That’s fine, but I have an issue with the article title: “Stop trying to delight your customers.” To be fair, it was used to draw attention to the core idea in the article: increasing the speed of issue resolution as a way to build loyalty. “Exceeding customer expectations has a negligible impact on customer loyalty,” the authors stated.

But if going above and beyond when providing service has minimal impact on customer loyalty, there is one huge, very important reason why your hotel company must still make remarkable service a strategic priority.

WOW service gets people talking.

In an environment where your customers have seen it all before, providing a personal human touch is often the tipping point that makes a jaded traveler tweet about the hotel or leave a glowing review.

Providing remarkable service is a strategy used by the Roger Smith Hotel. It’s a strategy used by citizenM Hotels. It’s the strategy used by Corinthia Hotels that led to Marc Benioff not only tweeting about the hotel but highlighting the organization as a leader in customer service.

The lesson is clear: if you want positive word-of-mouth to spread your brand, make sure your team is providing service worth talking about.

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See how ReviewPro can help you provide the type of service that turns guests into “salespeople” for your hotel.

The title of this article was “Stop trying to delight your customers” – which, while the over-simplification is intended to prove a point – can be a dangerous mindset to promote. (I’ll explain more about this in tomorrow’s post.)

But for now, how are you focusing on providing speedy resolution for your customers? More and more consumers go to the web – social media and review sites specifically – to vent and talk about your company, but also to seek resolution for their questions. Do you have the right listening tools and systems in place to pick up on these conversations? Have you established internal issue resolution processes to respond to feedback in a way that helps you retain customers and win their loyalty?

—

See how ReviewPro helps you retain customers and build loyalty by monitoring the social web to help you resolve customer service issues faster and more effectively….

1. Identify where social media will save you money
2. Count inbound leads from social media
3. Measure for sales conversion improvement
4. Track progress towards business KPIs and strategic objectives
5. Measure through specific campaigns

Read all the details here on how this works….

[You may also enjoy: How to Get Your Hotel's Social Media Budget Approved]

The discovery of a “Decade of Delight,” which describes consumers’ key brand expectations was the critical finding in last year’s annual Brand Keys.
Travel-Related Brand Survey: Who Came Out on Top?
by Hotel Interactive

Providing guests with an authentic representative as community manager to give them the answers they are looking for in real-time is the new king.
5 Reasons To Keep Your Community Management In-House
by Kevin Olivieri

How will you amp up your online reputation management to make sure small blunders inside the hotel don’t go viral?
Managing Your Hotel’s Online Reputation: How To Win Guests And Influence Customers
by Jennifer Dewey

With the ever-increasing proliferation of smartphones and tablets, mobile internet access and apps, consumers are becoming much more comfortable with browsing and shopping through the mobile.
How to optimise the mobile travel experience
by Trenton Moss

Some can rely on their location, or the building, or history. But what if your hotel has none of that?
What’s so Different About Your Hotel, Then?
by Caroline Cooper

When Google, arguably the world’s most powerful internet company – and a company legendary for hiring the smartest engineers in the world – launches its own social network, you’d think the hotel marketing community would immediately jump on the bandwagon. We did take notice. There were only two problems:

1. Google tried this earlier with Google Buzz – and failed
2. We are still trying to take advantage of the opportunity on existing social networks

Many of us, while curious, were reluctant to jump head-first into this new network when it launched in June 2011. But a number of important things have changed since then, making it now a powerful tool in any hotel company’s social communications program.

In this quick guide, we’re going to look at some practical ways your hotels could use Google Plus. The genesis of this article was my conversation with Chris Brogan and the Roger Smith team (full story here), and I highly recommend you read Chris’s book, Google Plus for Business, for a complete introduction. After experimenting, testing and researching on my own over the past few months, I put together this summary of some of the most relevant issues for hotels. Let’s jump in….

“Why Should I Care About Google Plus?”

Apathy because of the reasons explained above have been, and continue to be, the single biggest objection for individuals and businesses using and adopting the network. But this question also comes up when considering any new technology: Why should I care? What’s in it for me?

