There’s a lot of talk these days about the emergence of quantitative analytics and new opportunities to be found in huge sets of raw data. Massive number crunching certainly is a part of our demographic present and future, but for businesses that stake success on one-off customer service, qualitative analysis will always come first.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the hospitality and entertainment industries, where customers quickly come to associate certain brands and facilities with a superior experience. Gaylord Entertainment Company is a leading hospitality and event-planning provider that operates four hotels, each with 1,400 to 2,900 rooms. The latest, Gaylord’s 2,000-room National Resort & Convention Facility, opened near Washington, D.C. just months ago. Gaylord maintains other core assets including the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry.
Tony Bodoh is manager of operations analysis for Gaylord Entertainment Company. With an unlikely background in lean manufacturing practices, Bodoh keeps his focus on processes and organizational profitability, having brought them right along to the hotel business.
“As I got into the position I’m in now I realized, like everywhere else, the business has a core set of customers that are more profitable than others,” he says. “And in hospitality, the point is not so much to have a demographic or psychographic profile of customers; it’s about understanding how we are serving them.”
Eighty percent of Gaylord’s business involves conventions, meaning that the average visitor assembles a cumulative opinion of service over a stay of three days. If acres under glass and hundreds of thousands of square feet of meeting space are simply expected in the high-end convention business, they do not by themselves enable a superior customer experience.
An Ear to the Wall
What Bodoh really wanted was rich feedback about customer experiences, and he knew that sources for the information already existed or were planned. These resources include customer surveys managed by a single provider, a dedicated call center to manage discrete requests for services as simple as extra towels, external reservation and concierge services. In a strategy that could apply to any business value chain, Bodoh came to look at service channels as “listening posts” that could contain sources of detailed customer experience information.
Managing, mapping and tapping these resources called for content mining and text analytics, and just this year Gaylord turned to customer experience management (CEM) specialist Clarabridge for a solution that could match its own timeline of planning.
The proof of concept involved taking 30 months of Gaylord’s data, which was then exposed across the Clarabridge toolkit and customized for various reports over three months. Bodoh describes the result as “an iterative format that worked well.” He credits the hosted software delivery model as both a timesaver and a relief to Gaylord’s IT staff.
“At the time we were managing 6,000 rooms and were just about to add another 2,000 in a situation where you basically turn the switch overnight,” Bodoh says. “When the option of software as a service [SaaS] came up, it wasn’t what we were originally looking for, but we saw a great opportunity to take the load off our own staff and we’ve since needed very little internal IT support. It actually turned out to be a big driver in our decision and it’s worked out well.”
Compiling Customer Sentiment
The system is being rolled out point by point, following the model of “listening posts” consisting of surveys, emails, chat, messaging, call centers and online forums used by meeting planners. The initial focus was content capture, beginning with guest satisfaction and then moving on to the individuals who book the resorts.
