Customer experience best practice: lessons from TripAdvisor rating star’s ‘sparkling sunshine’ strategy you can apply to your business or job interview
- A hotel marketing manager hit on a formula for success: avoid the negative by maximising ‘contact points’ with guests and ensuring they are positive
- Her application of what’s called the peak-end rule raised her boutique hotel group’s ratings on TripAdvisor to five stars, and it can work for you too
Hospitality marketing expert Adele Gutman has achieved extraordinary success at the Library Hotel Collection, whose boutique properties consistently rank at the top of TripAdvisor lists. Gutman has identified the importance of the peak-end rule, where a bad last impression is worse than a bad first one.
In The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, science writer John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, a social scientist and psychologist, examine Gutman’s techniques and ask how they can be applied to other situations such as job interviews. Here’s an excerpt from their book.
So Gutman has been barraged with queries from other hoteliers and invitations to give master classes at trade conferences. She can talk the business‑school talk, expounding on “best practices in reputation management” and offering mantras such as “service Is marketing”, but there’s one phrase she keeps coming back to: “sparkling sunshine”. She says it with a smile and a fluttering of her perfectly manicured fingers to illustrate the sunshine her staff are sparkling over every guest.
“You have to double up on the good things,” she said. “If you manage to connect with every single guest, you’ve given yourself an insurance policy against bad reviews because they’re not likely to say something negative about somebody who’s their friend.
“You have to go over the top so they forget the bad things. I never use phrases like ‘meeting people’s expectations’ or ‘satisfying customers.’ I say ‘sparkling sunshine’, and our staff gets exactly what I mean.”
There is nothing haphazard about this sunshine. It’s a system she developed after taking over the marketing of the Casablanca and its sister hotels in 2005, when they were ranked lower on TripAdvisor. She realised that they couldn’t compete with low‑end hotels for price or high-end hotels for luxury.
They were small hotels with a sense of style – the Casablanca had a Moroccan theme taken from the Humphrey Bogart movie – but they didn’t offer palatial suites or sweeping views.
She also knew, though, that luxury was not the formula for getting to the top of TripAdvisor’s rankings. Deluxe hotels in New York such as the St Regis and the Plaza were routinely outranked by cheaper hotels because their guests expected so much and would find something to complain about. The secret to making that crucial first web page on TripAdvisor was to avoid negative reviews.
After studying the reviews, she drew up a list of all the “contact points” between a guest and the hotel, from making the reservation to checking out, and resolved to sparkle sunshine at every point. The front desk started keeping a diary listing every request or complaint from a guest and how it was handled.
Gutman focused on hiring cheery extroverts and coaching them to engage the guests whenever possible. The telephone reservation agents at the Casablanca don’t just book a room; they ask why the guest is coming to New York and if there’s anything special they need.
From the doorman to the front‑desk clerk to the bellhop, everyone is supposed to beam – “Welcome to our hotel!” – and treat the guest’s arrival as a singularly delightful treat: “Oh, this is your first time in New York? We’re going to have fun with you! The favourite part of our job is helping people make the most of New York. If you want any recommendations or help, please, please, let us know.”
When the bellhop shows the guests to the room, he watches their reaction and reports back to the manager. If the guests seem unenthusiastic, the manager will call to make sure it’s all right and offer another room if possible.
That welcome may seem like overkill, and no doubt some weary travellers would rather check in without all the fuss. But this strategy makes perfect sense to researchers who have studied how people form judgments.
First impressions really do matter, and they’re definitely governed by the negativity bias. Some of the clearest evidence comes from tracking reactions of people administering job interviews.
When the candidate makes a good first impression, the interviewer will be swayed only slightly, and that mildly favourable impression can be quickly reversed. But if a candidate comes off badly in the first moments, he’ll have to spend the rest of the interview trying to make up for it, and he’ll be lucky to get back to neutral.
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If the job interview ends on a sour note, the candidate had better keep looking elsewhere, because a bad last impression is even worse than a bad first impression.
It’s an example of what psychologists call the peak‑end rule, which was demonstrated by having people immerse their hands in iced water.
First, they dunked their hands for 60 seconds. Then, after a break, they dunked their hands again, but this time they kept them there for 90 seconds, with the water getting slightly warmer during the final 30 seconds. Later, they were told they had to undergo one more dunking and asked which version they’d prefer.
Most people preferred the second version. Although it lasted longer and involved more overall pain, afterward it seemed less painful because it had ended with slightly warmer water.
The peak‑end rule helps explain why reviewers on TripAdvisor will rant about an unpleasant surprise at checkout – “Beware the minibar bill!” – or fixate on the sleep they lost because of street noise. The complaints can seem ridiculously petty – “I was extremely upset to find only one tube of shampoo in the shower” – but Gutman takes them all seriously.
“Traveller reviews are like a free customer focus group,” she said. “Even when they’re unfair, you can learn something from them.”
She has eliminated obvious sources of irritation at checkout time by not having minibars in the rooms and providing free bottles of water, free Wi-fi, and free breakfast.
To avoid unpleasant surprises, the website offers photo tours of each room with painstaking details on what’s there (the size of the room and the bed) and what’s not (“no view of the city”). It warns that front rooms facing Forty‑Third Street get more street noise, and the back rooms get less light.
Gutman has also created one more “contact point” with the guests by luring them into the lounge throughout the day, where complimentary snacks and coffee are offered around the clock, and there’s a reception every evening with wine and cheese.
The point isn’t just to propitiate the guests with freebies. It gives Gutman and the staff more chances to sparkle sunshine and forestall complaints.
“When you’re constantly taking the guests’ temperature,” she said, “you can find out if there’s some little thing they were too shy to ask for – something that could be the difference between a four‑star and five‑star review.” As we’ve seen, listening to bad is a crucial step in overcoming it.
Thanks to all its strategies, the Casablanca has maintained a five‑star rating on TripAdvisor for more than a decade. Close to 90 per cent of the reviews are for five stars, and only 3 per cent are below four stars.
While some of Gutman’s tactics are peculiar to the hotel industry – most businesses don’t offer a chance to mingle with customers every day at a wine‑and‑cheese reception – the basic strategies can be applied in other businesses.
