Ask the right questions at the right time and take full advantage of guest feedback!

Asking your guests questions about their experience of your hotel is a practice you have surely implemented by now. Not only does it enable you to increase your visibility on the review platforms, it also provides an opportunity to collect relevant, constructive guest feedback which will, in turn, allow you to improve your operations and service, leading to better performance overall.

But, beyond simply asking your guests about their stay, it’s now vital to choose your questions well in order to glean the most useful information.

Here’s a little bit of background…

Greater flexibility for greater personalisation

To be successful, a questionnaire needs to be flexible and adapted to your establishment, guests and the time of year. This last category may prove essential when the time comes to analyse your performance.

For instance, imagine that your hotel is located in the mountains. Your clientele will, naturally, vary with the seasons. It’s therefore vital to be able to adapt to your target audience with ease. In winter, focus on providing easy access to the ski slopes; perhaps offer a shuttle service for your guests. Are your guests primarily families? If so, ask them what they think about the services offered such as childcare and entertainment. Do you run any offers for special events, such as end-of-year celebrations (Christmas Eve dinner, company Christmas tree evening…)? Here too, you can draw on the flexible nature of the questionnaire to make it as personalised as possible and thus collect constructive guest feedback. Depending on the season, you can also make the relevant facilities the focal point in your hotel; in summer, for instance, you might highlight your swimming pool and the related services.
By adapting to the different seasons your hotel experiences, you will be able to make more precise judgements about the guest feedback you receive about the services you have available. This customisation and personalisation means you can significantly improve your understanding of your guests’ needs and their satisfaction level.

There are just as many different situations as there are guest profiles. Your guests will be more receptive to and more likely to respond to a satisfaction survey if it is personalised. As we pointed out in a previous article, the guest experience plays a key role in determining the success of your hotel. That’s why Customer Alliance have worked hard to develop a new questionnaire which meets both hotel owners’ and guests’ needs in a precise way.

A made-to-measure questionnaire for an optimal guest feedback

And so, to help improve not only the guest experience but also the feedback you receive, Customer Alliance created this new questionnaire over which you have completely free rein. As demonstrated in the aforementioned examples, every establishment is different, and so too are its guests, according to the season. You know your guests better than anyone, so you can adapt the length of the questionnaire. If your guests are primarily business travelers, you can stick to the bare essentials and create a succinct questionnaire focusing on the areas where you would like to receive guest feedback (quality of WiFi connection, efficiency of check-in/check-out…). If you want to know whether your guests made use of particular services or facilities available in your hotel (spa, restaurant…), go for conditional questions; these will give you a precise overview of the number of people who used them, and also provide an assessment of these services.

It’s important for your guest to be in the best possible conditions to leave a review, so your questionnaire design needs to be as pared back as it can be. The format of our new questionnaire aims to make the answering process simple and fluid for your guest.

To sum up…

It’s vital to adapt your satisfaction surveys and questionnaires both to your guest segment and the time of year. The seasons and specific events (New Year, trade fairs, exhibitions…) must be able to help you personalise the guest experience through the means of a made-to-measure questionnaire.

Customer Alliance’s new questionnaire allows you to adapt quickly and easily to any situation. Want to learn more? Here’s a little glimpse of our new innovation.

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. One of our experts will be happy to answer your questions in a personal interview.