First, think of the enormous platform Google has built on the web. If you’re like me and millions of other businesspeople, Gmail is your email platform for work and personal email, you create and share documents in Google Docs, watch a video on YouTube, and then head back to the homepage two minutes later when your co-worker tells you to “just Google it.” When you tie all of these factors together, you can see the extraordinary opportunity Google has to create one seamless experience. This integration will only increase the value for businesses over time.

Second, as I write this in February 2012, many users on the network still might be classified as “early adopters.” The sort of people who jumped on Twitter and Facebook before it became popular. By getting in early, they established themselves in those networks and built an influential following. The same opportunity to connect with early adopters – and leverage their influence – now exists on Google Plus. Savvy hoteliers are moving quickly to establish themselves on this network so that their following grows as the network grows.

Third, “Circles” – the network’s key differentiator – allow you to develop highly curated lists of people to receive updates from, providing the increasingly valuable ability to filter through the noise and find relevant information. It also allows laser-focused sharing options to deliver the right messages to the right people – increasing your relevance (and value) in the eyes of your audience.

Fourth and finally, Google more or less forced business to get involved when they made Google Plus an integral factor in how they display their search results pages. (Videos: How Google+ Affects Hotel SEO.) The fact that Google owns the #1 and #2 most popular search engines on the internet – Google.com and YouTube – providing the portal to how many people shop and discover things – emphasizes the importance of this. So if for no other reason, use it for search engine optimization.

Business Pages on Google Plus

When launched, Google Plus was exclusively for individual people. Forward-thinking organizations like Ford and Coca-Cola hacked together company pages from individual profiles – even though it technically violated the terms of use at the time. But Google opened up to businesses on November 7, 2011 – and these pages publish differ from individual profiles in a few key ways. You can read the full details from Google, but the core things to know include:

• Businesses cannot “Circle” (circling is like “following” on Twitter or “liking” on Facebook”) and communicate with people until those people have circled the business. (Businesses can circle other pages, though.) So communication is entirely opt-in. You must earn attention by being interesting.
• Pages cannot “+1″ other pages or content on the web. (But they can +1 specific content on pages.)
• Pages share information publicly by default.
• Google Plus has no algorithm like Facebook’s Edgerank. When people add you to their circles, they will always see your public posts. On Facebook, the visibility of brand posts  is often severely limited, with brand posts reaching only an average of 17% of their fanbase.

Using Google Plus to Connect People

1) Video chats – “Hangouts” – set Google Plus apart from other social networks, and is one of the most interesting features. It puts the “social” back into social networking. I see a number of uses when face-to-face communication is important:

• This could be used by a hotel concierge or for providing customer service. You might host planning sessions with guests and curious travelers in a hangout. (Dell was an early adopter for using Google Plus for customer service.)
• This could also be used for sales. Your sales team can use hangouts for presentations and meetings with people who may be spread out across many locations.

2) For news announcements or public relations. As on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook, social networking is changing the way public relations is done. Hotels can encourage discovery by journalists by posting interesting content, building relationships directly with journalists and bloggers, and providing the inside story. Hosting a vibrant community on a social network is also a sure sign that what you’re building is popular – and deserves media coverage.

3) For internal communication and collaboration. Some managers encourage staff members to set up Google Plus accounts so that they can communicate with and share stuff with each other – especially if the team is working from different locations. Working with teams in remote locations also becomes easier with hangouts – which support real-time collaborative editing of Google Docs.

Setting Up Your Google Plus Presence

Mashable and Social Media Examiner have good step-by-step tutorials, but I wanted to focus on a few high-impact areas for hotels…

Fill out your profile completely. Add all your information, but think about the impact. This is marketing. Grab their attention from the start. Use great copy. Would you rather connect with a page calling themselves “The Best Budget Hotel in San Diego” or one that touts “Live Like a Local – We Share What’s New and Cool in San Diego” (what Kimpton’s Palomar San Diego hotel successfully used on Facebook and elsewhere)?

