TripAdvisor recently added a personalized customer satisfaction management (CSM) dashboard to each property owner's page. Owners & Managers can now instantly assess their performance, as rated by their guests, including trend and competitive analysis, easier response to guest reviews, and a new Customer Satisfaction Index.
Trip Advisor’s objective was to allow property owners a way to quickly determine the level of customer satisfaction in order to effectively respond when an opportunity for improvement was presented. The hope was to help innkeepers/hoteliers spend less time analyzing their rating numbers and more time keeping their guests happy – and making money!
Please consider carefully how to best utilize TripAdvisor's tools and resources.
As a partner with Google, their reviews feed to your Google Local Business (GLB) listing. How you manage your reviews is becoming increasingly important, and we hope this information allows you to stay current with those trends.
How do you get started with this new Owner/CSM tool?
First you need to register as the owner of your business with TripAdvisor which involves a few simple steps:
Step 1: Go to TripAdvisor.com
Step 2: Search on your business name + city + state
Step 3: Select the relevant listing from the Location Results display
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of your review page and find the box that says “Do You Own…”
Step 5: Click on State Here – Visit Your Owner’s Center
Step 6: Click the orange Register Now box within the Getting Started display box
Step 7: Follow the prompts to complete your registration
Once you have registered your business, you will have full access to your dashboard features & management tools.
Dashboard Features
Get Started – This page is a summary of the same options presented in the horizontal tabs across the top of your dashboard
Promote Your Business – This page presents you with badges & review widgets which your webmaster can add to your web site home page (and/or other pages of your web site)
Track Performance – This new feature is your metrics page created by MarketMetrix in partnership with TripAdvisor and provides you with tools to Analyze, Manage and Monitor your reviews.
Analyze - The information provided includes a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). The statistics displayed are a distillation of all of your reviews which makes up your Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). Information is presented in both numeric and graph display for quick reference. More on this index calculation later in this article. A “basic” registration includes a comparison to all lodging properties in your town and also allows you to select 1 competitor in your area for specific CSI comparison. However, we could not determine how/where you selected or established your chosen competitor.
You have the option to upgrade to either:
ReviewMetrix/Pro ($29.99/month) with these additional features:
- Monitor/analyze scores on 7 key metrics
- Identify gaps to local competitors
- Respond to reviews and keep track of replies
- Sort key metrics to understand low scores
Or ReviewMetrix/ProPlus ($59.99/month) with these additional features:
- Benchmark against any hotel or group of hotels
- Choose from over 400,000 hotels
- Set up custom alerts
- Includes all features from ReviewMetrix Pro
Most innkeepers may decide the Basic level may work just fine for their needs.
Manage - This feature presents a truncated display of all of your recent reviews and provides an easy process to respond to each individual review posted by a guest. You simply click on “Respond to a Review”, you select the review you want to respond to from a drop down list, and you post your response.
Note: One of our favorite stories is about an innkeeper who made the effort to respond to each and every guest review (both positive and negative). One day an extremely negative review was posted by an individual who never was a guest of the Inn, but simply became disgruntled when they could not negotiate a discounted rate and thus did not book. The Innkeeper was successful in getting TripAdvisor to remove the review based on lack of merit. Her success was due in part to the fact that she was intent on guest satisfaction represented by her posting responses to every review... an effort that proved very worthwhile in this instance.
Monitor - This feature is a compilation of your guest reviews for the period displayed. You can click on your score for each period and see all of the reviews.
Calculating your Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI)
“The Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) rates each review from 0-100 based on 7 key TripAdvisor questions that appear at the beginning of each TripAdvisor survey: Overall rating, Cleanliness, Location, Rooms, Service, Value and Recommend. A scoring model uses the ratings on these questions to create a score from 0-100. The CSI score makes it easy to determine which reviews require immediate action as well as compare results over time and to competitors.” (as provided by the TripAdvisor site)
Note: In Acorn’s review of one client’s dashboard, they had just 2 reviews posted, each with a perfect score of 100. However, their CSI was 87.3 based on 3 reviews. There is a little inconsistency here but that may work out in time.
Get More Reviews – This page presents helpful suggestions on how to build your Trip Advisor reviews. These suggestions include:
- Adding a review link to your web site
- Including a review link in thank you emails to your guests
- Verbal encouragement to your guest to post a review after their stay
Manage your Listing – This page includes quick navigation to a variety of management options including:
- updating your listing (accurate business name, ownership changes, etc.)
- posting photos
- posting videos
- posting article links
- receiving email notifications when a review is posted (very important in the management of your reviews
Acorn understands that guest satisfaction is a key measure of success for every innkeeper. If we can assist you in establishing your owner dashboard within TripAdvisor, please let us know!
Sharon Rowe
Acorn, Professional Client Services Manager
