Wednesday 10 April 2013

"Helpful"s let you know how you're hurting!

This was highlighted by a client in London with a pretty reasonable TripAdvisor ranking. In fact better than 'reasonable': top 100. We mined down into their TripAdvisor stats - and what do we find? 


That 86 people have voted one of the hotel's guests' negative reviews as 'helpful'.

What does that tell us? That at least 86 people were put off booking the hotel by a negative review (would you vote a negative review helpful and then book)?

Of course, it's much more than 'just' 86*, because very few potential guests bother to vote 'helpful' when viewing TripAdvisor reviews - so it is essential that hotels take all the action they can to minimise these negatives. 

To see how effective Dialogue is, have a look at the last two paragraphs of this post; negatives posted about this client have been reduced by over half in just two months.

At the risk of stating the obvious: if your guests' negative opinions are managed in private, they can't possibly put an potential guest off booking. And, on top of that, your ranking on TripAdvisor will rise.

*Needless to say, it's not just the people who are voting negative reviews 'helpful' who are being put off booking, but potentially anyone who reads them. We have lots of anecdotal evidence (from TripAdvisor) about the number of people who read a review compared with those who vote - in one such case there are 6 'helpful' votes where 425 people have read the review; that's 70 people 'reading' for every one who voted.

2 comments:

  1. Fred Reichheld wrote about the importance of resolution of the negative customer experience in "The Loyalty Effect" (http://www.loyaltyrules.com/loyaltyrules/effect_overview.html). He highlights the way disappointed customers have a disproportionate effect on the willingness of others to buy and be loyal. "A 5% improvement in customer retention rates will yield between a 25 to 100% increase in profits across a wide range of industries."

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  2. Thanks Ben. Especially for highlighting that managing negative comment is not simply an end in itself - the knock-on is as important, if not more so - customer retention being a big part of that.

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