Upload photos to fill out the scrapbook slots. A few examples….

RoomMate Hotels

Ritz-Carlton

Fairmont Hotels

ReviewPro

Create a suggested circles list. Jeff Korhan recommends creating a prioritized list of circles you suggest people place you in. It helps them understand your focus and the content they can expect from you. Here’s how Jeff does it:

Add recommended links. Connect with the rest of your web presence: your blog, other social networks, websites, articles, videos, etc.

Create inbound and outbound circles. This is a great tip from Chris Brogan’s book, Google Plus for Business. Although Google does not recognize the difference between circles, you can create separate circles for reading information on your home screen, and sharing information–privacy settings on content you publish.

Examples of Hotels using Google Plus

As I write this, there are still far too few hotels actively engaged on Google Plus. It’s the early adopters who are taking advantage of the opportunity. Here are three hotels you could follow for inspiration:

Corinthia Hotels

Mandarin Oriental

Fierro Hotel

For more examples, we put together a huge list (circle) of 400+ hotels on Google Plus.

Content That Works on Google Plus

As we saw through some of these examples, the fundamentals of publishing to Google Plus really isn’t that different than on any other social network. Extend your overall content and community strategy to this network, while considering its unique advantages and opportunities.

As on Facebook, photos are currency on Google Plus. Communicate your message visually wherever possible.

Google Plus provides a little bit more room to share content – especially compared to Twitter. So the fact you are not limited to 140 characters means that you can elaborate a little bit more and share more text. Don’t get carried away, but include enough information in your posts to arouse interest. This may mean posting a summary of an article you’re linking to rather than just the headline. (An all-too-common mistake on Twitter.)

Don’t feel you have to stay 100% on-topic about your hotel at all times. Some of the most popular accounts frequently share material that simply interests them. Something cool and funny. But always provide value. Make the lives of your audience better as the result of reading your material.

Chris Brogan wrote a concise summary of the ingredients for community on Google Plus – or any social network:

• Community: It takes precedence above audience.
• Campfire: It’s something to gather around.
• Connections: Create them between members of your community and share your network.
• Continuity: Keep things consistent; blend the offline and online worlds.
• Content: Make your posts interesting.
• Concepts: Educate others and empower them

And my favorite quote from Brogan:

“Attention is a gift. Appreciate the hell out of your community.”

Building your Google Plus Presence

Once you have your page set up, have some initial content posted, it’s time to think about audience building. Here’s three tips to get you started.

1) Add a Google Plus widget to your website. Here is the tool you need to use.

2) Encourage “+1’s.” HubSpot reported that websites that use Google’s +1 button generated 3.5 times more traffic from Google+ than websites that don’t have the button installed. Create a button now.

3) “Circle surf” – browse the connections of your contacts & interesting people to find other people of interest to “circle.” (Remember, when using a business page, people must circle you first before you can reciprocate – so experiment with this technique on your personal profile.)

How To Measure Success

If you’re looking to measure success with numbers, Christopher Penn wrote a good tutorial about understanding Google Plus analytics.

In the end, though, measuring ROI on Google Plus requires a similar approach to what you would use on any other social network. Measure progress towards business goals. Measure effectiveness of campaigns. Understand how it fits into your larger marketing and communications and service mix. Define and track KPIs that relate to those areas.

Fitting Google Plus In With The Rest Of Your Marketing

As we tie this all together, it’s useful to understand where Google Plus fits in with the rest of your social media and marketing program. It’s an extension. It’s an outpost. It’s what many see as the best way to share and connect online today.

While you can reuse some of the content and stories you post on other networks, think how you can give it a unique twist on Google Plus.

Again, the big play here is using Google Plus to expand your presence in the vast network of Google services. It’s increasing the chances of prospects finding your business because of increased visibility in search results pages, and then using highly-targeted content sharing options to nurture the relationship with your brand before, during, and after a guest stays at your hotel.

