By Clive Nicolaou, Plumsource Ltd.
Plumsource designs and develops integrated customer feedback systems that will help increase your customer value and advocacy. We can show you how to get real insight, and then engage with your staff and customers so you will understand how to develop and maintain a competitive edge.
Listen
We can help you choose and manage the channels of communication including:
- Customer feedback research: customer satisfaction, service evaluations, complaints, user groups
- Opinion: User rating sites; forums; social networking
- Performance measurement: Service audits; Mystery Customer research; Employee feedback
Understand
We can show you how best to integrate feedback from multiple sources and gain insight so you can prioritise the key messages for your business.
Engage
We can work with you to engage with customers and staff alike to create lasting and measurable improvement to the business.
What is Review Express?
TripAdvisor (TA) has just launched a new service aimed at helping hospitality businesses generate more reviews by soliciting customers directly.
Since its inception one of TA’s key success drivers has been the independence of the reviews that are posted by travellers and diners. Indeed, businesses have, until now, been explicitly forbidden from using incentives to attract reviews. Will this move undermine TA’s position as the consumer’s champion?
The key features of the new service are:
- Customisable emails, including ability to add a logo, image and personalised message (although a template is also available)
- Bulk upload of up to 1,000 email addresses, allowing businesses to target recent guests or customers with one mail out
- Processing of mail outs within 24 hours and automatic notification of successful and unsuccessful sends
- Ability to send messages in the 21 languages that TripAdvisor supports.
This service has, we are told, been launched as a result of demand from businesses, and has been extensively tested.
To ensure that any reviews collected through this method can be identified by TA users they will be appended with “collected in partnership with [hotel/restaurant name]”.
Is this a positive development for the review user?
There are many businesses that have developed a systematic approach to attracting, and responding, to reviews within the confines of the existing system. There are always businesses ready to complain that reviewers have not treated them fairly and, undoubtedly, there are reviewers that do leave unjustified reviews (both positive and negative). However, this only happens in a small minority of cases. When taken in aggregate, TA reviews provide an accurate representation of the customer experience.
The users of TA have been shown to use reviews in quite a sophisticated manner. Before making a judgment they will take into account the following dimensions:
- Quantity – There must be sufficient reviews to make the rating reliable
- Recency – Reviews need to be current, and left on a regular basis in order for users to trust them
- Balance – Users will read a selection of good and bad reviews, looking for similarities in the accounts left by reviewers
Will this undermine the consumers’ trust in TripAdvisor?
A request to your customers for feedback is likely to be well received and most will be keen to provide an impartial review of your business, so don’t expect to receive glowing reviews just because they are on your mailing list. In fact sending out requests to up to 1,000 potential reviewers, when you have limited information about their relationship with your hotel or restaurant could prove disappointing for your overall TA rating.
On the other hand, those businesses with a more advanced approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will have profiled their customers, and know who their most loyal guests or customers are. Therefore it will be no surprise if the bulk mailings used in the first instance are targeted at those most likely to provide a positive review.
As the reviews solicited using Review Express will be noted as such, will consumers consider them to be as trustworthy as those left spontaneously? If a business manages to increase the number and quality of reviews it attracts through this method it will, arguably, skew the overall rating in its favour. This will be especially true for those that engage with their customer base digitally.
Whether this undermines our trust in the impartiality of TA by creating a suspicion that is has made a strategic shift away from being the consumers’ champion, and become more a survey tool for hotels and restaurants, only time will tell.
Our recommendation would be to start looking at your customer database and mailing lists, clean them up, and try to identify your most loyal customers and guests. They should be top of your list if you are considering using Review Express.
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