Reading Used to Be Expensive

Four hotels in Europe this summer, and every one of them followed up to ask how it went.

In one of them I never got the climate control to do anything. Maybe the thermostat was broken, or set centrally for the season, or the panel on the wall was decorative. I couldn't tell, and it isn't my job to figure it out. I never said anything either. I decided it wasn't worth the call, which is its own kind of failure and not entirely mine. At another, the toilet backed up on day one. I reported it in the evening and nobody picked it up the next day. At the third, the beach club reservation the hotel was supposed to make for us never happened.  I wrote about that a few weeks ago because of what we ended up doing instead. They sorted it out. It was still a failure.

So how do I rate them?

The toilet should be the easy one, except the score is going to land on whoever was working the desk and not on whoever set up a system where a request made at night doesn't survive until morning. 

The beach club is harder.. Give them a two and the fix disappears. Give them a five and the failure does. If anybody had asked me directly it would have taken one sentence. Something was supposed to be booked, it wasn't, we found out when we showed up, and they scrambled and made it good. Any manager hearing that knows what to do with it. There's no score that carries it.

The surveys turned up a few days after each checkout, asking me to rate my stay. I started a couple of them. Two questions in, I could tell how long this was going to take and that none of what I've just described was going to come up.

So I closed the tab.

The version I work in

I live with this too.

I work in analyst relations. Research firms spend months studying a market. Briefings, documentation, customer interviews, all of it building a detailed picture of what each company does well and where it falls down. Some of it gets published, usually a report with a few paragraphs on each company. What people actually look at is the chart. You've probably seen one without knowing what it was called. The quadrant, the wave, companies plotted against two axes with the winners in one corner.

Most of what the analyst learned never makes it into the report. It shapes where the dot goes and then stays inside the firm, surfacing in conversations with clients who ask the right questions. A fair amount of my job comes down to where that dot lands.

The hotel does the same thing with a five-point scale. Someone there could use the fact that a maintenance request died overnight. Nobody asks. What they collect instead is a score. As far as I can tell it just moves up the chain, but I don't actually know, because nobody has ever told me. They could. They have my email.

Why it's still a number

There was a good reason for this once.

Reading didn't scale. Nobody was getting through five thousand paragraphs of customer feedback, so you asked five thousand people for a number and worked with the average.

That stopped being true. Reading a few thousand paragraphs and finding the pattern in them is cheap now. I could describe the toilet and the beach club at whatever length I felt like and the property would get more out of it than it gets from four stars.

So does this already exist? Almost certainly. Reading text at volume isn't exotic anymore, and I'd be surprised if nobody is selling it to hotels right now.

Which leaves a smaller and more irritating question. Why hasn't it reached me? Four hotels this summer, four scales of one to five, and not one of them asked me to describe anything.

I wrote in You're Measuring the Wrong Thing about metrics drifting off the goal they were built for. This isn't drift. The reason for the number went away and nobody went back to look.

Berkson's Bits

With all the new technology and automation, the focus for individuals should be to nurture critical thinking and relationship skills.

Before all this technology, the focus for individuals was...to nurture critical thinking and relationship skills.

Plus ça change...

What I'm Listening To...

My daughters are a significant source of new music for me. One recently shared this Jessie Mazin Medium Sized Backyard concert. I sense a trend in quite a few new artists showing influences from the great women artists of the 90’s. She also throws in some Radiohead and Phoebe Bridgers. And I love an open tuning on the guitar.

I've still got things I'd tell those hotels. They're just not listening. And they're missing a chance to do something more valuable than collect a score: understand what happened, fix what's broken, and tell me they did. 

That's how you turn a customer who had a problem into one who feels heard.

And maybe, eventually, into a fan.

What are you seeing? How are brands getting beyond the score and actually listening to what customers are telling them?

Looking forward to continuing the conversation…

Alan