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For advice on how this fits in with the rest of your social engagement program, and tips for making it a bigger parts of your business, contact us now.

If you are attending ITB Berlin this year, we would love to meet with you to show you how we are helping thousands of hotels improve quest satisfaction and increase revenue. We are located in the eTravel World area in Hall 7.1c, Stand 111.

Click here to Schedule the meeting with us at ITB Berlin.

On Thursday, March 8^th at 11.00 RJ Friedlander, CEO and co-founder of ReviewPro, will be speaking on “Key Trends in Online Reputation that will Increase Guest Satisfaction and Drive Revenue”. This seminar will be held on the eTravel World Stage, hall 7.1c. Access is free to everyone who is registered for ITB.

We invite you to join us for this exciting event. We look forward to seeing you in Berlin!

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 23 seconds

In this case study, you’ll learn about:

1. Creating a mantra to guide everything you do
2. Developing a customer culture that leads to the best results
3. Where your social media employee guidelines should be crystal-clear, and where they should give freedom
4. The right “voice” to use when communicating on the social web
5. Building trust through transparency
6. The process to obtain executive support for a social media program
7. The importance of “internal marketing” for raising awareness within your company
8. Monitoring conversations related to more than just your hotel name (and why this opens up better opportunities)
9. How customer communities reduce your workload and increase loyalty, advocacy
10. Using ReviewPro to monitor feedback, and manage the response process (acting internally, responding publicly)

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In this video above, one of the most powerful CEOs in the world, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, not only mentioned Corinthia Hotels, but showcased the group as an example of a brand that “gets it.” “[Corinthia Hotels] tweeted right back, engaging in a direct conversation with me. This is a unique opportunity for service that other companies should learn from.” It’s hard to put a value on exposure like that.

When companies receive a big PR opportunity like this, it’s too easy to write it off as luck. But there is often years of hard work and intentional planning that go into a big win like this.

And that’s certainly the case for Jason Potter and Vanessa Coleiro at Corinthia Hotels. The 5-star hotel brand with locations in Europe and North Africa runs their social presence as a virtual concierge. “Our customer-first mantra drives everything we think, say and do online and off.” Below is their story in their words….

“The customer is at the center of everything we do”

Social media is all about the customers. We’re trying to build a culture around the brand where customers feel comfortable to come and talk to us: to ask questions or discuss things they are interested in. We’re trying to encourage conversation at all stages: before, during and after the trip. We want to be there for the customer wherever they want us.

“We aim to respond to all queries within an hour.”

We set up strict guidelines in our social strategy to try our best to respond to all customers within an hour – whether it is to solve the issue then and there, or if it is to let them know that we’re working on the issue.

We have a very broad social media policy that is not at all restrictive. It’s mostly about defining the communication lines among our employees. We are working on documents that will define things such as our expected tone of voice, because we want to communicate not so much as a business but as a person. We try to stay away from corporate lingo. We want to stay professional, but not sound like a billboard or advertisement. We want it to simply be a person communicating with another person.

Transparent service builds trust

Whether guests are curious about something, or have had a negative experience that requires immediate response, we’re there.

It’s quite risky for hotel group to put customer service on social media platforms and public websites, but we’re willing to take that risk. The reality of the social web is that whether we engage or not, the conversations about our brand are happening anyway. Customers have all sorts of expectations and it is therefore impossible to keep every customer 100% happy, 100% of the time. So it’s better to view this as a way to build relationships. We’re turning negatives into positives. We’re transparent in reacting to issues in front of everyone.

That helps our customers trust us.

Convincing the whole team

A key part of launching this program was getting our senior management team to fully understand social media and how it works for business. Showing it to them from “the eyes of the customer.” Social media isn’t just a platform for advertising, or as a sales tool to push promotional packages. And that perception is still a massive challenge we face in the industry today.

So as much as we focus on external marketing, there is a massive internal awareness marketing and education program in place at Corinthia. This is for everyone at the floor level to executive management. That hasn’t stopped since we started the program and we don’t think it can ever stop.

