How Do You Make Systems and Data Work For You?
It is easy to drown in a sea of information, but without relevant data and systems to manage them you cannot make informed decisions. Most sales generating activities work best if they are thought through as a system.
How To Measure Customer Satisfaction
There are not many organisations that don’t have customer satisfaction as their main priority. Even some government departments and agencies seem to be a lot more enlightened and try to focus on the ‘customer’. However, without the direct stimulus of competition and a continual threat to your business it is very hard to maintain a true customer focus.
In your position you don’t have any such problems. There is always someone ready and willing to take any customer of yours that is not only satisfied but also delighted. If you continually
strive to ‘do best what matters most’, then the bottom line will be improved by your ability to charge more and your higher retention rate.
Most hotels have some sort of guest questionnaire, usually in the bedroom, with a series of tick boxes graded Excellent, Good and Poor. Unfortunately the answers you receive are virtually useless since even if the guest ticks the ‘Excellent’ box against ‘Friendliness of reception staff’ it doesn’t tell you how important this is to that particular guest. If they don’t care about this specific aspect then it will not have increased their commitment to your hotel. All surveys must be able to rate your performance relative to customers’ priorities. (Also, the rating of ‘Excellent’ will depend on the customer’s opinion of what is excellent, which may be different to yours.)
Why Measure
Generating new customers is a difficult and expensive exercise so it is fairly obvious that we should do what we can to keep the customers that we have. There is always some natural attrition, due to a variety of factors such as moving, death, changed habits and so on, but what we don’t want to do is add to this leakage by doing anything that might contribute to customers making a positive decision to try another hotel.
Customers can become dissatisfied by a number of factors which create a gap between their expectations and their experience. This gap can be created by:
- Promising more than you can deliver, either in a promotional offer or a sales promise.
- Procedures not being set up to meet customers’ expectations.
- No full understanding of customers’ needs and priorities.
- Staff not following agreed procedures at all times.
- Customer having a mistaken perception based on previous experience.
If these gaps exist it is usually not through any positive intent. No one goes out of their way to have dissatisfied customers, but it is only through measurement that it is possible to identify where your service has been below expectations.
You also need to measure customer satisfaction as a counterbalance to your own perceptions. For instance, having a full restaurant or even a full hotel does not imply that everyone is satisfied. They might be staying with you because there is no good alternative and as soon as a new hotel or restaurant opens they will all leave with a sigh of relief!
Defining Customer Issues
Before you can measure whether you are meeting your customers’ expectations or not you have to know what is important to them. A small example: you might assume that the priorities of your weekend guests are a clean room and home-cooked food. However if you actually asked them, you might find that they rate the quality of your welcome more highly. It would therefore not be of much value if you took guests’ comments on cleanliness as a measure of guest satisfaction.
First of all you need to list all the aspects of your product that add up to the customer value package. Amongst others this will include:
You should include things that you can control, as well as those that you can’t, so that you can get a complete picture of satisfaction. Even if you can’t do anything about your location at least it will be useful to know what your customers think about it.
One difficulty is that one situation does not fit all. Your different market segments will have different priorities and you need to take this into account. You should consider at least:
- corporate users
- weekend guests
- groups
- leisure users.