4 Stars or 5 Stars?

Regardless customer reviews have an enormous impact on traffic and sales in the hospitality industry. Here are a few incredible statistics from QSRWeb that showcase the impact of online reviews on different forms of retail, travel, & hospitality:

• Restaurants, Hotels & Doctor’s Offices are the industries most affected by negative reviews
• Restaurants that boost their Yelp rating by one star can increase revenues by 5-9%
• 42% of travelers use review web site while planning their holiday
• 76% of travelers are willing to pay more for a hotel with higher review scores
• 4 or more negative reviews about your company or your product might take away 70% of its potential customers
• When retailers reply to negative online reviews, 33% of customers deleted their post or replaced it with a positive review

Now What?

Almost all hospitality businesses win and lose based upon customer service, quality of product or service and speed of service. Online reviews are no different, in particular if you consider the same QSRWeb statistics that build on retailers responding to negative reviews. Nearly 20% of customers that received a response to a negative review from a retailer went on to become loyal customers making additional purchases. If one yelp star is worth 5-9% of incremental sales, then turning negative reviews in positive reviews will also fuel sales growth. Proper customer engagement starts with getting to know your customers at a more intimate level, and in the digital world this information lives in your data.

The Answers are in the Data

Customer engagement does not happen in the IT department, it happens in the business. The best way to tap into your data is to outfit the business (sales, marketing, customer service, operations) with a flexible data analytics platform which enables the following:

1. Disparate Data– It is not enough to just look at social media data in a vacuum or analyze a single online review site. The business will want to combine data from inside and outside the company to achieve a 360 degree view of the customer
2. Understand Sentiment – Get to know what your customers actually mean when they leave reviews.
3. Associative Experience – A business user needs an easy and straightforward way to see how review sites are related and unrelated with respect to online reviews, and how that correlates to sales and bookings.

The hospitality industry is a tough business, but with the proper amount of customer engagement your online reviews will trend the right way along with your sales performance. Analytics is at the heart of the journey toward positive reviews, and the Qlik Analytics Platform is the most robust an agile analytics platform in the market place that is focused on the business user. I invite you to try Qlik out for yourself with the Qlik Social Media & Facebook Analytics Solution Demo. I trust you will give us 5 stars!