Turning Data Into Profit At Choice Hotels

Choice Hotels International, Inc. was tasked with the business challenge of turning customer data into profit. This was no small task considering the size of the company. Choice has franchises with more than 6,000 hotels, representing more than 485,000 rooms, in the United States and more than 35 other countries and territories. The hotel was faced with a host of complications including unused voice of the customer data, a limited ability to provide actionable feedback for poor performing properties and inefficient process for addressing corporate and general management questions. In addition Choice was faced with a limited ability to impact the likelihood to recommend factor of the company, similar to net promoter score.

Matt Cohen joins us to present the Choice Hotel’s case study. Cohen serves as the Industry Director of Retail and Hospitality for Clarabridge, a solution provider of text mining software to improve customer experience. Cohen and his team were able to lower average handle time by 30 percent for Choice Hotels in guest relations. In addition Choice Hotels successfully reduced call volume, greatly reduced manual analysis, and increased the likelihood for a customer to provide a recommendation. Choice Hotels had more unstructured customer feedback than manageable and increasingly saw the need for detailed analytics. The company’s business challenge included manual entry of surveys, inquiries and suggestions, a time consuming and tedious activity, in addition to eliminating curse words from survey comments.

After the technology implementation of Clarabridge’s systematic infrastructure Choice Hotels was able to eliminate manual coding efforts, dramatically increase contextual insight and actions, enable customer experience management competency, daily quantification of qualitative feedback, continuous analysis, real time alerting on emerging issues, true customer perspective analysis and immediate new and historical analysis.