Why Listening To Your Guests Is The Key To Improved Operations Management

Improving the management process of internal operations is one of the most important goals of every modern hotelier. With so many tasks, responsibilities, and technologies that you have to juggle with on a daily basis, the simple act of listening might come across as too basic. But actually paying attention to what your guests have to say is the key to improving not only your hotel’s reputation but also the internal operations that you struggle with.

It’s easy to see why, as a traveler, you wouldn’t want to deal with any complications during your trip. Swinging back and forth between departments or not having anyone to solve any possible issues is definitely frustrating. As a hotelier though, you know just how complex a hotel’s structure is and how hard it is to constantly maintain operations at an optimal, satisfactory level. Although technology has begun to take over so many aspects of life, the human touch is still needed and will continue to be so. And with human touch come human errors - there’s no denying it. However, when referring to hospitality and mainly hotels, there are ways of making sure that technology is always at its best and employees are provided with easy-to-use and highly effective means of doing their job.

With the aid of technology, operations are now easier and more effective than ever

Due to more recent advancements in technology, hotel operations are easier and more effective now than they were in the past and the majority of the mandatory systems, such as CRM and PMS, are becoming more affordable. Also, APIs make seamless connections between different systems, to make sure that data is easily transferred between them and any member of the hotel staff is able to make operations as frictionless as possible. At the end of the day, this determines a big part of the overall guest satisfaction, which leads to a better reputation, more bookings, and increased revenue.

However, when it comes to guest relations, communication, and overall satisfaction levels, there is still room for improvement. With this in mind, we started 2018 with a brand new guest feedback platform, as you might have heard by now. Because we understand the complexity of all the hotel operations and the need for efficiency, as well as having a single, all-in-one tool, our TrustYou guest feedback platform is now improved by the new review marketing module and the guest messaging one. This means that, besides collecting and analyzing guest reviews, as well as providing easy-to-use means of replying to them, the TrustYou platform goes even further, by enabling hoteliers to keep communication opened during the entire guest journey and create personalized and 100% customizable guest surveys, for the post-stay phase of their journey.

Keeping the lines of communication opened during the entire guest journey is crucial nowadays

As Tnooz mentioned, “Improving the quality of staff interaction in hotels has never been as important as it is today. Ping-pong communication between departments is, sadly, more the norm than the exception and, in order to stay competitive, hotels will have to review their workflows.” For hoteliers, being able to constantly communicate with their guests and receive feedback even during the on-stay stage of their journey is vital nowadays. It’s one of the best ways of improving guest satisfaction and dealing with any possible issues on the spot, decreasing the chances of them turning into negative reviews, which can influence many other travelers in the future.

By using TrustYou Messaging, hotel representatives cannot only exchange useful information with guests but also delegate tasks and properly divide them between staff members, in order to avoid that unprofessional back-and-forth. Hotel employees can share one complex, yet user-friendly Inbox, which gathers all the guest messages and they can make sure that the right person answers each request. Also, in case any issue is reported, a task can be created and assigned to the appropriate employee and/or department. All that is needed to make sure that operations run smoother, faster, and with better results so that hotel-guests communications are more efficient and more personalized than ever.

Live chat enables a new and effective way of communicating with guests, in real-time and with a minimum effort

The TrustYou Messaging module does not stop here, though. A new study revealed that your hotel’s website is the most important factor in a successful hotel marketing campaign. It has proven to be even more influential than word of mouth, OTAs, search engines and review sites. And what’s better than improving your own website with a live chat plugin, to allow potential guests to communicate with you right away, even before their actual stay? Since live chat has been on the rise lately, we also incorporated such a feature into TrustYou Messaging. The brand new live chat widget can be incorporated in any hotel’s webpage, wifi login page, or any other website, in order to provide guests with the option of easily getting in contact with hotel representatives, via chat. All the messages received through the live chat widget go straight to the TrustYou Messaging Inbox, where, once more, they can be divided and conquered by the hotel staff.

Plus, since we reached a phase in human history in which we can carry a message to any distance, and through a multitude of channels, with nothing more than our own voices. TrustYou Messaging now pairs with Amazon Echo’s “Alexa”! We recommend checking out this post, in order to find out exactly how voice messaging through AI can improve operations management at your hotel and keep the modern traveler satisfied!

Guest feedback provides valuable insights, which hoteliers can use to make internal and operational adjustments

Also, let’s not forget about guest surveys, which make hotel operations a lot easier and the entire process of gathering feedback faster and more straight-forward. It has been proven that asking for feedback from guests results in better reviews and more positive scores since travelers see genuine interest from a hotel’s part. Plus, as we emphasized many times in the past, more reviews = better visibility, which can lead to more future bookings and ultimately, more revenue.

While asking for guest feedback though, it’s important to rely on a strategy, to have a clear structure and process in mind and the best way of doing this is, once again, through an all-in-one platform. TrustYou’s guest feedback platform allows hoteliers to create 100% customizable guest surveys, which can also be pushed to Google or TripAdvisor. In the long run, constantly receiving feedback from guests can improve operations in a hotel, since the personal opinions and impressions of a past guest provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses that hoteliers need to acknowledge. After going through an introspection, based on guest feedback and reviews, making proper changes and even staff and procedural adjustments comes a lot easier.

Last, but not least, keep in mind that guest surveys can be linked to guest records and a hotel’s PMS system, which makes operations easier since there is more important data in one place. The TrustYou platform not only gathers reviews and semantically analyzes them, but also provides the option of marketing them, for further benefits, such as visibility, improved reputation, direct bookings.

Keep in mind that the Analytics feature of the TrustYou platform gathers guest reviews from hundreds of online sources, including the personalized survey and all of this data is stored in one Inbox. For hoteliers, this automatically makes operations more effective, since it becomes easier to monitor, track, analyze, and reply to a large number of guest reviews from one place, instead of wasting valuable time signing in to different platforms.

The ultimate goal is to improve the overall guest experience, and acknowledging the many different types of travelers out there, as well as enabling them to communicate via their preferred medium, is something that hotels can only benefit from. It is also important to constantly strive to ease internal operations, merge different systems, keep as much data as possible in one place, and make processes easier, faster and frictionless.

If you are interested in improving operations at your hotel and want to enjoy a complete, complex, and easy-to-use platform, in order to enhance guest satisfaction, get more bookings, and a stronger ROI, make sure to get in touch! You can also sign up for a demo or start a free trial!

Catalina Brinza

Catalina is a social media and data enthusiast. At TrustYou, she's on a mission to bring the most out of travel and hospitality data. One day, she hopes to experience Japan's culture to its fullest.

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