Industry Report Hospitality

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HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY REPORT
Using Text Analytics to Improve the Hotel Customer Experience

Table of Contents

OVERVIEW................................................................................................................................... 3 SENTIMENT ANALYSIS................................................................................................................ 4 ROOT CAUSES OF SENTIMENT................................................................................................... 5 EXECUTIVE DASHBOARDS.......................................................................................................... 6 NON-SENTIMENT REPORTS PROVIDE MORE ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS.............................................................................................................. 7 CROSS-CHANNEL ANALYTICS..................................................................................................... 8 AUTOMATICALLY DISCOVER TOPICS OF CONVERSATION....................................................... 10 HOTSPOTTING: DETECTING EMERGING ISSUES..................................................................... 11 MONITOR THE SUCCESS OF NEW INITIATIVES....................................................................... 12 MARKETING CAMPAIGN TRACKING........................................................................................ 13 COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS........................................................................................................... 14 SURVEY ANALYTICS................................................................................................................... 15 CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT RESPONSE.................................................................................... 17 SUMMARY................................................................................................................................. 18

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OVERVIEW

Today’s travelers are increasingly vocal and willing to share their experiences with hotels and travel providers, and they are more apt to share those experiences online through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, in online reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, as well as directly with the provider through surveys, emails, calls and other more traditional means. From the check-in process to the quality of a property’s spa, this feedback contains valuable insights that hospitality providers can use to improve the guest experience with their brands, better target customers with offers, and differentiate their properties, products and services from the competition.

Until recently, collecting quantitative responses from guests through surveys was often the sole feedback method used by hotels and travel service providers. Today, many providers are recognizing the value of collecting feedback from social media and other online sites, as well as encouraging open-ended comments in their surveys. Yet, with thousands of reviews being generated every day, compiling and interpreting this unstructured data manually can quickly overwhelm the resources of a hotel or travel provider. To make matters more challenging, fake reviews are flooding sites like TripAdvisor, Citysearch, Yelp and other travel and hospitality web sites. In fact, research shows that forty-eight percent of consumers combine social media and search engines in their buying process (Source: Social Media Today). Those findings, in turn, impact the booking behavior of other consumers. In an Econsultancy survey, 90% of online shoppers said they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust opinions of unknown users. Consequently, it’s becoming increasingly more important for companies to manage the hospitality customer experience, not only by listening to customer feedback from a variety of channels, but also by analyzing conversations to extract valuable business insights and using those insights to improve the customer experience with their hotels. Attensity, a leading provider of text analytics solutions for Customer Experience Management, is at the forefront of this trend. In the following analysis, Attensity captured a snapshot of customer intelligence from publicly available online sources, including social media, where customers were having conversations about their experiences with leading hotels and resorts. The report provides an overview of the types of customer intelligence and key business drivers that hotels can leverage using advanced text analytics solutions from Attensity.

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SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
Historically, hotels have been somewhat wary of the evolution of the Internet as the predominant reputation platform for measuring the guest experience. This hesitancy was rooted in the assumption that only those guests who had a negative experience would post their comments. However, research shows that today’s social customers are increasingly sharing the full range of their hotel experiences, both positive and negative. Do your customers like you? Do they prefer your competition? Are your marketing messages resonating? If so, why? If not, what are their issues? Sentiment analysis helps hospitality organizations understand what customers think about their brands and offerings. The ability to track customer sentiment gives hotels the insight they need to determine where and how to prioritize change. Knowing whether customers feel positively or negatively about their brand, offerings and services gives hotels a high-level view of the health of the business. But, what are the issues that are driving that sentiment? These are the key details hotels and travel service providers need to know to make needed changes and drive their business forward.

This dashboard shows how sentiment varies by topic.

