Dialogue for hotels - a performance update

Here we compare Dialogue's up-to-date performance against the benchmarks we (and our clients) set:

The effect on our clients' online reputations

• Negative posts to TripAdvisor have been reduced by an average of 73%
• Positive posts to TripAdvisor have been increased by an average of 8%
• Negative posts (scores below 7) to Booking.com have been reduced by 54%
• Clients are averaging an internal TripAdvisor CSI of 92% 

The scores for our clients through Dialogue

and even better for 'Staff'

• Our client hotels are scoring an average of 4.6 (out of 5) on 'overall opinion'

Managing negative posts in private (guest retention)

To make these figures easier to understand we have put the number per 1000 reviews in brackets

• Clients are averaging 23.8% negatives through Resolution (238)
• Less than 1% of those posts are resulting in a published review in Dialogue (2.4)
• Less than 8% of that 1% are resulting in a negative review to TripAdvisor (0.2)
• An average of 1 in 3 result in a (privately) written comment indicating the guest's willingness to revisit the hotel (79)

Taken from just one (private) response in Dialogue (hotel name redacted)

 Reports from clients indicate...

"Repeat bookings"

• Increases in rates of return stays

"Direct bookings"

• Increases in direct bookings

• And increases in valuable feedback

"Valuable feedback...prompting them to book directly with us"

The bottom line...

Membership of Dialogue is not just about gaining control of your online reputation, it's about the effect that gaining that control has on your bottom line...

A great online reputation = increased profitability

Managing reputational risk

 

All prudent businesses manage risk. It's part of the daily role of management. The risk that sales forecasts won't be met; the risk that suppliers will increase prices; the risk that customers will default, the risk that key staff will leave...

But what about the risk to their reputations? A business's reputation can be harmed in a multitude of ways, and it's every business's core asset: if your reputation is put at risk, all other forms of risk become relatively insignificant. But how many businesses have a strategy to manage this 'reputational risk'?

Here we examine that key question. And the answers are many and various, but they basically break down into internal or external...

Internal

Covers such aspects as:

• Training - initial and ongoing
• Compliance - with the businesses' own rules and the laws/regulations imposed on it
• Management reporting

External

Just one thing matters here:

•  Customer satisfaction 

In the past, if 80% of your customers were happy, that was considered a good result. In all but the most exceptional circumstances the 20% 'dissatisfieds' would be drowned out by the majority of 'satisfieds'...

But not any more, not since the web came into being. If your business has just 100 customers, the 20 'dissatisfieds' can make enough noise to bring down your reputation, causing permanent damage to your business.

This bears closer examination:

Any one of those twenty can post anywhere on the web, not just once, but as many times as they feel inclined to. Google will pick up their views and they will be displayed in Google searches. You have 1000 customers? The odds increase exponentially: the chances of one of the two hundred 'dissatisfieds' being the kind of person who will have the energy to post multiple times increases, and research shows that the more negatives are published, the more other 'dissatisfieds' are likely to join in...

And we haven't even mentioned disgruntled ex-staff or unscrupulous competitors yet.

Your strategy

• Ensure your management and staff - all your staff (remember Miss Irhlweg at United Airlines?) - understand the implications of reputational risk.

• Ensure you have a credible mechanism for harvesting positive comments from your satisfied customers so you have them to weigh in the balance when something does go awry (and it surely will, even in the best run business). It will be too late when the negative noise starts.