Sixty-five Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn properties are to join BDRC Continental’s VenueVerdict and Meetings Benchmark Tracker, widely-recognised customer service benchmarking programmes within the UK hospitality industry.
Together, the programmes cover all aspects of an event booker’s experience of a hotel. Meetings Benchmark Tracker deploys mystery calls and emails to assess enquiry-handling standards, while VenueVerdict sends post-event questionnaires to customers to seek their feedback.
Both programmes are operated by market research agency BDRC Continental and offer industry benchmarking to subscribers, allowing them to compare their performance with other participating hotels and specialist conference centres on a regional or national basis. BDRC Continental’s expertise in the hotels sector adds value to the raw data unearthed by the programmes to help hoteliers drive improvements in service quality and enquiry conversion. In the region of 200 venues across the UK subscribe to each programme.
Robert Alley, Meetings & Events Sales Director for IHG, sees joining the programmes as the next step on the company’s continuous customer satisfaction improvement journey. “Understanding how our customers perceive our service and the trends that occur over time is one thing, and these programmes give us detailed insight we can use at strategic and operational level. Comparing our performance with other industry operators, however, allows us to gain deeper understanding into our key points of difference.”
The hotels will enter the programme from June this year, meaning they will be able to enter the race for VenueVerdict’s Gold Standard accreditation, held by just 13 venues currently, at the end of June 2012.