In the report shown here, an analysis of customer sentiment on publicly available Twitter conversations shows both positive and negative sentiment for two competing hotels. In addition to highlevel sentiment, the report shows the sentiment associated with specific attributes of the hotels. For example, a quick analysis of comments about the Crowne Plaza hotel shows that most of the Twitter posts are positive, specifically those about the hotel itself, the room, staff and location. However, there is a strong negative sentiment associated with the Service category. Something is amiss here, and is probably worth a closer look.
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ROOT CAUSES OF SENTIMENT
One of the most impactful insights that organizations can get from analyzing online customer conversations is an early view into service issues. The ability to understand the impact —and get early warning— of those issues is a significant area of opportunity to save costs and improve the customer experience. Learning about issues early and tracking them over time to improve customer service and, ultimately, the hotel’s offerings, can result in significant cost savings. However, since the detail about these issues is usually hidden in textual feedback, identifying them and understanding their magnitude can be challenging.

Hotels can identify top compliments and complaints, as well as specific issues affecting customer sentiment.

By drilling down into the root cause of the sentiment reports above, we can get a snapshot of the top Compliments and Complaints being talked about by customers. The data seen here is for “all hotels” in the analysis, so it does not reflect the strong negative comments about one particular brand. We see that overall, the top Compliments have to do with Friendly Helpful Staff and Overall Positive Experience, as well as the hotel’s “Pro Green Approach.” In the Complaints report, we see that Smelly Odor Complaints top the list, followed equally by Poor Customer Service, Negative Experience, Room Size and Parking. Understanding the root cause of sentiment is critical in deciding where to focus efforts on improving the customer experience with a particular brand or individual property.

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EXECUTIVE DASHBOARDS

Executive dashboards combine structured data such as Guest Promoter Scores related to brands and membership levels with unstructured customer feedback.

For years, companies have been collecting structured data about their customers and using that data to better target campaigns and offerings. Structured data includes things like customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and membership levels and properties the customer has stayed at in the past. In addition, hotels have other structured information such as hotel brands, individual property information, room numbers and more. Using advanced analytics, hotel executives can now combine that structured data with unstructured feedback from customers, such as online reviews, Facebook comments and Twitter posts, to get a more complete picture of customer feedback. For example, the report above shows Guest Promoter Scores by brand, membership level, geographic region and more. Executives can see at a glance how customer sentiment and specific complaints vary by these factors simply by clicking on any of the variables to add a dashboard constraint.

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NON-SENTIMENT REPORTS PROVIDE MORE ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
While sentiment analysis is important, non-sentiment based comments play an equally important role in customer feedback, and often contain valuable insights. For example, the report shown below provides a detailed look at actionable information such as customer profile data, the reasons the guest chose that particular hotel, the reason for their stay, such as a birthday or anniversary trip. Non-sentiment can also provide insights such as ideas or recommendations for new services, questions about a hotel property or intent to purchase a room.

This dashboard shows the insights that can be gained from non-sentiment based data.

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CROSS-CHANNEL ANALYTICS
While social media channels such as Twitter provide a real-time view of customer conversations, it’s important to remember that customers communicate with hotels in a variety of ways, and analyzing customer conversations across all communication channels is important for any hotel that wants a complete and accurate picture of the customer experience. For example, surveys continue to play an important role, and analyzing Guest/Net Promoter Scores (NPS) remains an important tool at both the individual property and the brand level. In the report below, Guest Promoter Scores across several hotel brands owned by the same company, as well as specific results for the company’s eco-friendly hotel brand.

To get a true picture of customer sentiment, analyze feedback from direct sources, such as surveys, emails and call notes, in addition to online sources.

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Even “social media” itself includes many different conversation sources, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as community forums, blogs, review sites, and video sites like YouTube. The report below shows compliment and complaint trends in conversation across these different sources, as well as sentiment analysis by topic.

Identify sentiment across social media, blogs and other channels to get an accurate picture of the customer

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AUTOMATICALLY DISCOVER TOPICS OF CONVERSATION
Hotel property and brand managers are increasingly aware that customers are sharing their opinions and looking for recommendations in social media, on review sites, and in customer forums. Many are taking strides to monitor and search for topics of conversation they know are of interest using keywords. But, how do they monitor topics of conversation they haven’t identified yet? While traditional search and text analytics systems rely on building exhaustive keyword lists, newer advanced analytics technology gives hotels and travel service providers the ability to automatically discover topics of conversation as they are happening. With the threat of hotel issues and service missteps quickly going viral, the ability to get early warning of issues and spot trends is fast becoming a key competitive differentiator.

