Hospitality Paradigm

Social intelligence firm newBrandAnalytics has analyzed information from 2012 to make some predictions for 2013 on what key ways businesses will use online feedback to enhance customer experience.

The key trends that will unfold in 2013:

Good-bye surveys: In 2012, organizations witnessed a 25% increase in online customer reviews. With a consistent, reliable and free source of feedback coming from the web, social intelligence has rendered solicited surveys pointless, and businesses will start to eliminate spend on solicited surveys in 2013.

Industrial espionage is now legal and free: Forget old-school normative assessments and anonymous data. Smarter companies will use social intelligence to dig into their competitors’ performance. They will not only benchmark competitors’ social data to try to outperform on operations, but also as inspiration for product creation. “We predict that more than one-third of businesses adding products or menu items will be inspired by their competition’s online customer feedback,” said Kristin Muhlner, CEO newBrandAnalytics.

So long traditional performance evaluations: Social intelligence will drive the real-time 360° performance evaluation system of the future. Forward-thinking companies will see the value of using online feedback from customers, guests and co-workers to assess performance, make hiring/firing decisions, and motivate staff.

Social media, not just for marketing anymore: Social media will break through the walls of the marketing department. Operations, human resources, customer service, and product development teams will have their own personal views into the intelligence. Ultimately, disseminating the information to more individuals ensures that investments in new locations and product offerings have the desired results in revenue and profitability.

Star ratings are so yesterday: Consumers and businesses alike will start ignoring the once-coveted star ratings as they are proving to be misleading, unreliable and not actionable. Instead, they will flock to online review analysis tools to gain the meaty insights and details they’re looking for. Consumers will seek verbatim reviews in making their purchase decisions; businesses will decipher the true meaning and uncover important themes discussed in these unstructured reviews to drive improvements.

Everything’s local: Companies will move from trusting brand level intelligence to wanting location-specific intelligence. The conclusion – it’s no longer about the brand. Savvy companies will use location-specific social reviews and alerts to quickly pinpoint trouble spots and react in a way best suited to deliver the best possible customer experience in that location or store.

One billion tourists have travelled the world in 2012, marking a new record for international tourism – a sector that accounts for one in every 12 jobs and 30% of the world’s services exports. This cements tourism’s position as one of the world’s largest economic sectors, accounting for 9% of global GDP (direct, indirect and induced impact) and up to 8% of the total exports of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

I am proud to be part of an industry which at one point of time in my country was not viewed very positively and even suffered from a social stigma!

Social media plays the largest role in inspiring travel and in the travel experience itself, according to a study commissioned by Text100 Global Communications examining the importance of social media and mobile technology during the four major stages of consumers’ travel decision-cycle: inspiration, decision, purchase and experience. The study, which was conducted by Redshift Research among 4,600 consumers in 13 countries, found 63 percent of survey respondents consider recommendations by friends and family the number one factor to inspire travel, and social channels make sharing among friends and family easy.

Other findings included:

• Of people surveyed under the age of 34, 87% use Facebook for travel inspiration.
• More than half surveyed also use Twitter, Pinterest and other social media platforms for inspiration.
• In the experience stage, 68% use their mobile devices to stay in touch with friends and family while on vacation — more than taking photos (43%) or checking the news (20%)
• In Asia-Pacific, more than 70% of travelers have used social media to inspire their holidays and base their eventual choices on friends’ recommendations (52%) and convenience (42%) — higher than other regions.
• In the United States, 58% of respondents under the age of 34 use social media to inspire destination decisions, while 37% of respondents consider travel blogger reviews first when making travel decisions.
• In Europe, 33% of travelers rely on online travel blog reviews to make initial decisions about travel destinations.

“The study suggests there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to engaging travelers in all areas worldwide,” said Text100 Global CEO Aedhmar Hynes. “Today’s vacationer bases their decisions on far more digital, mobile and physical touch-points than ever before, therefore, companies need to be consistent in communicating their core values via authentic audience engagement.”