Hotel Responses to Online Customer Reviews Research (Research Paper Sample)

Hotel Responses to Online Customer Reviews
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Hotel Responses to Online Customer Reviews
In the modern world, businesses are operating in a global environment. The ability of companies to sell their products globally has come as an advantage to their businesses and at the same time attracted public criticisms from consumers globally. (Strauss, 2008). With the introduction of the internet, communication channels have improved to the extent where customers can influence each other regarding the products of particular companies. It is with this regard that this study is carried out to determine how Hotels in the United States of America respond to online customer reviews regarding their services in an attempt to keep their customers from taking their businesses to their competitors. ( Garding&Bruns, 2015). Customer complaint behavior is one of the ways in which companies use to develop business strategies that will ensure their retention. ( Shajahan, 2006).
Online reviews by customers concerning a company's or an industry's product play a critical role in the popularity of the company by acting as a form of free advertising, improving the company's search engine results, providing peer recommendations, and offering constructive criticism and suggestions.( Hanafizadeh&Behboudi, 2012). The way a company handles these reviews, whether positive or negative will determine its relationship with customers and by extension its ability to sell to them.
The online reviews by customers to products or services offered by businesses have led to companies responding to these reviews. Since these responses are now being made by clients who are not specialists in the products or services, sometimes they do not represent the correct position. (Blanchard, 2009). Businesses, however, to maintain their reputation and sales revenue have to respond to these reviews in a very careful manner. This study analyses the online responses to customer reviews to explain the strategies that businesses use to manage the dissatisfaction of their clients. Specifically, 60 online responses by restaurants based in the United States are analyzed to determine these moves.
Several studies carried out indicate that online reviews have an impact on how customers will react to a company's products or services hence influencing the amount of money they are willing to spend on these goods and services. (Munzel, 2013). With advancement in technology and people's purchasing power, one upset customer can now influence hundred and even thousands of other clients.( Mo, Li, and Fan, 2015). Online reviews touch a broad range of customers, are generated by internet users and are rich in information relevant to businesses. For sensitive and costly businesses like travel and leisure, customer satisfaction to ensure loyalty is important and such businesses heavily rely on customer reviews for improvement in their service delivery. ( Hajli, 2013).
Other studies have been carried out regarding online customer reviews about service industries, specifically, the responses of hotels to reviews of customers. (Zhang &Vasques, 2014).Tripadvisor, an online site handling issues related to hotel bookings is a database providing hotel and restaurant responses to these online reviews. The variation in this study is that hotels are considered from the United States of America and considers a wider range of the hotels not being classified as per their nature. This study, however, specifies the time periods of the study to determine whether hotel responses changes according to their geographical location, size and time periods.
The type of speech act explored in this study combines the text type and the social action with the customer care representatives from hotels aiming at achieving specific goals and at the same time producing documents accessible to a variety of users. (Jucker, &Taavitsainen, 2008). The goals aimed at is to react to a customer's complaints in a very courteous manner to address the issues raised by the client to build the hotel's brand and at the same time market its services and maintain customer loyalty. Responses made by business representatives to the reviews made by customers represent an English genre that is reactive and dependent on the client reviews coming before them. In achieving this goal, this paper links the hotel response to the particular primary consideration by the customer to determine the words used and determine whether the issues raised by the client are addressed in these replies.
The analysis of the particular act of speech used in this study involves the use of text structures and the interactions between the various texts involved and the communities producing them. Moves analysis described as an approach used in analyzing the text of a particular act of speech is used here to describe the text in answer to communicative function. The study analyses the moves to describe the responses of businesses in response to the customer online reviews giving these businesses an opportunity to respond to any positive or negative review. Data was analyzed from the replies by businesses to determine the standard methods of approaches used in addressing customer complaints.
Research questions
This study aims at answering the following research questions.
What are the common strategies used by businesses to answer to negative customer reviews?
To what extent do the responses address the actual issues raised by customers?
Methodology
60 responses from hotels in the United States of America from 2016 to 2017 are extracted from the online company dealing with hotel bookings and travel the TripAdvisor to determine the common moves used by hotels in addressing the reviews left online by their customers. A sampling of the hotels is done as per the geographical location, and in this case, the study focuses on the hotels in the United States of America. The selection of the United States is arbitrary to make comparisons with prior research done on the same. Time of the study is limited to a period of one year to determine how the responses evolve over time. It is important to note that just like other studies done, smaller hotels did not respond to customer reviews. Even though this study covers such, it was difficult to ascertain accurate responses, and this forced the researcher to rely on answers from medium to large hotels.
The customer reviews obtained from TripAdvisor were considered, and the search was restricted to those hotels in the United States of America. The reviews were searched through to find the ones that had attracted the responses of the hotel representatives. Once a response was found for a negative review, they were taken along with the actual customer review. From the total number of consumer reviews received, only those written in the English language were considered for consistency of language purposes.
Results and discussions.
This section of the paper presents the move types that were common in response to customer reviews by companies. The function of the reaction whether to explain in details or apologize and so on and the frequencies of the moves in the selected responses are considered.
In the discussions that follow, specific examples of the actual responses to the customer reviews are used and have been italicized to differentiate from the real text of the study. The customer responses have been added at the end of the survey as an appendix. The following are the most frequent moves obtained from the business responses.
Breakdown of hotel responses as per the customer ratings and the location of the hotels….
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Table 1
Location

Rated poor

Rated terrible


New jersey

5

3

8

Texas

7

4

11

Maryland

10

8

18

Los Angeles

11

5

16

Pennsylvania

3

4

7

Florida

36

24

60

Table 2

Move

Numbers

Percentages

Expression of gratitude

56

93

Acknowledgment of complaint

46

76

Proof of action taken to correct the anomalies

39

65

Opening and closing pleasantries

52

87

Invitation of the customer for more visits

48

80

It is worth noting that table 2 has left out 18 out of the 60 responses collected because they were totally irrelevant to the complaints raised by the customers. This research assumes that the replies were generated by an answering machine since the same response was directed to all the customer reviews despite the difference in the issues raised by the customers.The responses have been analyzed critically, and they resulted in their classification into five moves as per the table 2 above.
The first step explored here is the Hotel's expression of gratitude towards the customer review. For Example, Thank you for ther feedback, we pride ourselves in making a quality product for our customers.It thanks the customers for visiting their hotels and for making the details of their stay known to the hotel management. This move is expressed by standard terms such as; thank you for sharing your feedback with us, thank you for staying in our facility.
The second move is an expression by the hotel management of their acknowledgment of the customer complaint. This step puts it clearly to the client that the hotel has acknowledged their displeasure or discomfort with their facility. One of the responses included here is; “There is certainly a challenge to weekends that have large teams staying with us.”And “sorry to hear that you were disappointed with your recent stay with us.”As per Table 2 above, this move ...