How Hilton used tech to heal its customer relationships
It is no secret that the pandemic caused short-term pain for hotels, however for the Hilton’s director of guest insights, Anthony Jahanbakhsch, COVID-19 also uncovered long-term strategic problems within the hotel industry.
“During the pandemic, we saw a dramatic decline in post-stay survey volume and also guest satisfaction scores,” he told guests at Qualtrics X4 Sydney event last week. “This was a critical issue because guest satisfaction is directly linked to business performance as we all know.
“Through some very sophisticated analyses, our team was able to prove that guests with a positive experience are much more likely to return to a Hilton property than those who have had a negative experience.
“The pandemic created an environment where guests had higher expectations and were more critical of their experiences than ever before.”
This focus highlighted that Hilton’s existing feedback process was not up to scratch.
“The challenge was that our legacy tools and approaches were not delivering the insights and the capabilities we needed. Response rates for surveys were declining, making it harder to gather critical feedback from our guests.
“Our antiquated approach emphasized post-stay surveys and neglected important in-stay actions that would ultimately enhance the guest’s experience.”
These observations led to a substantial change in how the Hilton manages its feedback system.
“We realised that to move forward, we needed to overhaul the feedback systems, processes, and integrate them into a cohesive, actionable framework that would allow us to respond swiftly and efficiently to guest needs.
“We transitioned our 20-year partnership with another vendor to Qualtrics. This move provided us with best-in-class text analytics capabilities, enabling us to derive the insights from what customers tell us rather than just the scores that they provide, we adopted a five-star approach to simplifying our feedback metrics, and developed simplified dashboards that are easier for on-property and corporate team members to use.”
The results of the shift in tactic have been huge: Jahanbakhsch said that Hilton now has 75,000 unique users on its feedback platform which has also garnered 7.5 million pageviews.
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