Sports and Travel Brands Leverage Continuous Customer Satisfaction Tracking

As more successful sports and travel brands put emphasis on running a customer centric organization, there’s been a growing need to monitor and measure the impact of front line employee interactions and service. Whether these touchpoints occur on property, remotely or both, effective satisfaction tracking measurement should also encompass evaluation of various amenities and experiential components of a property, that can have longterm impact on customer retention and loyalty

Customer satisfaction tracking research, by its very nature, can often be seen by a client as ‘staid or even boring.’ Particularly, if that client is doing a good job of listening to the customer, anticipating his or her needs, and delivering a consistent and solid experience, one will see satisfaction scores that remain stable over time. But it’s those exceptions and a deeper dive into the results across segmented customer groups that can make longitudinal tracking, invaluable over time.

At SLRG, our customer satisfaction tracking often seeks to measure customer satisfaction through agreement statements, utilizing a ten-point scale. The use of the ten-point scale provides greater breadth of analysis than one can garner from a shorter (for example 1-5) scale. It opens a window to assess and identify ‘grey’ areas. Think about it this way. If a customer evaluates their satisfaction as a “4” on a five point scale, is that closer to a perfect rating of 5 or a mediocre rating of 3? 10 points allows for the greater nuance, while not becoming overly cumbersome to think about.
We also use the ten point scale, to determine the incidence or percentage of respondents who provide a “top 3 box score,” which is a sum of those providing a rating of 8, 9, or 10, and a bottom three box summary; those selecting 1, 2 or 3. This enables the research to look at the truly satisfied and those with larger issues.   Over time, a good ongoing tracking program can identify those moments where there may be an observed lapse or jump in satisfaction across a particular area, function or amenity.

A tool that we recently implemented with a leisure client, involved building a live, real time, online dashboard that allows both client and researcher to identify these gaps in customer satisfaction, as they occur. By having this real time feedback, the client is able to observe trend lines on a continuous basis. ,Once an aberration occurs outside of the trendline or established benchmark for performance, further analysis of key drivers of that particular measure, as well as open ended customer feedback, allow the client to take corrective action, as necessary.

Another useful element that we’ve deployed with our dashboards is the ability to customize levels of access across a variety of management levels. For senior most management, we often provide single summary measures that are typically an aggregation of overall brand health. This is not just simply an average of top 3 box percentages across the different measures, but it often takes into account the weighting of certain components that the client may deem more or less significant than others. With enough data, over time, we can also conduct a more sophisticated analytical process known as key driver analysis, where those factors that are most important in driving overall satisfaction can be identified. In turn, those particular elements will then get a higher weighting in the overall aggregate score, tracked on the dashboard.

For operational management, dashboard access often enables these department heads to dive deeper into their specific functional area, and take a closer look at those individual areas that comprise their ratings. Examples of these functional areas for a sports venue might include: ushers, ticket takers, people at the concessions, and merchandise stands as well as various elements of in-game entertainment. At a resort functional areas for measurement can include everything from valets to front desk personnel, housekeeping, and restaurant staff. By tracking each of these different roles, the client is able to monitor consumers’ experience across multiple touchpoints. The department heads can monitor each of those on a granular scale, while senior leadership can see how this affects the overall performance of the property. By tracking these measures continuously, clients are able to identify peaks and valleys of performance, and take the necessary corrective actions in real time, before they become more organizationally systemic.