Hoteliers Guide to Collect Feedback from Guests

Prioritizing your guest's happiness and satisfaction is a must. But, how do we know they are satisfied with our service? How do we know we are successfully running our business? That is where feedback comes in.

Guest feedback is an evaluation of a good or service made by someone who has bought it, used it, or had some other interaction with it. Your customers' experience is valuable information you can utilize to better your goods and services as well as to support wise decisions.

Let's dive deeper into the hoteliers guide to collect feedback from guests.

 

Why Feedback is Important?

Like no other sector, hospitality depends on consumer satisfaction and favourable ratings. Reviews are crucial for hoteliers since they have the power to make or break your establishment. Your business may be adversely impacted by unfavourable evaluations. You run the risk of losing clients each time a bad review appears on Google searches. Customers are 86% less likely to buy or interact with businesses that have bad reviews. Besides that, 57% of people only interact or buy from businesses with a minimum of 4 stars

 

Guest feedback and review on hotel

Read also: Why Guest Feedback Is Important For Hotels

 

Hotel feedback from guestSource: Softinn

 

When you have feedback, you can choose to display them on your website. This can help attract more guests and clients. Displaying positive feedback will have a big impact as your future guest or client can see them early on. 

 

Feedback Methods:

1) Surveys

It could be harder than you think to create a good consumer survey. There are many other inquiries you might make of your clients. Not all clients will be willing to share their honest opinions in public through social media comments or mentions. Some people might rather keep their ideas secret or anonymous. You should do surveys because of this. There are all types of forms and tools that can help beginners. 

Short surveys are best to get feedback from your active customers directly from your website or app. You can also use this method to assess net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), or customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Survey method for collecting hotel feedback

You can also opt for a long survey that can be made and distributed by email, social media, or the Internet. Several survey tools give templates on which you may build your survey depending on its use case and objectives. Surveys do, however, have significant limitations. One of the primary ones is that people find lengthy surveys tedious. If your survey is too long, people are reluctant to reply. Make sure your surveys are to the point to avoid this.

 

Tools for survey making

 

2) Emails and Contact Forms

One of the simplest ways to obtain truthful client feedback is via email. The majority of businesses utilize it as a support channel, so you may take advantage of every interaction to get feedback. By going in this direction, you can advance the dialogue and win over clients who will become devoted supporters just because of how well you treat them. When doing emails and contact forms, there are some things you need to do.

First, make sure you are organized by using a system that will track all feedback coming in. It can be hard to manually check and track the feedback received so invest in a system that will do the hard work for you.

Next,  be clear with your expectations by ensuring guests' feedback will be given a response in a set number of days. This will create trust and guests know when they can expect their feedback to be reviewed. Make sure to respond quickly.

Other than that, make sure you do a follow-up with the guest. Do not spam them as it can make them feel uncomfortable. Thank them and ask for their opinion on customer experience.     

Emaild and contact forms for collecting feedbackSource: sendlane

Read also: How to write a customer feedback email with sample email flow and templates

 

3) Website Widgets

Long questionnaires concerning their interactions with your website are not always desirable or feasible to complete. Using clickable icons that enable your consumers to quickly convey their emotions is one approach to boost response rates. Customers are continually noticing aspects of your product or service that they liquor dislike. 

They can contact you and provide their frank opinion more easily if you have a feedback widget. Users can quickly provide feedback and let you know when they run across something they don't like thanks to feedback widgets. Also, if they don't require it, it won't interfere with their experience. 

Website widgets for collecting feedback

 

4) Chatbots

As artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced, chatbot usage has increased significantly. The experience of providing feedback is changed and made more engaging by this new generation of tools. 

Besides automatic chatbots, there is also live chat. Guests who have recently used your live chat feature to request assistance can also provide you with quick feedback on your customer service. But take note, both happy and sad feelings will be amplified during live chat. As a result, the information you get in this manner will be accurate and unfiltered.

Chatbots to collect feedback

Source: Softinn

 

5) Social Media

Social media can be a priceless source of feedback, which is why businesses are concentrating more and more on it. Social media users are fantastic because they are sincere and honestly express themselves through comments, mentions, and hashtags. Some guests feel uncomfortable approaching hotels directly. They would prefer to interact with their peers by posing questions to them or posting comments on each other's social media accounts.