Word cloud reports offer an easy way to see which customer compliments and complaints are trending at a glance.

In the word cloud reports shown above, the larger words show the topics with the most number of comments. Easy-to-use reports and dashboards like these are an essential component of customer analytics systems, and give marketers and customer service organizations an easy way to monitor customer conversations and spot key trends.

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HOTSPOTTING: DETECTING EMERGING ISSUES
In the past, customers who encountered an issue or problem would contact the hotel directly to resolve it. Today, they often turn to social media to express their frustration publicly. These conversations can be quickly picked up and reposted by dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people in social media, turning a single comment into a public relations disaster if the hotel brand doesn’t act quickly enough. Using advanced analytics, hotel and brand managers can quickly identify these types of issues or “hot spots” as they are emerging, and address them quickly, before they turn into a viral conversation. Unlike common keyword-based approaches, Hotspotting reports are useful for identifying new issues of which hotels may be unaware and thus, not searching for in advance. As an example, the following report shows a hotspot in conversations about one hotel property’s lack of hot water.

Hotspotting trend analysis report for hospitality industry

Similarly, a “cold spot” can be created when there is a noticeable dip in conversation volume around a specific topic. By tracking issues over time, hotels can get a sense of both emerging challenges and those that have gone from a “normal” level of complaint to a serious or “hot” level. Armed with this knowledge, the hotel can take action to prevent a minor annoyance from spiraling into a customer service or public relations disaster.

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MONITOR THE SUCCESS OF NEW INITIATIVES
In the hospitality industry, new initiatives often require a significant investment in time, money and resources to bring to market, including the coordination of multiple information systems, properties, capital investments, and training for hotel staff, to name just a few factors. Leveraging customer insights throughout the process is critical to success, and even then, success is anything but certain. Using advanced text analytics, hotels can now get fast feedback on new offerings directly from the market, and use that intelligence to adjust their initiatives to the realities of the market. Near real-time feedback can help organizations course-correct, making changes that can make the critical difference between an initiative that falls flat and one that is a major hit. Understanding customer opinion early in the process gives hotels the insights they need to understand the needs and wants of their customers, and deliver products, services and offerings tuned to their target markets.

Use of advanced customer analytics to monitor the success of new green initiatives at four hotel brands, including a new eco-friendly hotel.

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MARKETING CAMPAIGN TRACKING
Hotels spend millions to market their services, and to drive traffic to their websites and into their locations. Other than waiting for the sales reports, how can they tell if it is working? Surveys and other market research methods only tell half the story. The detailed feedback found in social media from customer opinions and ideas can be striking—and hotels and travel service providers can use this feedback to mold new campaigns, or to adjust second and third waves of an existing campaign.

Facebook Marketing Campaign Analytics for a top U.S. hotel brand

For example, in the report above, advanced analytics let marketers analyze detailed customer feedback on Facebook. In this case, customers of the Hampton hotel brand have very positive things to say about the hotel chain’s comfortable beds, breakfasts, “bold” coffee, and warm cookies, among other things. The hotel can then use this feedback in marketing campaigns promoting these offerings.

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COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Before the advent of advanced text analytics, competitive analysis was typically carried out by consultants paid millions of dollars to research the competitor’s offerings, pricing, marketing and properties. While those tactics can produce some very interesting insights, leveraging social media to get a real time view into what the market thinks presents an enormous opportunity to get direct insights from customers, faster and at lower cost.

Competitive analysis among Hyatt hotels in Dubai

For example, the above competitive analytics report shows how social customers prioritize different amenities at different hotels within the same Hyatt brand. Hotels can also analyze social conversations across different competitors in their industry.

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SURVEY ANALYTICS
Surveys are an important tool that many hotels use to track customer feedback over time. Using survey metrics such as customer satisfaction, or actively undertaking Guest/Net Promoter Score surveys (“Would you recommend Us?”) with customers electronically, enables the business to track changes in customer satisfaction over time. Along with survey questions, it is critical to provide detail behind the scores. Why does one service at one location continually score lower than another? Why are some customers not inclined to recommend a particular hotel? The following report looks at Guest Promoter Scores across different hotel brands owned by the same company.

