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APRIL – JUNE 2018
RESORTDEVELOPER.COMVACATION INDUSTRY REVIEW
20
Any business that collects customer
feedback does itself a valuable service, as
client opinions — from the complimentary
to the critical — are a major factor in
helping evolve, improve, and enact positive
changes that keep customers returning.
So when The Christie Lodge in Avon, Colorado, began
planning its recent renovations, those involved knew just
where to start.
“We looked at a year’s worth of comment cards to see what
the 10 most frequent complaints were,” says Lisa Siegert-Free,
managing director and general manager of The Christie Lodge
Owners Association Inc. “Then we designed our renovations
around finding solutions for them.”
When it comes to lodge guest feedback, some of the small-
est changes can make the biggest differences. For example,
the resort replaced mini-fridges inside guest rooms with larger
models and moved beds away from the walls.
It became quickly apparent that the HOA has made all the
right moves; comment-card ratings from guests who stayed in
the renovated units outshined the ones from those who didn’t.
Those results come as no surprise to Jay Baer, author of
Hug Your Haters
and founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy
consulting firm. “Customers will give you the information you
need to improve your operation, make more money, and save
money, but that only happens if you embrace complaints,” he
says. “Good companies tolerate complaints, but great ones
seek them out because they know that the people who are
complaining are actually giving you what you need to discover
where you can improve.”
Survey Says …
There’s one form of feedback that
every resort affiliated with exchange
company Interval International re-
ceives: the post-stay comments from
Interval members.
At Interval, Soraya Gonzales,
vice president of resort assistance,
explains that every member who
accepts a confirmation receives an evaluation form. The
exchange company emails members the day after checkout,
providing an opportunity for them to rate their stay. Those who
don’t respond initially get another chance on the eighth day
and the 25th day following their stay.
Once the results are in, they are distributed to resort man-
agement. ”They have access to real-time dashboard data, so
they can compare multiple resorts within the same group, they
can combine resorts, and they can compare categories across
time,” Gonzales says. “There’s a lot that resorts can do with this
information, including reconfiguring it for their specific needs.”
Many resorts also have an internal feedback system. The
Christie Lodge uses CustomerCount, emailing a survey to each
guest three days after they check out.
Medallia is the feedback engine of choice for Holiday Inn
Club Vacations (HICV). It also uses the GetFeedback system
through SalesForce, which Nick Pestillo, vice president of
owner support at HICV, calls “very robust.”
“The after-call survey is just 10 questions,” he says. “As
time goes on, fewer people are willing to do surveys, so our
goal is to make it quick and easy.”
In the future, HICV will ask members who interact with its
call center to respond to a text-message survey comprising
just three brief questions about their experience:
n
Was the interaction acceptable?
n
Was the issue resolved?
n
How would they rate the overall experience?
By simplifying and streamlining the way HICV solicits cus-
tomer feedback, Pestillo says that management is hoping for
an increased response rate.
The Christie Lodge also plans to implement a text analytics
program through CustomerCount to analyze positive, neutral,
and negative feedback to increase understanding of the
data received.
To Incentivize
or
Not
to Incentivize?
What’s the ideal survey length? “The
best possible survey is one question,”
Baer says, not too seriously. “There
isn’t a magic number, but in general,
ask only the things you need to ask.”
With that, Baer urges resisting the
temptation to tack on more questions,
since every added question can increase a survey taker’s frus-
tration and, consequently, decrease his or her level of interest
and participation.
Customers need to respond in order for ratings surveys
to be effective. Baer discourages incentivizing members to
respond by offering prizes or rewards; while it may seem like a
logical option at first, it can quickly skew the results.
“When you do that, you’re biasing your sample because
it’s people who want to be in the drawing,” he says. “Market
research says that’s not a great practice.”
LISTEN
UP!
Customer Feedback —Complaints Included —
Is Good for Business
BY JUDY KENNINGER