Dialogue and Contract Bookings

Almost all the noise on the web focuses on individual travellers and their interaction with reviews, but what about your other sources of business?

We have many clients who source much of their business from the corporate/contract channel - and here we examine the help that Dialogue can be.

Pitching and negotiation

Having Dialogue reinforces your commitment to customer service. It provides evidence of customer satisfaction. Time and again we hear that 'contracts are won on price', but we both know there's more to it than that; the client wants to know there will be no backlash from their client(s), great reviews make that backlash much less likely, having great reviews and a mechanism for unhappy guests to voice directly to the hotel makes it even less likely

Retaining custom

Great feedback from the contract client's guests makes winning the renegotiation much more likely. Showing actual reviews and out-turns from Resolution - where the guest has had whatever issue raised managed to their satisfaction - reinforces the hotel's position

From the contractor's viewpoint 

Corporates are impressed by efficient and effective CRM. It means less concern that their clients are going to feed back negative experiences to them

TripAdvisor 'Review Express' gets a hotel a 'Killer Review'

You can be number 1 in your location, but that won't stop a 'killer review' harming your business. Last month TripAdvisor launched its 'Review Express' service, and just like we warned about potential drawbacks of 'Rave Reviews' we highlight the possible downside:

For those of you who would like to see the full death-dealing content...

Oh - and to complete the suite of TripAdvisor tools: a direct feed on the hotel's own home page - and guess what's on top? Another killer review...

Update 26 June - this hotel is no longer No1 in its area.

In summary:

If you run a perfect hotel, and, much more importantly, all your guests are perfect and would never dream of writing a negative review, then Review Express will work for you. 

Unfortunately we all have to live and work in the real world where guests do get out of the wrong side of the bed and want to vent their frustration; if you give them an easy-to-use mechanism they will use it (our clients know that) so you have to have a way of making sure they don't do it on TripAdvisor (like Dialogue).

If that easy-to-use mechanism is Review Express it will be used by all your unhappy guests to post direct to TripAdvisor, so it's definitely not something we would recommend.

Getting reviews - a little bird told me...

Dialogue + email = great reviews...

Dialogue + email + prompt card = more great reviews

Here's an example from a client who uses just such a card to great effect...

Read this in conjunction with the Secret of Dialogue's success.

The importance of responding to reviews

 

Couldn't wait to get to 100?

A locksmith in San Francisco issued a press release yesterday, proud that they had received 95 five star reviews on Yelp. So we had a look at their Yelp page...

Why, oh why, would they not bother to respond to the negatives (and thank the positives)? Doesn't this give potential customers a better impression...

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.

Yelp - issues with their filter

This is not an issue confined to Yelp - TripAdvisor has a secret algorithm by which it determines a hotel's ranking too. We think this clip from the Washington Post is worth watching...

Light relief - TripAdvisaargh!

You may have noticed that Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1bn yesterday. Some may be asking 'What's Tumblr?' We'll leave the broad answer to that in the capable hands of Google and focus on its relevance for our clients:

If you're looking for design ideas there'll be Tumblrs. You may even consider your own. One has an interesting take on the Premier Inn logo (good taste forbids that we publish it here)

Anyone can set up a Tumblr page - it's like a mini-Blog. Here's just one example...

It's not all about the negatives - in fact some of our favourites are the positives...

Like this...

 And this...

But the serious message remains the same as ever: if you don't claim your online reputation, there are ever-increasing ways that your customers, and the proliferation of websites which host user-generated content, will do so.