Hilton + Qualtrics

Hilton is tasked with delivering a consistent, premium guest experience across dozens of brands and thousands of hotels in hundreds of countries. Years ago, they were at the forefront of using survey feedback to improve their hotel offerings. But today, consumers want instantaneous answers and quick resolutions to their problems. Hilton realized traditional post-stay surveys, with data that can only be acted on after a guest checks out, no longer cut it.

“Like every other hotel company, we were listening to guests after their stay experience,” said Jess Petitt, Senior Vice President of Commercial Strategy, Insight and Analytics at Hilton. “In order to really have an impact, we knew we needed to find ways to listen to our guests before, during and after their stays with us.”

Hilton is establishing a continuous listening program with Qualtrics that gives them actionable insights from before a guest books a trip, through their arrival and stay, and until they are ready to return.

Through Qualtrics XM for Customer Experience and state-of-the-art messaging delivered by official Qualtrics partner Kipsu, Hilton is engaging directly with customers before, during, and after their stay. Guests are able to express questions or concerns via SMS text messaging in natural, two-way conversations. In return, Hilton’s team members are able to help multiple guests at once, prioritize the most urgent issues and take appropriate action — like relocating a guest due to a noise complaint or arranging an in-room amenity.

And over time, thanks to the AI-driven analytics of the Qualtrics platform, those messages will help Hilton do more than just reduce calls to the hotel concierge or to Hilton’s contact center. Eventually, conversations will be automatically analyzed to understand the content as well as effort, sentiment, and emotion behind them. Hilton team members will proactively receive insights into specific locations or points in the journey where guests are experiencing frustration.

Addressing insights at a corporate level

Increasingly, Hilton believes that their ability to deliver a differentiated experience depends on how they incorporate feedback from guests via messaging and surveys as well as conversations happening in other channels — whether that’s social media, email or calls to the contact center. The Stay Experience Platform, powered by Qualtrics, allows them to interpret unstructured data at scale, bringing insights from various channels into one view where they can see connections, build an understanding of individual guests and segments, and prioritize actions.

By ingesting select messaging data into the Stay Experience Platform, Hilton discovered towel quantity and quality was a major detractor from the guest experience — something they had never asked about in a survey. In response, Hilton developed a new company-wide towel program that is cost-efficient for hotels and improved the customer experience.

With a centralized platform for feedback, Hilton is breaking down silos across the enterprise, and empowering their team members to put the customer voice at the center of everything they do.