Why is the CSAT score such an important metric in hospitality?

Within the hospitality industry, the aim is to provide superb customer service, to ensure that every guest has an enjoyable stay and leaves happy. A dissatisfied guest is unlikely to book a return visit and could well leave a negative review. But if a guest leaves without letting you know there has been a problem, how will you know that anything is wrong? This is where CSAT becomes incredibly valuable. A tool to better understand how guests feel about your hotel, and to pinpoint those areas that could be improved. 

What is a CSAT score?

CSAT stands for Customer Satisfaction. This score is a method of measuring customer satisfaction levels. There is no universal standard for measuring CSAT. Your own measurement system will give you a personal insight into your business and can be compared over time. You may be familiar with NPS (Net Promoter Score). This system is also used to measure customer satisfaction, but it differs from CSAT as it is a standardised scoring system. While NPS can be useful for comparing businesses with each other, CSAT gives you the ability to adapt, fine-tune and compare your features and procedures, giving you the flexibility that NPS does not offer. In short, the strength of CSAT is in its customisation. 

You have the opportunity to gain insight into any area of your business that customers experience. Delving deep to discover those areas that do not match up to your standards. You can find out how easy your guests find the booking methods and the check-in and check-out processes. Do they have any complaints about the rooms, the food, or the leisure facilities? Were they happy with their interactions with staff? Were any issues resolved quickly and efficiently? 

By processing the CSAT data you extract a lot of important observations, but you can also convert the gathered information into a simplified Customer Satisfaction score. That CSAT score can then be used to track your CSAT progress over time, and, if you have several properties and use the same CSAT system across the board, to compare the satisfaction levels between each location. 

What are the benefits of measuring CSAT?

Measuring CSAT is incredibly beneficial and gives you a customer-centric view of your operations. The results of your CSAT surveys give you a perspective of your business that cannot be gained through staff observations. Not all customers will air their views during their stay, or at check-out. Simply asking guests “How was your stay?” will often result in a positive reply or an evasive “fine,” even if the guest was not satisfied and has already decided not to visit again. Busy guests just want to get on their way. 

Once you have some CSAT result data, changes can be implemented, and further CSAT surveys conducted and analysed to see if your changes have had the desired effect. This data-focused process eliminates trial-and-error methods. 

Conducting a survey among your guests is in itself a benefit. Customers appreciate businesses engaging to gather feedback and being given the opportunity to air their grievances or offer compliments. Additionally, it gives you the chance to put right any problems that may otherwise have never come to light. This type of after-care process shows a willingness to listen and improve the guest experience.

When and how to measure CSAT

It is important to send out your CSAT surveys to guests soon after their stay when everything is fresh in their minds, and they are still engaged with their trip. The longer you wait, the less likely they are to bother filling it in. In the longer term, you can conduct tailored CSAT measuring before and after changes, to see how the public is finding these new additions or alterations. 

The way you gather your CSAT data is particularly important. It is wise to plan the wording of your questionnaires very carefully. Your questions need to be clear and concise with no ambiguity. A survey that appears to be too long may be ignored, so only ask a few important questions. You can always give a free text option for leaving further feedback if you feel your survey may be restrictive. You should tailor the questions to get you the answers you want the most. 

The format of your questions is also important. On CSAT surveys you will commonly find simple questions with a Yes / No answer, or questions that offer a scale for example ‘On a scale of 1-10 how clean was your room?’ or ‘How satisfied were you with the check-in process? – Highly Satisfied, Satisfied, Dissatisfied, Very Dissatisfied,’ or a popular alternative is to use a graphical scale such as emojis. When it comes to converting your data into a numerical score, it is up to you and your business to add weight to each scale. 

Creating your CSAT surveys is a task that should be undertaken with care, and taking the time to do some research into CSAT survey development will help you to fine-tune your surveys to bring you the best results. You need to find the balance between surveys simple enough that the majority of guests will complete them, but complex enough to give you plenty of valuable data. 

CSAT measurement is an ongoing process, and it is also one that needs to be adaptable. The questions you ask today may not be the most important questions to ask this time next year, so do not simply create a CSAT survey and send it out continuously forever, regularly re-evaluate and update your survey to reflect the data you need to gather today. 

Measuring CSAT of guest communications with HiJiffy 

Using HiJiffy’s Guest Communications Hub you can easily measure, monitor, and track your hotel’s CSAT score. After every chat with our conversational AI or a human agent, guests are asked to rate their experience using a simple scale using a mix of verbal (Good, OK, Bad) and visual (face emojis) scales. You can see the reports collating this data as well as access actionable insights in the Console.

Summary

Used in the right way, CSAT can be incredibly beneficial to your business, taking out the guesswork and gathering definitive data that can be used to improve your facilities and service and ultimately, keep guests returning and leaving positive reviews. Compiling CSAT surveys, distributing them to customers, and then analysing the data can be difficult and time-consuming. However, the results are certainly worth it, and you can take the hard work out of the entire process by using HiJiffy’s Guest Communications Hub to automate and streamline your CSAT ventures.