How to develop customer metrics that will give you insights

how you develop customer metrics that
will actually give you insights I've
been doing some work with one of the
largest hotel chains in the world and
obviously customer data is critical to
them they want to understand how well
they're doing so they asked me to come
in and review their overall performance
management approach and help them
improve it a few years ago they
developed their own in-house customer
survey and like so many other companies
what they did is they went out and
looked at existing surveys covered their
own survey together and then used this
their aim was to basically see
improvements over time and they've done
that so they have lots of performance
data a lot of reports coming out and as
part of their monthly and quarterly
performance packs there's a bit on
customer information showing an upward
trend indicating that customer
performance has gone better over the
years but this is probably as far as it
went because I asked them a few
questions say ok this is all interesting
but how does it compare to other hotels
and they couldn't really answer this I
asked another question saying hey how is
this information helping you to improve
performance what are the kind of things
you need to do differently and their
survey was pretty standard egg was the
reception friendly was the room tidy was
the restaurant good so all these kind of
questions and in the end what I said to
them is that this is a bit like asking a
customer about the things that you feel
they want and then say have I given you
what I think you want instead of
actually asking the customer have I
given you what you want so they realized
that their existing metrics were not
very good not delivering them lots of
insights so we changed this and what I
brought in is the Net Promoter Score the
NPS this is basically a single metric
that says or ask one question saying how
likely are you to recommend
to a friend and then ask gives us K from
1 to 10 and then people say yes 1
definitely not 10 absolutely and then
you get inside the beauty of of
something like a Net Promoter Score is
that suddenly you have a metric that you
can benchmark because it allows any
Hotel to put the put this into context
of other hotels so you get benchmarks
off the hospitality industry and
suddenly this metric actually means
something you see where you are in
comparison the other thing we brought in
is we extended this Net Promoter Score
with two more questions one we said what
do you particularly like about us and
the second question is what do you think
we could do better what you now have is
you have one metric that gives you
really good insights gives you numbers
that are benchmark above the other two
questions give you insights about what
you need to do differently what you can
improve and what customers actually like
and dislike so suddenly they have
reduced their questions from about
thirty to three their response rate has
gone up and the insides are now really
valuable they have learned completely
new things why people would come to
certain hotels as has does it have is it
the venue do they come to certain events
is it because it's close to shops or not
again again they can use this for their
marketing the other thing they learned
is that certain people in these hotels
made a big difference so in one hotels
it was the bellboys that always made a
big difference or a particular cocktail
waiter so these kind of insights you
wouldn't get from this standard survey
that just asked 30 questions in little
tick boxes yes or no yes or no because
it doesn't give you what give you
doesn't go beyond the very very simple
tick boxes so we had better metrics the
other thing we did is we then look at
what data is already out there we now
live in a world of big data and lots of
other organizations lots of other ways
of collecting data so they looked at
companies like TripAdvisor and
booking.com
and what they do is they collect a
and interestingly their response rate is
actually higher so more people or people
are more likely to answer a survey that
comes from booking calm or TripAdvisor
then from this particular hotel chain
directly and the beauty is TripAdvisor
makes this data available so he can now
pull this in and again we created a
routine by which every Hotel manager the
first thing they do in the morning is
they now read reviews on booking.com and
TripAdvisor and they will answer them
and they will take this information and
put this into their own scorecards so
again using some of this data the other
thing they wanted to do is they wanted
to have more granular insights what I
see is that lots of surveys are not done
frequently enough companies do them
maybe once a month and aggregate them so
they the survey identified a certain few
areas that was a Jim and another area
was the reception where some of the
hotels were having some issues so what
we did is we install a little terminals
there's a company called happy or not
that installs a determinist where you
basically say were you happy with the
reception check-in experience today are
you happy with the Jim and then you
simply press a button a green or amber
or red indicating how happy you are and
this is now giving them real-time
insights and giving them insight on when
certain when people at reception are
particularly unhappy or particularly
happy and for me these are great
examples of actually moving to better
insights this company had plenty of KPIs
they had great report well they're not
not giving them they were not giving
them what they needed making a few
tweaks we now have benchmarking
indicators real insights from the open
questions and more real time data from
the happier not terminals and bringing
in external data this is has made this
whole process cheaper their response
rate has gone up and their insights are
now really actionable this is what I do
with my clients I help them develop
performance management systems
and better ways of gaining insights from
data that really drive performance
improvements hopefully I will see you in
my next video if you would like to learn
more head to my website at Bernard
marcom where you can find tons of
articles white papers and videos that
will give you a lot more insides of real
world case studies and examples