In today's world, guests are highly informed and offer loyalty to hotels with certain expectations for communication between the hotel and their customers. Hoteliers must listen carefully to these voices, respond quickly, and efficiently gather guest feedback.
In the lodging industry, guest feedback can be found through surveys, SMS Texting, app conversations, and online reviews. Hotels must not only learn how and when to gather guest feedback digitally, but also avoid mishandling that feedback.
Below are five things to avoid when communicating with guests digitally.
- Focusing only on post-stay information from surveys - Find ways to survey the guests during their stay and make sure that it is both easy and actionable. The digital world has numerous platforms to handle post-stay reviews. Focusing attention on guest communication digitally while the guest is still in-house to execute service recovery and turn a problem into a delight before they leave.
- Not having the same level of service over digital communication as in person - It is crucial to have a similar set of communication standards in the digital world as you would in person. Guests have many more ways of communicating in today's world. But, best practices such as empathy, apologizing for a bad experience, and getting to a resolution are key to the feedback experience. This is true at the front desk or online. 'Online' hospitality should not be different than 'offline' hospitality.
- Using bot technology for important communication - Be careful in using chat-bots and be genuine in the hotel's response to a guest. This technology might place a hotel in a position of seeming fake in a conversation where attention to detail and messaging are critical. Even in the online world, make sure there is a live person available to reply to guest feedback. Let the staff use available guest information from Host, this can aid to further personalize the message.
- Ignoring social media happening in real time - Do not just post, 'like' and not reply. Many hotels will dedicate social media resources to content creation while forgetting about listening and reacting. When a guest sees that the hotel is engaging with them, it creates an atmosphere of recognition and can help turn a guest into an advocate. You should always respond. If a guest takes the time to post something, take the two seconds to respond and keep it personal. Do not use generic or canned responses.
- Only focusing on influencers - It is important to recognize all posters even if they are not in the "Influencer" group. Respond and engage with guests no matter how many followers they may have. If a guest posts a picture and is not an influencer, they might not be expecting the hotel to respond publicly. But there is a lot of opportunity to connect with guests through those means. You can potentially drive them to a Social group where you have all your advocates to keep the conversation going.
Roger Franke
2018 HUG Boardmember