Monitoring mentions of your brand on social media is one approach to get important guest feedback. On social media, rumours, and unfavourable remarks spread like wildfire. According to Market Force study, 81% of its respondents indicated that their friends' recommendations and posts on social media had a direct impact on their purchasing decisions. Therefore it's critical to address issues as soon as possible.

 

Percentage of users who post reviews onlineSource: Statista

 

6) Interview

When you interact with your customers face-to-face, you can get crucial feedback. Direct communication with clients enables interactions that would not occur otherwise. Face-to-face interviews continue to be one of the finest approaches for gathering client feedback. This is because you have control over the process, can examine verbal and non-verbal signs, and can record emotions and actions that a tech channel couldn't.

A team can better grasp the motivations behind customer choices and how the public will react to a company's decisions or brand thanks to these personal experiences. When you interview customers, you give yourself a chance to refute long-standing misunderstandings.

 

Which Guest To Collect Feedback From?

If you think we need to collect feedback from every guest, then you are correct! Feedback is crucial information. It doesn't matter who it is coming from. Be it from a guest that only stayed for one night and is never to be seen again or a family that keeps staying every school break each year, all their remarks matter and help the business

Feedback from loyal guests and one-time guests differ from each other. Hence, their feedback needs to be collected so you can review what part of your hotel experience they like or dislike. Great reviews and bad reviews both have a high impact on future guests. Negative feedback might affect your hotel but studying it will help you improve your business. Thus, collect feedback from every guest, positive and negative, as their experience is different. 

 

Guest feedback research Source: SurveyMonkey

 

Tips When Collecting Feedback:

Collecting feedback may seem like an easy task. But, many make mistakes that will eventually affect their business in the future. Here are some tips to follow when collecting feedback from guests.

Tips when collecting feedback

1) The More You Collect, The Merrier

It is troublesome if you have hundreds of customers but are only obtaining feedback from a small percentage of them, as you won't be getting a true picture of how all of your consumers feel. For example, you only collect feedback from loyal guests and pay no attention to guests who cancel their bookings. This will not give you insights into what you need to improve and what section you are lacking. 

That is why you need to collect as much feedback as you can, from the entire guest base. More variety and a high amount of feedback will give you a higher chance of improving your business.

 

2) Don't Delay Asking For Feedback

There is never a bad time to ask for client feedback during the user experience. One might believe that requesting guest input too quickly might not yield accurate data. Some think that guests must be given sufficient time during their stay in order to understand the value proposition offered. Guests don’t have to be accustomed to your service and develop a deeper understanding for you to ask for feedback. 

Ask for feedback throughout their user journey. This will give you input on what stage is most satisfied by guests and what isn’t.

 

3) Streamline and Share Your Feedback

Guest feedback is invaluable knowledge for a hotel, all departments included. Making customer feedback accessible and keeping it in one place where everyone at your hotel can access it is advantageous. Everyone will receive the same information so it scrapes off the possibility of misinformation

Share the input you've received with your internal stakeholders because they can their thoughts and solution. Sometimes we need a point of view from a different perspective to fix an issue.

 

4) Keep Track of Every Feedback

Guests will follow up on their remarks and frequently ask for an update. Keep a record of every comment your clients leave you. This way you can always be ready in case those guests want an update. There will be thousands of people coming to your hotel, how are you supposed to remember all their remarks?

By keeping track and documenting your feedback, you can always look back into it. Your future staff can have something to refer to and it can always be updated. Organize your remarks so they will be easier to go through. 

 

How Softinn Collects Feedback :

Softinn Booking Engine provides a Smart Review system where it allows hoteliers like you to collect feedback from the guest on the first night. An email will be sent to the guest that books directly through the booking engine to ask for reviews. Not just that, it also helps to send emails to guests to collect Google reviews on the day after the checkout date. This can be done automatically by the system following users preferred settings. If you want to know more about Softinn's Booking Engine and its features, check this video out!

 

 

Conclusion

As a hotelier, it is vital to give guests an unforgettable experience and that can give guests the boost to leave reviews. All feedback matters and should be researched to improve the business. All these methods of feedback can be of use to your hotel. Hence, it is significant for hoteliers to put heavy importance on feedback and build strategies that accommodate what their guest want.

You're reading a blog compiled by Softinn. We're a hotel-technology company with the mission to make hotelier work easier. Do subscribe if you enjoy reading our blog or you may interact with us on our Facebook Page.

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