details that a move-in inspection should cover, many property companies use an inspection checklist. This way, you can trace back to the initial conditions of the rental space.

For example, if there is water damage on the floors, note this on the checklist and you can make the necessary repairs. If a tenant leaves a giant hole in the wall that wasn’t there when they moved in, you can include this in your deposit deductions.

From a financial standpoint, this means you won’t have to pay for any repair costs that were not your fault. From a legal position, this protects your business from undue legal claims.

Inspections at the handover of the premises hold all parties responsible and accountable for the care and proper maintenance of the property.

Images Tell A Thousand Words

While a simple checklist can be enough for property companies, visual evidence is vital when managing a property. As with the checklist, images or videos record the condition of the property. Images also allow for a visual comparison of the condition before and after occupation.

This makes it easier to consider the normal wear and tear of the space. Normal wear and tear are the changes to a space that occur as a result of people using the space. An example is scuff marks on the floors.

Taking pictures when accepting the premises back is just as important. Include those pictures in your final correspondence with your tenant. These pictures are important evidence and safety nets for both parties. If your former tenants make false damage claims, you have the visual proof and communication to back you.

Pictures are also particularly helpful if both you and the tenant cannot be present for either inspection and/or third parties are used for inspection services.

Digital Signatures Provide Proof Of Agreement

The keyword in any agreement is communication! Sending pictures of the condition, emailing the complete checklist, forwarding written concerns or issues – you must do all of the above.

Your digital correspondence with the tenant is proof of an agreement between you. The exchanges also serve as proof if there are any issues and disputes that occur.

It is important to have interactions written via email, or visually documented so that you can access them if necessary.

It’s not just for your organisation – tenants expect it too

With too many arguments, disputes and tweets about unjust landlords, tenants have started to expect move-in and move-out inspections too. Nobody wants to work or live in a space where you have to fear that any scratch or mark may end up getting taken from your bank account – even if they were there before you!

By providing detailed, transparent inspection checklist reports with good quality images, you end up starting the relationship with new tenants with proper experience and congratulating them justly when they move forward from your lease. Make sure to get the most of these two customer touchpoints.