Guest Promoter Score and number of weekly promoters vs. detractors

While many companies measure scores as a calculation of Promoters and Detractors, Attensity also factors in sentiment from “Passive” customers. Even though these customers don’t fall into the Promoter or Detractor range, their feedback still shows sentiment around key issues the brand or property manager needs to know about. For example, the report below shows that Passive customer complaints for a particular brand (Feel at Home) revolve around Noise, Negative Experience, Smelly Odors and Pricing, among others.

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Guest Promoter Score and specific complaints by promoters, passives and detractors

Using Guest Promoter Scores, hotels can identify changes in customer satisfaction over a selected period of time. To know how to turn the identified detractors into promoters, hotels need to understand the “why” behind the numbers and the scores. The following dashboard displays the ability to track the top compliments and complaints by room number and date of stay, allowing hotels to see why certain properties have the fewest problems and why others have the most.

Utilizing survey metrics like Guest Promoter Scores enables the hotel to drill down room numbers and dates of stay at a specific property, based on top compliments and complaints.

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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT RESPONSE
The verbatim of customer conversations about specific services can be quite revealing in terms of the detail customers provide about themselves, the reasons they buy, who they buy for, and more. While demographic and behavioral data is telling, customer conversations often deliver a degree of granularity that can be used to better segment and market to customers. While analyzing customer conversations is critical, it is just the first step. The ability to drive action based on these insights based on established business processes is critical to success in today’s competitive hospitality market. Many companies are struggling with how to engage with their customers in social media. It can be a daunting challenge, yet for today’s hyper-connected customers, the ability to engage through social media is quickly moving from a novelty to an expected piece of the customer experience.

Engaging customers in social media provides a valuable tool for service development.

In the report above, the Hyatt hotel brand used the 2011 summer season to directly engage its most social customers by opening its Facebook page to suggestions from fans on what to add or what might be missing from the page. Discovering popularly shared suggestions, such as wanting more sweepstakes and promotions for residents on the Facebook page (as evidenced in the above dashboard), Hyatt harnessed information that, without customer engagement and analytics, would otherwise have been unknown to the brand. Companies that don’t actively engage with customers through these social channels will soon find themselves at a disadvantage. Using customer analytics to drive proactive response is a key capability hotels need to turn insight into action. Today’s advanced customer analytics and engagement platforms allow hotels to transform customer conversations into action.
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SUMMARY
There is a wealth of user-generated content in social media, email, CRM notes, surveys and more being created every day about your company, your services, and your competition. Too often, this vital information goes underutilized and virtually untapped as a valuable asset. However, through the power of today’s advanced text analytics solutions, hospitality industry leaders can now conduct deep analytics and use those insights to drive key business decisions, deliver proactive service, and formulate competitive business strategies. The key to unlocking this wealth of information lies in a deep understanding of language— the ability to accurately pull out sentiment, key issues, and relationships—and in the ability to express those insights in easy-to-use business-oriented applications. This report is just a small glimpse into the kind of analytics and engagement capabilities that hotels and travel service providers can achieve.

For more information on this report, Attensity’s text analytics solutions, or to get a private demonstration, please contact [email protected], or visit us online: Website: www.attensity.com Blog: blog.attensity.com Twitter: twitter.com/Attensity Facebook: facebook.com/attensity

About Attensity
Attensity’s text analytics solutions are the choice of the world’s leading brands for Customer Experience Management (CEM). Attensity is the only company that gives business users the ability to analyze millions of real-time customer conversations from any online, social media or internal source, and extract the industry’s most accurate insights to drive business decisions. From its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and Kaiserslautern, Germany, Attensity is powering the customer experience strategies of companies such as AT&T, Charles Schwab, Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Lloyd’s Banking Group, Siemens, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Travelocity, Travelodge and Whirlpool.

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©2011 Attensity. All rights reserved. Attensity, First Person Intelligence and Exhaustive Extraction are trademarks of Attensity Group in the United States and/or other countries. Other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Information is subject to change without notice.

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