We had to start our social media program with minimum resource budgets to prove our case. Our executive team understood it was something they needed to address. They said to go ahead and set it up, and then prove that it is worth it.

Show the business value, and share success stories

Going back to the opening example of when Marc Benioff mentioned the hotel group in his keynote address – he was going through the Salesforce launch of Cloudforce. Marc happened to be staying at the Corinthia Hotel London. He was doing a keynote speech about the social divide, and I think his experience with us fit in well with what he was presenting about. So he was staying at our London hotel and tweeted about how he had a hard day traveling. We picked that up in ReviewPro. We tweeted “How are you doing? Hope you enjoy our spa!”

It was a very simple conversation – but that’s what we use Twitter for. Connecting with customers before they come to our hotel, while they’re staying with us, and after they leave. And it resulted in a great mention in his keynote.

But Corinthia’s approach goes far beyond tweeting with celebrities like Marc….

Monitoring the social web for service and sales

Our team is not only monitoring mentions of our hotel names, but also using saved social searches to monitor relevant conversations and identify ways and opportunities we can help.

For example, we once picked up a conversation where someone was having a bad experience at a competitor hotel in our city. We had been tweeting with him before, and noticed he had a bad experience at this spa with his girlfriend. We contacted him saying we were really sorry about that experience, and asked if he knew we had a spa at our hotel. He said he didn’t know, but would check it out next time.

Conversations like this illustrate why we’re monitoring conversations not just about our brand, but for general conversations in our destinations as well.

Another example: We had a gentleman who was checking into one of our hotels in Lisbon when unfortunately his arrival at the hotel coincided with a large group check-in, which meant that he had to wait longer than usual before he could go to his room. While he was waiting he tweeted – not to the hotel but to his followers – that he had a nightmare check-in experience. This was of course negative for us – we had a customer who was upset inside the hotel. We immediately picked up his tweet through our ReviewPro alerts, and tweeted back saying we’re really sorry to hear about this – it isn’t something that we expect happening in our hotels – so let us help.  We used Twitter direct messaging to get some information to connect with him at the hotel, and notified the management team immediately. They resolved the issue and an hour later the guest tweeted “Forget my last tweet. Amazing service at the Corinthia Hotel. They really care about their customers.”

For the next three days, he was tweeting all about our hotels, and became a loyal advocate for the rest of his stay – talking about how much he liked the management, the customer service and our different outlets.

It is stories like this that demonstrate why customers are right at the top of our social media strategy. As a business, our ultimate goal is to increase revenue by generating more sales. But we’re not only increasing sales by selling directly: we do it through customer service too.

Building communities that help each other

A few months ago, we had a local problem with one of our hotels. Our phone line was down, and a customer couldn’t get through to us – so she posted on our Facebook wall. After seeing it, one of our other customers replied to the person on our wall to try to solve the problem before we got to it. When you see customers helping customers, that’s when you know you’ve built a true community.

We encourage community naturally by the way we talk with our customers. We try not to speak in corporate lingo or “brand talk,” but rather make the conversations as friendly as possible. Often when we start a conversation with one customer, another customer will come and join the conversation. So it’s a natural evolution.

We had a great guest contribution recently: a photo of a little kid leaving the hotel with a suitcase. His mom posted it on our Facebook wall. Our fans started replying to it – saying “What a beautiful shot, I hope you enjoyed your stay.” You can’t buy things like that.

Once guests have experienced your brand in this way, they feel they work for the brand. There is a sense of pride and ownership.

How Corinthia Hotels Uses ReviewPro

ReviewPro now plays a central role in how we provide service to guests and monitor and manage our online reputation. It shows customer feedback from all the major review sites and social media networks in one dashboard. The ReviewPro Global Review Index^TM gives our properties an overall summary score of guest satisfaction across all these review websites, and also provides us with competitive insight for each department. Semantic analysis of customer feedback reveals specific areas we can improve in or train our staff on. As we’ve begun using ReviewPro in the hotels, I followed up the official training with my own training meetings to make sure our team is using these tools fully throughout our organization.

