Did you know that it can cost five times more to attract a new customer than keep an existing one happy? Understanding what drives customer satisfaction is an essential way to keep your client base happy and build a loyal pool of advocates who will champion your business and choose your brand over the competition in the future.
That’s why we were able to recommend HubSpot survey functionality to a long-serving client and leading UK holiday park operator who needed to build a robust system for gathering feedback once customers had visited their parks.
Understanding what they were doing right and wrong and taking appropriate action to remedy any issues which may drive potential advocates away had become an integral part of their customer retention strategy, but their current tools and processes were not delivering the goods.
The situation
Our client had previously used disparate evaluation tools, making their feedback processes inefficient. Their data gathering also worked separately to their booking and reporting platforms so it wasn’t possible to monitor trends and glean any kind of meaningful insight into customer satisfaction.
On top of all this, the UK holiday parks industry is fiercely competitive with a number of key players vying for space. The travel sector has also taken a battering throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Constantly changing rules on testing and isolating and a lack of consumer confidence mean that major players in the industry have had to work harder than ever to convince potential visitors that their park should be the destination of choice.
This operator clearly faced significant challenges in order to maintain its current market share and customer loyalty.
The solution
Our client was already using HubSpot as their CRM system to manage their data and marketing automation processes, so the obvious next step was to integrate a process for gathering customer feedback using HubSpot’s pre-built evaluation software.
Not only would this new system enable significant efficiencies for the business, it would also integrate with their customer data, providing more sophisticated reporting and a deeper understanding of what motivates their clients.
Given that customers share good experiences with an average of nine people and poor experiences with 16 – that’s almost twice as many who could spread negative feedback about your business – understanding customers’ gripes and resolving these promptly is imperative to good reviews and positive brand perception.
The approach
We presented the tools within HubSpot’s survey functionality to our client to give them a flavour of the possibilities available to them. Following discussions around their particular needs and the potential for the ‘Net Promoter Score’ survey to evaluate both customer loyalty levels and churn rate (the percentage of customers who do not convert to repeat visitors) – both high priorities for our client – the NPS survey was the obvious choice for them.
We highlighted that the beauty of the NPS survey is its simplistic design which yields a higher response rate: you ask one question where the customer rates how likely they would be to recommend you to others on a scale of 1 to 10.
Respondents are then categorised into three groups: scores of 0 to 6 are ‘detractors’, 7-8 are ‘passives’ and 9-10 are ‘promoters’. Follow-up tasks and targeted communications and promotions can then be sent to each of these groups.
The ability to add automation functionality to the NPS survey was of particular appeal to our client. We designed the system so that the survey email is triggered by the customer’s deal stage within one day of them checking out of a holiday park, therefore targeting guests when the holiday experience is still fresh in their minds.
We also developed a more lengthy departure questionnaire so our client can gather feedback on specific aspects of the services provided by different teams such as reception, maintenance and housekeeping. The survey is constantly adapted to suit changing needs and currently features a section on how guests perceive eco-friendliness at each park. There are also open-ended questions that enable guests to leave more qualitative feedback, complementing the quantitative nature of the NPS survey.
Again, the results of this survey help to guide the delivery of services and follow-up communications to visitors. It is an invaluable mechanism to identify issues that need to be addressed or services that can be further improved and developed.
The results
Our client has seamlessly launched a package of departure surveys with impressive results.
In the first quarter of 2022, the percentage of respondents who rated the holiday park accommodation as ‘Excellent’ rose to 66%, an increase of 5% compared to the previous quarter, demonstrating the positive impact of service improvements driven by customer feedback.
More than a quarter of respondents at the tail end of 2021 who said that they would book another holiday have already done so in 2022. Those who have not yet rebooked have been enrolled in a workflow that sends a series of automated follow-up emails featuring incentives and park news to encourage repeat bookings. Using survey data in this way provides invaluable insight into guest motivations and is key to the design of response-driven marketing campaigns that will improve their conversion rate and drive more sales.
Thanks to HubSpot workflow functionality, automated tasks are now triggered when a visitor gives a negative NPS score, prompting the customer care team to contact the guest individually for more detailed feedback.
Likewise, any positive comments about staff members are fed back to the team, helping to boost staff morale and employee satisfaction levels.
Our client is also benefiting from customised reporting dashboards that enable senior teams to present survey results in an accessible and visually appealing way.
If you’re interested in using HubSpot survey functionality to drive your customer care and retention strategy, we can help. Book a meeting today to get the conversation started:
