Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The HotelTechInsider podcast interviews the top leaders at the convergence of hotels, travel and technology. Guests include founders, executives, top hoteliers and industry organization leadership. Find all of the episodes at hoteltechreport.com
The question becomes more long tail, like I chat. Before, the answer would be, yes, has a pool. Maybe the opening hours. Today, the answer would be, yes, has a pool. Families raved about it and gave it a nine out of 10, and kids love the water slides.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.
Speaker 3:Today, we're talking with Ben Yost, the founder and CEO of TrustYou. He's a true expert on all things reputation, data, and AI, and he shares some nuggets of wisdom about asking guests for feedback, responding to reviews, and gleaning insights from data. If you want to boost guest satisfaction and your website conversion, you won't want to miss this one. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today, Ben. Looking forward to chatting with you and learning about your journey at TrustYou.
Speaker 3:So to get things started, I would love for you to introduce yourself, Tell us a bit about your role and your company and your journey so far.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. Yeah, how can I bring this in an elevator pitch fifteen years plus of Trust You? I give you at a high level story. We started actually as a B2C company. So the idea was to be a competitor of TripAdvisor and Kayak and the likes.
Speaker 1:And we not only wanted to aggregate price information but also review information because we thought users are looking for value and value is quality divided by price. So we said like, let's aggregate the review from across the web, do sentiment analysis on top of it and then show the users out there, you know, what's the quality all about? What's the summary of everything that's ever been written about this hotel? And then show them price alongside. And then 2008 wasn't a great time to start start out with the financial crisis.
Speaker 1:So we just got started and the financial crisis hit us and then we didn't have a lot of money, but we just launched then the site. And then what we realized though was that Hotelius actually came to our site, searched for their hotel name. And then when we talked to them, it's like, what do you do there? It's like, they obviously never booked their own hotel. So we didn't earn any money, but we learned that they are actually looking at the summarization of all the reviews, the good, the bad, and they printed it out sometimes and showed it to their staff.
Speaker 1:And that basically was the idea of reputation management was born. And we asked them, hey, would you actually pay for it if we offer you this in the software and you can actually print it out of there and you can see more analysis and you can benchmark against your competitors, etc. And then fast forwarded how we pivoted to a B2B model. And in 2010, we only had the B2B model live and we dropped the B2C model. And yeah, when we started, no one was talking about reputation management and what it was, and it was just a new type.
Speaker 1:And then along the way, we realized since hoteliers wanted to upload what they called surveys. And we looked at this like, oh, it looks like a review actually, but you collect the data. So that was where we integrated then surveys into our offering. Yeah, and then fast forward, I think we became the biggest guest feedback reputation management survey provider in the world. In 2017, we got bought by Recruit Holdings, which is known outside Japan for Indeed.
Speaker 1:They own Indeed, they own Glassdoor. And they wanted to tip into the hospitality tech ecosystem. And then we wanted to also grow the company further with more acquisitions. And then 2020, when we just got ready to execute on all of that, obviously, the pandemic hit. And then in the pandemic, it was not clear where hospitality was headed.
Speaker 1:And then they weren't sure what they would want to do with it. And in that time, I told them, hey, what if you would sell it back to me, the company? And fast forward, we did the management buyout in 01/01/2023. And what we actually then went to do is, hey, where are our strengths as a company? And I think our strength of the company was always to build great technology and be very good in big data.
Speaker 1:And it says like, what are we missing? And that was the idea of building actually next to all of the customer feedback data that we have aggregated all of the missing information that we don't have about a customer which is all the transactional data. And if you combine those, you have actually a three sixty degree view of everything about that's ever been done by a customer and that is typically referred to as a CDP or a customer data platform. And that's what we built as a first platform next to our customer experience platform. We built this customer data platform that actually, you know, has a three sixty degree golden profile of Everguests.
Speaker 1:And then you can do two things with it. You actually do outbound communication with it either event based communication, like after booking, pre arrival, during stay, etc. Or marketing communication because you know, lookalike audiences, what is an interesting audience? How do I market to that audience and then send marketing communication to them? And then we said, like in the age of AI, what if we could also add an agent next to the communication we send out?
Speaker 1:And whenever you as a customer have a question or have a reply to whatever I send you, you can actually now communicate with an agent that's 20 available to you. So, I'll give you an example quickly, which is if you send out an email after booking, normally the industry is sending out an email with a no reply email address. So it's the first touch point that you see after the booking with a hotel. And we say, why can't I just reply to this email? And then within two seconds, I have another email in my inbox as a guest and that is written by an agent.
Speaker 1:And then if you think about this, that can actually be applied to every channel. So like I send out a WhatsApp, I get a reply on WhatsApp, an agent replies, send out an SMS. The guest wants to communicate back. The agent replies 20. Then the cool thing is the agent now knows everything about the hotel being fed with all of the description, amenities and review data.
Speaker 1:So it knows everything that we feed into them. So it knows everything really about ever being written about hotel, including all the customer feedback. And it knows everything about you because it has all of the contextual data in the CDP. So it can really personalise the response to you. And that's kind of what we've been building.
Speaker 1:So from a one trick pony, B2C to B2B, guest feedback, and now adding customer data and then adding on top of it the AI agent. And that's kind of the eighteen plus years or so we're doing this. And I think it's been very exciting and I have the feeling this is like our third inning as a company and we're now evolving in this industry's tax second hospitality.
