Outcomes
The outcome of a customer satisfaction survey is to establish whether or not there are any gaps in your service. You will see the size of the gaps and the importance that customers place on them. You will be able to see what your priorities should be for making improvements. Closing small gaps in priority areas is more vital than closing large gaps in unimportant areas.
Public Forums
Many internet sites now feature comments made by guests who have stayed with you. Indeed, your dissatisfied guests might post their comments on the internet rather than contact you direct. This would be an unfortunate development since these sites do not yet seem to offer hotels a ‘right of reply’.
Despite safeguards, you are at the mercy of both informed and ill-informed comment, and you cannot influence the weight that potential guests give to each. There is really nothing much you can do except ensure that guests do put their positive comments
on these booking sites. A questionnaire given to each guest along the lines that I have suggested here may well prompt your guests to at least highlight the ‘right’ areas!
Useful Data To Keep
A database is nothing more than a collection of all the information that you keep on your customers, guests and bookers. Of course, having accumulated this data you are then under pressure to actually do something with it. So before you collect any information at all, you need to decide exactly the purpose for collecting it.
For instance you can collect a list of all your past guests but if you don’t then send them details of your special promotions then all you have done is waste paper or space on your hard drive. Conversely, if you decide that you want to promote your hotel to the local business community, before you can start you will need to make a list of the most useful bookers.
I suggest that you need to collect data on the following:
- guests;
- restaurant customers;
- corporate bookers and meeting planners;
- travel and other agents;
- referral and joint venture partners.
Guests
If you have a computerised Property Management System (PMS) or even a web-based system which avoids the need for
you to buy expensive hardware, then it will automatically accumulate information on all your past guests. If you put the system in new then you will be asked by the supplier to specify what type of information you want to keep and what segmentation to use. If you still use paper and an eraser for your room management (and there is nothing wrong with that) then you can use your registration forms to collect the information and put the details into a binder or use a programme like MS Access. I would recommend that the registration form contains the following information for each guest:
- arrival date;
- departure date;
- name and address including postcode;
- telephone;
- e-mail (plus confirmation that you have permission to use it);
- rate paid;
- room number;
- date reservation made;
- a code for guest’s reason for stay: either business (split between individual/corporate contract/meeting) or leisure (split between individual/group or tour/special promotion/wedding);
- a code for the source of the reservation (direct from guest/agent plus name/company plus name/own site/third party site and name).
Your guest registration form now has all the information you need to help you get back in touch with the guests, but also accumulate some statistics about where your reservations originate and which companies or agents give you significant
business. With this detail you can decide to carry out some extra promotion based on firm knowledge about which sources are working and which aren’t.
What the registration form will not do is help you find out if there is more business from any particular guest source. For each guest you need an answer to the questions, ‘What is the reason you are staying here?’ and, ‘Are there more potential guests where you came from?’ These questions are two of the most powerful tools at your disposal. With the answers you have a constant supply of follow-up actions.
Your split between leisure and business will enable you to carry out different promotions. Leisure guests who are happy with their stay may well come back again in a low season period if you give them a big enough incentive. The only issue is keeping your list ‘clean’: you can obtain some software that deletes people who have moved and/or died but it may be less costly and just as effective to only mail those guest who have stayed during the previous two years.
Your business guests may not be that useful a list. These guests may well be staying with you because they were put there by their company so they have no discretion. However you may have a lot of individual business guest, who make their own decisions, and you will definitely want to keep communicating with them. The information you collected on the registration form or through your PMS will give you the necessary information to isolate the different types of guests. You may be competing with chain or franchise hotels that operate what they call loyalty schemes – have you thought about such a scheme for your hotel?