Do customer comment cards deliver useful benefits to tourism and hospitality businesses?
Tourism and hospitality businesses have long been urged to use customer comment cards and in-venue customer feedback surveys. And for many quality assurance schemes, they are a mandatory programme element.
But are they really the best way of gathering and evaluating meaningful continuous customer information, as businesses are often advised? Do they really give insight to market needs and competitive performance?
Or are comments cards at best a glorified “snagging list” - useful at delivering operational information, but giving little in the way of actual insight?
My concern is that comment cards and internal feedback surveys are often promoted as a customer research cure-all, when in fact they are best used as part of a wider suite of business intelligence and customer research.
In part 1 of this post I will explore my concerns with over reliance on comments cards as a research tool. In part 2 I will look at how tourism businesses can get more from comments cards, through systematic analysis and combining them with other data sources.
What is the problem with comment cards?
While I believe in the critical importance of soliciting and listening to customer feedback, I have two main concerns with an over reliance on customer comment cards:
1) Too little genuine insight
Often, far more effort goes into collecting and recording information than analysing it in any depth. There is more data capture than systematic evaluation or acting on the information contained.
I am aware of some excellent tourism businesses that have put a lot of effort into getting their customer feedback cards right, yet still express concerns that they do a lot of collecting, but struggle to get very little in the way of actionable insight.
Beyond the snagging issues, they find much of the data superficial, or lacking clear actionable outcomes and they feel they need to look to third parties like ourselves in order to get any depth of analysis from the information they hold.
Yes, the comments cards provide highlight issues that need fixing. Feedback surveys may also provide performance benchmarking data which, if regularly analysed, has value. But depending on sample size, this may not be particularly representative.
The cards can give marketing information about customer origin or their decision triggers, but again, this may only be part of the picture.
This is because comment cards and feedback surveys are self-selecting – particularly if it is left to the customer to seek them out. They are more likely to be used by the very happy and the very unhappy – but not the merely satisfied or indifferent. They are also less likely to be used by regular customers who soon get “feedback fatigued”, especially if they don’t see results from their input.
Which brings me to my second main concern with customer comment cards and feedback surveys.
2) Not a research “cure-all”
Customer comment cards are sometimes talked about as though they were a general customer research panacea. I’ve seen businesses participating in assurance schemes and other development programmes encouraged to put out comment cards, simply in order to check off the customer research box. Research mission accomplished.
But customer comment cards and feedback surveys, while they have value, hardly provide a 360 degree view of market needs and competitive activity.
After all, what about all those potential customers who never even make it through the doors?
At worst, over reliance on customer comment cards can be a distraction, or even waste resources if more effort goes into data capture and reporting than the potential benefits really justify.
There is no single research tool or data source that has all the answers a business requires. Comment cards are just one in a suite of options open to businesses and shouldn’t prevent focus on other intelligence sources.
And for most businesses, they are not even the most useful data source available. If given the choice of only one metric one which to base their decisions - unsurprisingly, most businesses I have spoken to would choose cash/revenues as their critical measure.
Should customer comment cards be abandoned completely?
I don’t believe all customer comment cards and feedback surveys should be abandoned - not at all. However, I do think an over reliance on them at the cost of other research approaches can be unhelpful.
Of course customers need the facility to give you feedback they may not want to say to your face (or may not have had the opportunity to give verbally) and comment cards and feedback surveys are a very good outlet for this.
But collecting comments shouldn’t stop at the door. Customers also give comments on third party review sites like Tripadvisor as well as on agents websites and in blogs and online social networks. There are tools that let you see these comments – why not include them in the research process too.
Systematically combining customer comments and other feedback allows a business to identifying quick fixes and strategically prioritise developments.
And of course, customer comment cards and feedback surveys can also be used as marketing tool – particularly where personal information is captured.
They can also aide performance benchmarking and staff engagement, provided they are actually analysed.
So, I am not advocating abandoning comments cards, but I do think they should be:
1) promoted as one of a suite of businesses information sources, and
2) properly analysed in order to deliver real business value
Of course, customer comment cards and feedback forms remain an important tool, but they are not a research “cure all” and can’t be used in isolation.
They are useful only if effectively analysed (as opposed to simply being inputted, or worse still, sitting on a shelf) and only if businesses are prepared and able to act on the issues raised. After all, if you really can’t do anything with the data, why not save your efforts and don’t collect it!
In Part 2 of this post, I will get practical and look at some of the ways businesses can get more value from their efforts, with in depth analysis of their customer comment cards.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Opinion, Research tools, Tourism market research, Visitor attraction research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.