Maximizing the Impact of Customer Reviews & Ratings Sentiment Analysis for Hoteliers

Transcription

1 Maximizing the Impact of Customer Reviews & Ratings Sentiment Analysis for Hoteliers Vinodh Balaraman, Principal & Senior Partner June 2016

2 Why does electronic word of mouth (ewom) matter more than ever? Reviews are everywhere!! Review / rating sentiment drives hotel choice and RevPAR! What are hoteliers most focused on? Online reviews influence customers choice of hotel and drive RevPAR. However, the quality of reviews has a greater effect on luxury hotels RevPAR, while the volume of reviews has a greater effect on lower-tier hotels. Cornell Study 2

3 What can sentiment analysis do? Provide insights at company/regional/ brand/property level to inform and shape the customer experience Target audience: Marketing/brand leaders/ franchisees Generating loyalty Quality control and new procedures Revenue management price premium Provide insights to pricing/revenue management to drive decisions on ADR Target audience: Pricing/revenue management Online reputation comparison ewom Focus on target communication Effectively engage, respond and address individual customer concerns / questions (social listening command center) Target audience: Customer service Customer interactions response and recovery Specific marketing strategies Provide insights at individual customer level to drive personalized offers/experiences Target audience: Marketing 3

4 Typical challenges with sentiment analysis Delivering synthesized actionable insights from extremely large volumes of unstructured data to the right stakeholders at the right time Getting the right context & tone from customer comments leveraging company / industry knowledge Getting the taxonomy right Making it a repeatable process Doing it all without spending too much money and time! 4

5 Four step approach hotelier reviews & ratings sentiment analysis REVENUE INFLUENCE Insights on Key Business Questions Step 4: The dirtiest hotel in the world bugs, roaches and other insects. Exoskeleton of the bed bug found in our bed!! Dashboards & KPIs Step 3: Text Analytics Step 2: ROOM ROOM SERVICE LOCATION Data Acquisition & Integration Step 1: HARNESS CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE DATA 5

6 Let s look at the art of the possible 6

7 Global performance summary Opportunity for improvement lies in the low sentiment score (0.3) and ~27% negative area 7

8 Identify brands to look at by taking into consideration review volume and sentiment at brand level Clover Inn Are these customer perceptions of your brand consistent with your brand positioning intent? Which brands are reviewing poorly? 8

9 Look at the brand analysis dashboard that provides insights on strengths/weaknesses of a brand Clover Inn Keywords like Location, Stay and Bedroom have a strong, positive sentiment attached to them (shades of green), while Microwave and Lobby need to be looked into (shades of red) 9

10 Identify customer experience outlier properties for the brand based on the property list dashboard Clover Inn Fort Lauderdale has a high volume of reviews with an alarmingly high negative review count and a low overall rating 10

11 Drive impactful pricing decisions based on the strong correlation with customer sentiment ADR Index vs Sentiment Score Index ADR vs Sentiment Score by Property A D R Clover Inn FL COMP SET Clover Inn FL Sentiment score Leverage recent sentiment score/rating movements and comparables set (competitors, like company properties) assessment for future pricing decisions 11

12 Map customer sentiment by stage of journey to hone in on issues at the property level Customer journey view of feedback can help you pinpoint and address issues. For example, Room Stay with a more negative sentiment score and a higher keyword count can be a focus area 12

13 Drill down from journey stage to sub-categories to identify specific areas of focus at the property level Relate the count of keywords and sentiment to identify the areas of focus in this example, Bathroom and Insects 13

14 Drill-down from sub categories to view top positive and negative keywords to ID specific actionable insights Insects The dirtiest hotel in the world bugs, roaches and other insects. I want to warn that we only stayed one night, and got a full refund for our stay due to BED BUGS! It was unfortunate because we were having such a nice time Exoskeleton of the Bed Bug found in our bed!! Roaches Bed Bugs Bugs Bed Bugs Dirty Bugs Dead Roaches Drill-down from sub-categories to specific negative keywords and associated reviews can allow property owners/managers to identify specific actions to improve customer experience 14

15 Reviews/ratings are important but insights can also be derived by combining these with other sources Travel journey and hotel stay experience reviews and ratings From popular review-focused sites like TripAdvisor From hoteliers own websites (publicly available) From OTA websites like Expedia & Orbitz b Popular social media channels where the hotelier is mentioned Twitter Online blogs Facebook Travel review forums Hoteliers internal sources of customer feedback Internally collected customer feedback survey data Internal call center data Internal customer service data 15

16 An effective approach to address ewom can be extremely impactful A one-point increase in a hotel s average user rating on a 5-point scale makes potential customers 13.5% more likely to book that hotel. 1% increase in the hotel s online reputation score can boost RevPAR by almost 1%. Addressing ewom is critical to gain a competitive advantage by driving brand loyalty and optimizing pricing strategy. Source : Cornell Hospitality Research 16

17 What can you do? Assess your current approach reactive vs. proactive Break organization silos business/it sponsors and cross-functional stakeholders Have strategic roadmap but focus on tactical execution approach to achieve incremental ROI Decide on the platform-custom/saas/hybrid and data management accelerators Consider engaging a partner, to accelerate time to market, by leveraging their platforms and domain/company knowledge 17

18 Thank you! Any questions? Vinodh Balaraman Principal