The importance of text analytics for timeshare resorts
By Emily Collins, EVC Marketing
“If you’re not going to read the answers and take action, why are you asking?”
This was the question posed by marketing guru Seth Godin in a 2016 blog post. And it is a question that’s still valid today.
Godin continues: “If you ask someone if they’re satisfied and then don’t follow up later, you’ve just made the problem a lot worse. If you ask your best customers for insight and then ignore it, you’ve not only wasted the insight, you’ve wasted goodwill as well.”
Many vacation ownership companies understand the importance of monitoring and measuring their customer experience (CX).
Metrics such as the NPS and CES provide them with essential data on every aspect of the customer experience and journey with the business.
From how marketing leads are managed to their experience when checking in at a resort as a member, hospitality brands are generating statistically accurate insight into the experiences of their customers.
Resorts are missing out on crucial information
However, while knowing your Net Promoter Score or that 75 per cent of your members enjoy your inhouse entertainment is crucial many resorts are missing out on even greater insight.
Rating survey questions like ‘how satisfied are you,’ or ‘how likely are you to recommend us to a friend’ tell you how customers feel within the limitations of the questions you ask. They show you how your resort has scored.
Unstructured question types with verbatim comments are a window into customers’ thoughts. They are where the meaning lies – where you uncover what you need to change and how and where your resort can improve.
And it is these customer thoughts and comments about your sales process, your resort, and their experience at check-in that they are likely to share with their friends and family – and on social media.
As Geoff Colvin writes in ‘The Simple Metric That’s Taking Over Big Business’ (May 2020, Fortune magazine) the star of Net Promoter is its follow-up question. This is usually stated as something like ‘How could we improve? Or, ‘Why did you give that score?’
Colvin cites Marc Stein, Senior VP at Dell Technologies, who says: “The real gem and actionable insights (from the Net Promoter question) come from the verbatim transcripts.”
Unfortunately, many companies either ignore these answers, produce a word cloud to highlight key terms, undertake simple sentiment summaries or store them away because they don’t have a scientific way to analyze them.
And this is more common than you may think.
Seth Godin runs a simple test to prove the point. In the last question of a customer service survey, when they ask, “anything else?” he puts his name and phone number and asks them to call him. No one has in more than fifty brand experiences.
When it comes to verbatim comments or open-ended, unstructured survey responses, the difficulty when analyzing them is that they are:
- Messy
- Complicated
- Varied and
- Unpredictable.
As Martha Brooke from CXPA explains: “Comments can be brief or lengthy, vague or technical, general or specific. Some comments stay on-topic; others trail off. And of course, customers refer to similar issues in different ways.”
And it’s not just comments found in surveys. Other sources of invaluable customer data such as reviews, interviews, posts and chats are a challenge to quantify. And that means missing out finding why your customers feel, think and rate the way they do.
Brooke explains: “All data can and should be quantified because, without quantification, you only have anecdotes. Not only are anecdotes not actionable, but they can also be misleading.”
Introducing AI-based Text Analytics
The good news is that with AI-based Text Analytics this unstructured but critically important data can now be quantified.
Resorts can process and understand the unorganized and unstructured way their customers share their opinions from wherever and however they collect their feedback from – website reviews and ratings, CustomerCount surveys, help desks, and call centers.
By analyzing these qualitative data, resorts can improve customer experience KPIs like NPS, CES, and customer churn and fully understand what their customers are saying. Only then can they build a responsive CX program that meets their needs and resolves their issues.
What is Text Analytics?
Text analytics combines sophisticated algorithms, AI technologies and text mining into easy-to-use software that draws meaning or sentiment out of written communication.
As customers share more data and feedback online, they increasingly expect a higher level of responsiveness and agility. No matter the size of the company or the industry/sector.
In other words, resorts that harness the power of text analytics are likely to be rewarded with growth, engagement and loyalty.
With Text Analytics, you can:
- Interpret and report unstructured data into structured data
- Find critical insights from any form of online feedback
- Let your customers speak for themselves
- Analyze sentiment and opinion
- Determine trends
- Easily visualize data
- Control and segment data
- Find correlations between comments and metadata
- Identify improvements you can make to your survey
To find out more about CustomerCount’s feedback management system and our Text Analytics functionality, contact Bob Kobek to arrange a full demonstration by email: [email protected] or telephone: 317-816-6000.