Managing customer feedback for improvement

We are using the messaging and workflow tools in ReviewPro to share insights for action with people internally. We encourage them to take time to identify where and why an incident happened. If there’s a customer complaint, we think through how we can prevent that from happening again. For us, it is critical to make sure we have solved the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Our public review responses give us the opportunity to go back to the customer and communicate the specific steps we took to resolve an issue. Usually, we only get one opportunity to respond on the review site. So we make sure we’ve gone through the whole internal resolution process before we write that public management response.

Once we’ve resolved the issue and it’s time to leave the response, we always make sure it’s the general managers who respond. Not a single review is answered in the same way. Every general manager has a unique tone of voice – as they would have when talking with customers inside the hotel.

Our team now has a monthly meeting dedicated to the insights we gather in ReviewPro. We sit down with management and review our progress in guest satisfaction. As we get more buy-in from general managers, we expect them to review new data in their daily morning team briefing.  It must become part of their regular management routines. We really believe in it that much.

Thank you for sharing your story, Jason and Vanessa!

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You can follow Corinthia Hotels on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. You can find Jason Potter on Twitter and Google Plus as well.

To learn more about how ReviewPro can help improve service and guest satisfaction at your hotel, you should request a demo now.

ReviewPro is attending BIT Milan 2012, February 16-19. BIT Milan is one of the biggest exhibition dedicated to Travel & Tourism in Italy.

We will be meeting with current clients to share the latest additions to ReviewPro and will also offer demos of our product to interested hotels attending the show.

Click here to schedule the meeting with us at BIT 2012.

Looking forward to seeing you in Milan!

When your hotel guests are willing to pay extra.
Is There a Science to Scoring the Best Hotel Rooms?
by Dan Jovic

Changing travel patterns sparks hotel industry changes.
Hotel industry adjusts to shifting travel habits
by Krister Rollins

Examining gender, age and income differences.
Hotel Guest Satisfaction: Do you understand who loves what and why?
by Rick Garlick, Ph.D

76% of respondents revealed they felt their status in a hotel loyalty programme would last longer than their marriage or current job.
Travellers “married” to their frequent traveller programmes
by WIT

Now, it’s time to optimize! Below are 6 hotel marketing tips to engage potential hotel guests on YouTube.
6 Tips For Optimizing Hotels On YouTube
by Abby Heft

“I don’t have time for social media.”

No. You as a CEO or senior executive don’t have time for the incorrect use of social media. You cannot use the wrong listening strategy and get lost in a stream of useless chatter. But you also cannot afford to neglect its insight for executive decision making and maintaining a competitive edge.

Last night I had dinner with one of the leading experts in hotel data analysis and interpretation, Dom Beveridge. Since both of us are very active on Twitter and work with CEOs at hotel groups around the world, it was interesting to exchange observations about how social media can be used by executives to improve their decision making, professional performance and results.

It seems the leading business value of social networks like Twitter for executives is nearly universally overlooked or misunderstood. The value is in real-time information exchange.

Reputation management has huge implications (and measurable impact) in service, branding, and PR – but those are areas you likely have other people managing. The primary benefits of social media for you personally as CEO or executive come from “selective listening” to the right topics and conversations online.

Beyond following the real-time newsfeed of information from individuals and topics of interest, there is another related, important way for you to use social media…

Real-time information + executive summaries

Incredible value for you comes from the synthesis of customer sentiment, business performance, and market intelligence from those social conversations. Concise summaries of trends as they are happening.

The level of insight that can be extracted clearly depends on the quality of data being collected. Its recency and accuracy. How well the insights are presented to you.

Information is power. Effective listening gives better information, providing you with the edge and a powerful advantage over competitors.

If you are a CEO or senior executive at a hotel company, what does your “selective listening” strategy look like?

If you are managing the social engagement program for your company, what does your executive reporting process look like?

Contact us now for a free consultation on how you can improve this.