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The Importance Of Guest Experience In Hospitality

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. Learn more about aspect-emotion co-occurrence.

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.

Conclusion

Repustate’s guest service experience solution, Repustate IQ, has helped hundreds of hotels bridge the gap between market demands and service provided through intelligent customer feedback analysis. Through machine learning, you can get guest insights in just a few clicks and know exactly what you need to do to improve your business and how to connect with your audience in the best way possible.