NH Hoteles Implements 'Quality Focus' Strategy

NH Hoteles has announced it is stepping up its efforts to find out about, and optimise the level of satisfaction of its guests supported by technological innovation and web horizons.

To do this, the hotel chain's Quality Department has developed new channels of communication with its customers and has set up tools among the first of their kind for analysing assessments and comments made about the hotel chain online, such as satisfaction surveys, calculating and analysing online opinions and in-depth studies made regularly by 'mystery guests' who visit the hotels have all been implemented.

The website and the 2.0 networks are now well entrenched areas for exchanging opinions regarding any product or service in particular for the hotel industry; networks such as Tripadvisor, Booking, Atrapalo and many others have now gained a high level of credibility among the public.

To analyse and improve the brand reputation it and its 400 hotels around the world have, NH Hoteles has developed its very own online tool for tracking comments about the hotel chain. Quality Focus Online locates any comment posted about the hotels in the NH Hoteles chain, records them and compares them with five direct competitors at the brand level, country level and hotel by hotel.

Thus, the hotel chain is able to gain accurate information in real time about what comments are being made about the hotel chain, be it on the Internet or on social networks, such as which services are most esteemed and which services are deemed to be unsatisfactory. The feedback is then collected and analysed and can then find solutions for any issues raised.

The information, accessible in real time for all employees at head office and hotel managers, is analysed every day by the Quality Department, processed and sent out to the departments involved in each service.

The hotel chain has also established that management remuneration at its hotels shall depend on a variable of the monthly and historic results that are recorded every year by its Quality Focus Online tool.

Measuring its online reputation is not the only tool NH Hoteles uses to find out about the opinion of its customers. The hotel chain also sends out weekly satisfaction surveys to guests who have stayed at its hotels over the last seven days.

NH Hoteles is the only hotel chain that, as part of this survey, asks its guests whether they would like hotel staff to contact them to sort out any problems that might arise. Around 8% of those surveyed have asked for this extra service in which a promise is made to deal with these requests within 72 hours.

The hotel chain has set a maximum of four surveys a year (no more than one every quarter) for each of its email contacts, so as not to overload its customers.

Around 6,300 customers fill in the satisfaction forms available for every hotel on the NH Hoteles corporate website annually.

Outside experts or 'mystery guests' carry out anonymous assessments of the quality of service at the hotel chain's different hotels, based on a series of parameters called "the 600 points of quality".