Learn how text analysis helps the tourism and hospitality industry respond quickly to travellers' needs.
Whether you run a five-star Airbnb or a five-star hotel, you’re a customer-centric organization. You know this because you’re constantly asking your customer how you’re doing. How satisfied were they with your response time today? How likely would they be to recommend you to a friend? How likely they are to be a returning guest?
But what do you do with this information? All those ticked boxes, scorecards and rambling rants add up to a mass of data without a clear picture of what your customers are saying. Even if you only get one “Terrible” for every ten “Excellent,” you need to know why. All the stylized graphics in the world won’t help if that “Terrible” customer shares his or her complaint for the world to see.
That’s where text analytics comes in. Text analytics is the process of evaluating unstructured responses in order to extract high-quality and actionable insights, quickly and efficiently. Text analysis of guests' feedback is a critically effective way to understand your market.
Here are 5 real ways text analytics can lift your market research game.
1. Text analytics helps you understand your market on a deeper level
Guests have limitless wants and needs. Text analysis helps you develop products and services that sell. Lots of your guests commented that they loved the free Netflix so it’s time to move that up in the marketing! Forget about the free wifi... everybody has that. With this information, you can market a better product, bringing you a better return on your investment.
2. Find out why you’re a 2.5
Text analysis can help you pinpoint the negatives in customer’s minds. Open-ended questions reveal weaknesses and problems. What does a 5 on a Likert scale tell you anyway? But if you ask the question “What concerns, if any, do you have with our hotel?” and the guests answers that they like the brand but other hotels seem to be both better located and cheaper, that’s information you can work with.
3. Let travellers know you’re a 5
On-line reviews are important for a brand’s exposure and to build up customer trust. Why did a customer love your hotel? Or why they hated it? Wouldn’t you love to know that 73% appreciate the service and standards of your hotel, 23% thought the new food and beverage offerings were great while 6% felt the location wasn’t convenient.
4. Beat the competition
Market research is about knowing your competition, but data on your competitors can be notoriously hard to glean. This is where online reviews come into play. More than just knowing you scored better than your competitor, text analysis can be used to find the reasons behind why they chose you rather than an alternative hotel, or the features of your competitor that led them to preferring it to your own. This knowledge assists you in improving your product and helps you attract or convert those customers still on the fence.
5. Let travellers love you more
Customer loyalty and retention go together. Text analytics can help you effectively analyze thousands of sentences and hone in on actionable complaints. Once you have identified which complaints to address, you can let customers’ knows their voices were heard via a newsletter or social media announcement that builds on your customer-centricity. So you can’t change your hotel’s location. But you can let them know that the new restaurant and bar are so fabulous that nobody wants to go out anyway!
Text analytics is the perfect side-kick to any existing market research. Whether you call it text mining, text analysis, natural language understanding or sentiment analysis, it answers the big questions around why your customers choose or not choose to act on your service. In short, it’s useful for saving time, improving the effectiveness of your marketing, and in the end, making you more money.