When you picture a CX expert in the hospitality industry, maybe you imagine a helpful concierge, a receptionist who’s always smiling, or a tour guide cheerfully lifting an umbrella to keep a big group together.

What you might not imagine, however, is a hotel manager who spends half of every day glued to a screen, tracking guest metrics. For a people person who thrives on social interaction, this can be a tough sell.

The CX challenge for hospitality leaders

While many folks get into the industry because they love hosting guests and connecting with people, CX managers across the industry find themselves poring over multiple platforms – CRM, omnichannel survey, in-hotel feedback management, billing and revenue, and loyalty management – to make sense of guest feedback and experience.

Unfortunately, even these hours don’t always pay off. Too often the automatic reports aren’t useful, the insights aren’t actionable, and — obviously — there are lots of different pieces to pull together.

Are you struggling with a lack of standardization when it comes to tracking guest feedback and metrics? We hear you. As leaders in integrated CX management solutions, we regularly interact with hospitality teams who ace guest experience. We asked them how they get typical industry conundrums.

After all, they seem to know how to nudge busy guests toward authentic feedback. As businesses look to forge stronger guest relationships, customer feedback matters more than ever.

Here’s what we learned…

Tip 1: Cap priority metrics at business goals

Resist the urge to run a survey for every new metric that becomes an industry fad. This will also help you limit the questions and surveys you have for busy guests. Focus on your primary business KRA and the guest experience metrics that align with it.

Let’s say, your management wants you to increase the customer lifecycle value by 3% annually. In this case, you shouldn’t fuss over the average order value as much as on average resolution time. A customer who has had to wait for longer than expected on a service issue is unlikely to give you their best business.

You might ask – what about the endless metrics your guest feedback system offers? It’s important to track them, especially from a predictive analytics and process optimization standpoint. However, when mapping the guest journey to make a business impact, considering every metric can slow you down. It can even take the bite out of your strategy.

Top CX leaders and revenue outliers don’t obsess with every guest feedback that gets plotted. Instead, they invest in a guest feedback system that uses AI to prioritize which feedback needs their attention. Know your must-act metrics over good-to-resolve metrics. This lets you intervene in good time. Reach out to guests using the right balance of tech and personalized service. They also make sure they don’t settle for the traditional approach to conducting guest surveys. Here’s what they do differently:

• Design smarter questions to elicit clear responses in the context of the chosen metrics
• Go past textual responses and process deeper guest sentiment using technologies such as NLP across touchpoints
• Follow-up with personalized communication to forge genuine connections with guests who choose to share feedback

Tip 2: Balance revenue metrics with service metrics

Top hospitality leaders also recognize the fact that some of the best guest experiences begin with neutral or negative guest feedback. And most often, they are key to big business and profitability. These leaders invest in going the extra mile by marrying intuition with prompts from an intelligent guest feedback system.

Their universal mandate to the team? Exceptional guest journeys don’t just happen. They are curated.

Such teams map guest journeys in a manner that is far from transactional or intrusive. They choose to include both metrics that move the needle on revenue and metrics that echo their ideal guests’ experience (more often than not, the two are directly correlated). After all, improving guest experience through feedback can only help but boost your numbers on both ratings (when they see you’ve implemented suggestions) and revenue (when they come back again)!

Here are a few key metrics to prioritize in guest feedback:

Net Promoter Score

Leaders in the business know that referrals are the most effective channel to winning repeat as well as new business. They ensure they measure Net Promoter Score or NPS in an intent-led manner. Our tip? Use an omnichannel guest feedback system to know the precise touchpoints/experiences that have the most impact on your NPS. Some companies choose to use Referral Score and Direct Revenue Ratio as metrics to measure the inherent guest sentiment.

Customer Effort Score
Across the board, guests associate great hospitality with immense thoughtfulness. This makes it imperative to track how your business scores on Customer Effort Score (CES). Monitor guest feedback across touchpoints to spot an isolated trend or trend as it emerges.

Customer Retention Rate
This isn’t a metric that you can measure on a standard guest feedback system. Invest in a CX management platform that you can integrate with your CRM and ERP systems. This will allow you to map retention trends to specific guest experience wins and losses.

Average Order Value
The money a guest chooses to spend with your business reflects their trust. Top CX leaders ensure they link guest feedback and experiences across touchpoints to subsequent spending. This allows them to know top drivers and deterrents to the guest experience.

Online Sentiment Score
The most effective leaders out there give serious consideration to this post-check-out metric. When guests are proactive in posting positive, neutral, or negative feedback on third-party forums, it is a result of deep-rooted sentiment.

Tip 3: Build a comprehensive feedback ecosystem

The journey to mapping guest experience with CX metrics begins with seeking active feedback. But it demands setting several other measures in place. A big shift for top hospitality players has been investing in guest feedback systems that “listen” across internal and external touchpoints.

Here’s why:

• You can request guest feedback on transactional and relational experiences only so often
• Guest sentiment towards your brand and the ideal CX is evolving even when they aren’t actively experiencing your service; owing to an Uber ride perhaps?
• Metrics such as Personalization Score need to be weaved into the guest feedback system using custom parameters

Deploy a powerful CX management platform to understand guest journeys as they happen. Uncover active and dormant guest feedback at the right time with intuitive tools. This helps you get past traditional data-sharing bottlenecks. Give everyone on the team access to guest feedback and sentiment, helping them map and manage guest journeys in the most intuitive manner. When you limit everyone’s focus to winning on the top two to three metrics, you replace stress with insights for the team. Scoring on guest feedback metrics becomes a catalyst for their performance, further transforming the guest experience.

Ready to learn how SogoCX can help you map and improve the guest journey? Contact us to discover how leading hospitality brands leverage results to improve CX metrics, guest experiences, and long-term loyalty and revenue growth.