“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” You’ve probably heard this quote before.
NB: This is an article from asksuite
But do you know what hotel customer service KPIs (key performance indicators) you should focus on to sell more rooms while providing service excellence? Even though many hotel managers agree with the quote, when it comes to customer service, they get lost about what metrics to follow. Service metrics can be tricky, after all, they involve quality of service, which can be subjective.
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However, there are metrics that can show you the path for service excellence. Choosing the right KPIs is critical to ensure service improvement and optimize your hotel’s operations. Also, it provides a clear view of the hotel’s progress.
Once you know which metrics you should be paying attention to and track then, you can make better-informed decisions to help your team perform better and improve results both in customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
In this article, you will learn the main 5 KPIs for hotel customer service performance.
But before we continue, let’s define service excellence, the ultimate goal is customer service. This level of service is not only about satisfaction and good reviews, but it drives more reservations.
You can’t increase reservations without service excellence.
What is service excellence?
By definition, service excellence refers to the ability of service providers to consistently meet and occasionally even exceed customers’ expectations.
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal to companies due to the experience they receive.
Might not be fair, especially for small independent hotels, but that’s how the game is played now. That’s why it’s so important that you elevate your service in all channels: phone, email, texting, social media.
You can improve your service by acknowledging your gaps. That’s is why is so important to control and measure your customer service.
One can argue that “excellent service” is a subjective concept, but there are objective numbers that can guide hotels to provide a 5-star experience. Using data, you can map your customer journey and lead potential customers to reservations by improving your performance.
5 KPIs to focus on when measuring your hotel customer service performance
Here are the 5 essential KPIs to focus on when measuring your hotel customer service performance.
1. Total volume of service per channel
The first metric that is important in customer service is communication channels. Which one is the most used by your guests and potential guests?
Long are the days when telephone and emails were the only way to contact a hotel. Even though they are still important – especially emails -, they are not the only way travelers can communicate directly to travelers. Chats and text messaging are increasingly important.
Despite popular belief, instant messages are trendy in every generation, not only among the young ones. The pandemic contributed to the acceleration of the digitalization process in any industry, including the hotel industry.
Today, anyone – from teenagers to grandparents- use text messaging to order food, car ride, talk to family, and so on. Among the most popular ways to talk to companies, we have Website chat, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Google.
The graphic below represents the chat volume per channel in hotels on average. When the hotel offers multiple channels, we can see that website chats are the preferred ones.
This data is extremely important for customer service. Once you know the preferred channel of your potential guest, you can better prepare operations and your team to not miss bookings opportunities.
