Most hotels tend to ignore that data is essential for their business or think that data gathering and reporting is reserved for big multinational hotel chains like Accor or Marriott. Yet, the contrary is true: vital hotel metrics can benefit each hotel. In this article, you will find why having accurate metrics in your hotel could boost your revenue and success.
Hotel Metrics Essential for Each Hotel
The most common scenario would be to find yourself running a hotel business with just a little knowledge of what is happening in the back office of your hotel. Not knowing what the communication metrics are could negatively affect your business. Luckily, there is a way of centralizing and automatizing data.
Most hotels are working with different technologies that allow them, as a side effect, to know more about their customers. Booking Engines and Property Management Systems are very powerful tools that can report beneficial information, although they don’t gather all of the key information needed to succeed. But there is more a hotel can do to optimize the use of data.
Use a Chatbot to Improve Communication And Obtain Metrics
As a hotel manager, you would benefit greatly from having a chatbot if you want to be totally up-to-date on your business metrics. A chatbot is a chat widget powered by artificial intelligence, meaning that it can perform tasks that generally require a human. It also extracts information from the hotel database to provide tailored answers. This smart technology with artificial intelligence is usually embedded into the hotel’s website, social media platforms, and even messaging apps like WhatsApp. Applied to hotels, a chatbot can chat with potential customers, answering all of their questions automatically. Companies like HiJiffy provide different solutions that, correctly applied, can make you succeed in the hotel business.
4 Hotel Metrics to Measure Your Guest Experience
Below you can find four tips to boost your hotel’s business by using hotel metrics to measure your guests’ experience.
1. Conversational Metrics
Knowing your client is everything. The more you know about your guests, the better you will be able to please those guests. Getting to know the exact number of conversations your hotel has with clients may indicate the satisfaction level with the available content online. It’s easy to quickly identify trends and topics to adapt to your potential customers’ needs. These metrics allow you to identify general concerns among your guests. For example, noticing higher automation rates would mean that all the information guests’ are interested in is clear and easy to find.
Knowing other details, such as your guests’ favorite channels to communicate with the hotel or the main languages potential customers talk to the chatbot, can help you improve and build a better brand image tailored to your customers’ preferences. Being aware of what languages and words are most used will make you able to improve marketing and sales campaigns. For example, matching the most used languages or words with the language display options on the website would be good practice. Another interesting tip would be to pay attention to different languages’ usage percentages. Finding abnormal percentages of use of a specific language could mean that one of the website translations is inaccurate.
2. Engagement Metrics
Finding out what your guests or potential customers are talking about when they contact the hotel and keeping track of it may have sounded impossible to achieve just ten years ago. Nowadays, it’s just a matter of choice.
Being prepared by knowing beforehand what your customers will ask and require will differentiate you from the competition and prove your hotel is better than any other. When using a chatbot, knowing the return on investment is always necessary. Keeping track of the bookings made automatically by the chatbot and hotel agents is essential. That will allow you to make the comparison.
For example, identifying growing booking trends made by the chatbot would mean high-quality hotel information. Guests feel comfortable with the chatbot and require no help from human agents.
3. Customer Satisfaction Metrics
It is well known that customer satisfaction is not something easy to measure. Every hotelier, has experienced total uncertainty and surprise from unexpected guests’ feedback.
Here you can find another key strength of hotel chatbots. Having a centralized platform monitored and controlled by the hotel management, measuring the average happiness of customers is no longer a problem. The hotel metrics are available.
Chatbots use subtle techniques to measure customer satisfaction. The most commonly used and successful is a satisfaction survey. Filling in a satisfaction survey online, on your phone, or through email is no longer a big effort for the average customer. Collecting and analyzing these results will provide you, as a hotel manager, with direct, clean, and valuable feedback regarding your staff and customer care quality.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most straightforward of the customer satisfaction survey methodologies. The questions should always be simple, like ”How satisfied were you with your experience?”. To get as many replies as possible, it is important to make it easy to answer for customers, such as using scale options like 0-10. Customer satisfaction surveys are usually sent to customers that interacted with the chatbot or human agents up to 24h after such interaction.
This information, used wisely, could mean, in many cases, a total improvement in the customers’ view of a hotel and staff in a matter of weeks, this being the key to success. It is crucial to compare both scores, CSAT-team and CSAT-chatbot. This comparison will tell the difference in treatment and quality the hotel provides depending on who is answering the customer queries or clearing up potential problems to be solved.
4. Data is power
Given the current times, knowing WHAT to improve and WHEN to do it will improve your chances of succeeding in the hotel industry. Any business in the hotel industry desiring to succeed must take advantage of all the data opportunities. New technologies are here to help, and smart usage can easily transform a decaying hotel business into an extremely successful hotel.
Access to data and metrics is no longer the privilege of a few. Regardless of your business size, you can now get accurate data for your business. Getting to know your business’s conversational, engagement, and customer satisfaction metrics will allow you to respond, react, and innovate in the hotel industry, a very data-sensitive market.
Free Report: Top 50 Hotel Guest Chat Questions
In this report, you’ll discover the top 50 topics of questions hotels received in the summer of 2023. The authors analyzed over 1.7 million conversations to identify the key categories of queries, emerging trends, and differences between various communication channels, like web chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.
Click here to download the report “What Hotel Guests Really Want to Know – Top 50 Questions Asked“.
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