One of the first marketing lessons I learned, early in my hotel career, was that it costs roughly five times more to get a new customer than to keep one you already have. While the ratio may have changed over the years, I think the basic premise remains true today. If you really want to grow your business, you must do everything you can to keep your guests coming back.
An effective way to keep your guests coming back is to provide them with a level of service that exceeds their expectations. In order to be successful doing this, you must have a good understanding of the level of service they expect and how well you’re doing in delivering that service.
The best way to gauge what your guests think of your service is to simply ask. In today’s wired, online world, your guests are already talking about you and your service. The key is to make sure they’re telling you as well. For that to happen, you need to ask them often, and in different ways. At Ridgecrest and Glorieta we take three steps to get a handle on what our guests think of our product and service.
In-room Surveys
In all of our adult guest rooms, we provide a simple, one-page guest survey. The questions are basic and designed to give us immediate, actionable feedback. By that I mean if there is a problem, we can hopefully find out about it and correct the problem while the guest is still on campus. If that’s not possible, we still have a chance to fix the problem before the next guest checks in.
This type of survey is considered to be unsolicited guest feedback. The survey is in the room and the guest chooses whether to complete it. As a result, the data collected is not always an accurate picture of the true level of service being provided. Typically this survey is only completed by guests who were either very satisfied or very unsatisfied.
Online Surveys
The most accurate measure of guest service is what is termed solicited feedback. This feedback comes from asking the guest to give it to you. The easiest way to do this today is online. We have designed a comprehensive online survey this is emailed weekly to every guest (for whom we have an email address) who stayed with us the prior week.
The results of these surveys are compiled on a monthly basis and give us a good picture of the overall level of guest satisfaction with our product and service. We look at both the current month’s results and the three month rolling average, then see how the scores compare with the same period the previous year. This allows us to reinforce the areas where we identify positive trends and to address those areas that reflect a negative trend.
Event Planner Evaluations
While the in-room and online surveys are targeting individual guests or attendees, our event planner evaluation targets the group leader. In most cases these are the people who made the decision to bring their group to Ridgecrest or Glorieta and, as a result, their feedback is critical to our future success. The questions on this evaluation are focused on the needs of the meeting planner and how well we met those needs. From these evaluations we are better able to make decisions that allow us to improve the way we serve our meeting planners and hopefully make their job easier.
By utilizing all three of these methods for gathering guest feedback, we are able to get a well-rounded picture of whether we’re meeting the service expectations of our guests. The good news is that when we do this well, the guests will come back. When more of our guests come back the following year, the pressure and costs associated with finding new customers is reduced and we’ll see our business grow.
