Keep calm and focus on Customer Satisfaction: The hygiene measures will become a ‘hygiene factor’

To all the hoteliers and venues reopening their doors, best of luck! I bet things are all systems go with the revival of the hospitality sector, the roll out of new hygiene measures and the balancing act of staffing levels.

It’s great to start seeing shoots of recovery, hotels re-opening and even meetings starting again. It’s been a long time coming, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am at this move in the right direction for the whole hospitality sector.

If you have been reading our weekly consumer sentiment tracker, you’ll know that consumer confidence is what the hotel and venue sector need to work on right now. Our insight also tells us that customers want to be reassured about the safety measures put in place and that customer experience and satisfaction should not be forgotten. Since every brand under the sun is now rolling out a ‘cleanliness stamp’ how will you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

My advice right now is to monitor, measure and maintain both Covid response measures and customer experience. Many hotels, venues and attractions are signing up to the brilliant VisitBritain ‘We’re Good to Go’ initiative. This is great, reaching out to show your customers that you are back in business and Covid ready, but are you auditing this process? Do you have an independent company that can give your customers confidence and a seal of approval that after mystery checks, the property has passed the Covid response criteria?

BVA BDRC are experts at monitoring brand standards. If you are rolling out Covid response measures across your portfolio, and you care about what your customers are experiencing and you want to get them back through the door again, then we have the toolkit just for you.

The COVID-19 Integrated Response Toolkit helps businesses enhance operational preparedness before, during and after reopening, to achieve safety in the post-COVID-19 economy. It has a two-pronged approach to include customer experience monitoring and Covid response checks along with multiple optional extras such as:

• Social media review analytics
• Internal check tool
• Customer feedback surveys

All of these can be pulled together into an easy-to-use platform with integrated dashboards and action plans. This is a bespoke tool, providing expert guidance to measure your new industry standards.

If you are spending hours pondering how you can market to your customers who, in this new environment, all have completely different views and standards, then cognitive studies could be the answer.

At BVA BDRC we have integrated an EPIC framework into our market leading mystery shopping. We learn from behavioural economics that ?“people judge an experience based on how they felt at its peaks (i.e., its most intense points) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”

The EPIC Framework allows us to measure these  ‘peak moments’ (the moments from an experience that are most memorable and meaningful) by asking mystery shoppers to record when and why they felt:

• Elevation (the experience went beyond what was expected)
• Pride (they were made to feel unique)
• Insight (they learnt something)
• Connection (a bond was formed)

Whatever you do, keep customer experience and satisfaction front of mind, or new hygiene measures may simply become a ‘hygiene factor’ and you’ll get left behind. Do get in contact if you want to know more.