When you’re traveling, where you stay plays a key role in how you’ll look back on your trip – a great hotel experience is magical; a poor one is hellish. HotelTonight launched in 2011 to make it easy for guests to use their mobile devices to book the industry’s finest hotels at the last minute with the best rates. Following a screening process, hotels add their unsold rooms to the HotelTonight app, which curates available rooms and connects customers with great deals on amazing hotel experiences.
HotelTonight depends on unbiased, candid input from users as a reality check into how the company is doing. “A person who has a bad experience rarely takes the time to write us,” says Amanda Richardson, chief data and strategy officer at HotelTonight. “However, you need that user’s thoughtful, raw feedback to correct and improve experiences for all customers in the future.”
HotelTonight is a champion of the Net Promoter System (NPS). Initially, the organization used a Google form to survey customers, but it didn’t give as much access to candid and thoughtful raw customer feedback as HotelTonight wanted. Although team members originally wanted to ask many more questions, after transitioning to Delighted to send customers NPS emails the day after they check out of their hotel, HotelTonight saw engagement increase.
“Often, customer issues pertain to the hotel, but it’s up to our team to figure out what went wrong and understand how to improve the experience,” says Richardson.
With Delighted, HotelTonight collects an average of 1,000 pieces of guest feedback around the world each week. Delighted’s automated weekly digest email summarizes the feedback for the executive, product, sales, and customer service teams. Richardson says, “It’s either the best way to start your week, or the worst – but really, it’s always the best because you’d never hear users’ voices so candidly with any other channel.”
HotelTonight’s average NPS in the first two months of using Delighted was 68. The company has since improved and maintained an average score of 75, roughly double the average score for the hospitality industry. The HotelTonight team works hard to maintain such a strong NPS, quickly addressing negative feedback as it arises and using feedback to prioritize feature enhancements for the future. Using Delighted to monitor NPS keeps HotelTonight tuned into industry trends, first impressions, and other pieces of valuable customer feedback. “If you don’t measure NPS, you’ll never fix the root cause of customer problems,” says Richardson.
Delighted also enables HotelTonight to understand customer sentiment by type of hotel, region, app interface, user history, and more. Backed by data, the company can make informed decisions as it moves into new markets and reaches new customers. Actionable feedback has also helped inspire change within its hotel partners.
As a Delighted customer since 2013, HotelTonight has worked with Delighted throughout the technology-driven shifts in the travel and hospitality industry. “Our biggest challenge is keeping it simple,” said Richardson. “Although it can be tempting to request additional feedback from customers, we’ve learned that our weekly NPS digest is the most effective tool for our team.”
In working with Delighted and applying NPS feedback to operational processes, HotelTonight also recognized that, as a technology company, it is critical to balance quantitative data with context from customer experiences. “Customer experience and feedback are the only things that matter,” said Richardson. “Data may tell you that customers don’t like a certain feature, but you’ll only find out the real problem by uncovering the ‘why’ factor through Delighted.”
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