Perfect 10

On a recent business trip I had the opportunity to stay at a major hotel chain for a couple of nights. While overall I was pleased with my stay and experience, I was a little put off by their surveying technique and request to receive a 'Perfect 10'.

This chain had a program in place asking their guests to please rate them a 10 out of 10 on their survey and to bring any service or stay requests to their attention so that they could make your stay as comfortable as possible. Now as a CRM and Customer Experience Professional I often look for different things when I stay at a hotel or even shop at a grocery store, but I try to remain as objective as possible.
I can only assume that this type of program was launched to increase Customer Satisfaction levels at the hotel by addressing customer issues. What it did for myself and my colleagues however was make us look at each element of our experience and stay and find ways to NOT give them a perfect 10.

As with most people who travel for business, I have seen a lot of hotel rooms and have had some incredible experiences and some bad ones as well. After seeing a poster for the program when I first entered the hotel I began to see if they could live up to expectation that they had inadvertantly set with me. Things that prevented me from giving them a perfect 10 started to creep up:

• I was greeted and addressed by front desk staff over the course of my stay by my first name and last name


• The shower head was ridiculously low


• The air conditioner was archaic and extremely noisy (making it difficult to work and sleep)

What companies, and this hotel chain in particular, should do is take a outside-in view of their operations and the customer visit to measure their customer's experience to see what needs to be done to receive a perfect 10 every time. By looking at things pro-actively from a customer's perspective smaller but easily rectified issues (with some investment) can be addressed.

By passively waiting for customers to provide feedback they are doing nothing to actually improve the customer experience for that customer, it will only be reaped by the next. This of course for some businesses is too late.

And in case you're wondering I scored them a 6.