Speaker 3:I want to take a step back and dig into the reputation management piece for a hotel who is maybe just occasionally reading their TripAdvisor reviews or looking at their reviews on an OTA, I'm curious, in your own words, why is reputation management important? Why should a hotel be investing in like, paying for a system to ingest their reviews when they could just as easily go to TripAdvisor and do what you saw hotels doing back in 2010 when you made your pivot? Why is it important to have this as a discipline?
Speaker 1:First of all, like I think TripAdvisor is not the number one player anymore than it was maybe 2010, right? So the biggest volume we see actually, it's the number one volume is from your own survey. It's like just an interesting fact for hoteliers that do it really well and collecting feedback. They're actually the biggest review generator from all the sources. So around up to 50% of all reviews ever been written can be generated by your own post save feedback.
Speaker 3:A quick question on that. Do hotels when they send their own surveys, are those responses generally only kept internally? Or do hotels post them publicly?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think that is one of the fundamental questions. Why should you do a reputation like you in the original question, why you should use reputation management? But I just wanted to say it's like, it's not TripAdvisor anymore. TripAdvisor, booking.com, Google, and depending on where you are in the world, the sources differ a little bit. Obviously, if you're in China, it's different than maybe Expedia is a little bit bigger in The US, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1:And then you have Central and in Europe, we have other players like Holiday Check, etcetera. But I think fundamentally, there are three things that you should look at. Number one is why should you benchmark against competitors, look at the reviews, respond to that, etc. Because it drives bookings. Like at the end of the day, we have statistics that if you're nine out of 10 hotel score or seven out of a 10 hotel score, you can actually have a much different pricing if you have a nine out of 10 than a seven out of 10.
Speaker 1:So, it actually influences your top line directly. So, every 0.1% counts. And if you think about it, it's like it's the other side of the coin of Linux revenue management. Like optimizing price and optimizing quality is basically kind of side by side. It has equal equality.
Speaker 1:But in the industry, I think we still focus a lot on those revenue management parts, like what's the best price in the future, etc, because it's easier to manage than maybe the not so fast quality management where you need to get from an 81 to an 82 to an 83. That's not overnight. But you can get there. And if you get there, you can actually also increase the price. So it's very, very important.
Speaker 1:And why is that so? Because everyone knows we as travel agents do it too. We look at not price, we look at value always. And value is quality divided by price. So if my quality goes up, the price can go up and the value is the same, right?
Speaker 1:So that's kind of fundamentally why you should then do it. And then I think I touched on the survey component. It's not enough if you just look at third party reviews because you can actually generate a lot of your reviews your own and ask very specific questions that you need to know for your quality of management. So post a survey and reviews is actually one thing. And you cannot have two systems.
Speaker 1:Like basically, a survey is nothing else. Booking.com sends out a survey. Google sends out a survey, right? Those are all surveys. And then what we aggregate is actually the review part from the customer.
Speaker 1:So post say that you send out and receive a survey. It's like direct bookings. You don't want to be reliant on all the third parties. You want to do your own direct bookings. You want to do your own direct surveys or direct reviews.
Speaker 1:And then last part, I think, also very underestimated. It's like what can you do with that content when it comes to marketing? Because a lot of people in the industry still think reputation management is about responding to a review and maybe do some analytics, but it's also about marketing. So there are a couple of factors. And even today's like they're becoming more and more important when it comes to marketing.
Speaker 1:One is all of the survey reviews you should actually make available on the website, what you just said. Why? Because number one, users are looking for it. So it's like if I'm on a brand.com website and I don't see review content, well, I go to a site where I see review content because I need review content to make a booking decision. So it's just a conversion driver is number one.
Speaker 1:Very straightforward. You can see, you can measure it with or without and you can see it actually increases conversion on your website, increases direct bookings. Number two, it has an SEO effect. And I'm saying this now because it's like SEO effect was maybe a couple of years ago was even more important. Now it has not only an SEO effect, it has an agent effect.
Speaker 1:What is an AI agent effect? What does it mean? It means that the agents out there, like think about ChetGPT or Google, Gemini, or other companies that have agents specific to hospitality, like Trustview has, but others as well. They use now all of that contextual information and they use it in their agent knowledge. I'll give you a concrete example.
Speaker 1:In the past, you probably have asked a question like, does the hotel have a pool? And today you ask a question, I'm traveling with my family, two kids. I wanna stay near the beach and it needs to have a pool. What can you tell me? So the question becomes more long tail, like I chat now.
Speaker 1:And the answer is more broad and contextual. Before, the answer would be yes, has a pool, maybe the opening hours. Today, the answer would be yes, has a pool, families raved about it and gave it a nine out of 10, and kids love the water slides. So that becomes a recommendation engine that these agents out there are gonna use. And the better your brand voice and your customers fit together, the higher you will be ranked.
Speaker 1:And that is something that I think hoteliers need to get their head around that review content and how I use review content to drive more direct bookings directly on my side, but also third parties and be future ready. That's a lot being driven by review content, not only price.
Speaker 3:And I know you mentioned TrustYou has integrations with a variety of different systems. So it is possible for hotels to pull in like PMS data, for instance, to get that complete profile of the guest. Is it then possible to use the AI responder to pull in some of that information into the response? I don't know if a guest, like, checked out early or if there was a discrepancy on their bill or something like that. Is there a world where the AI can pull in that information from the PMS and incorporate that into the response?
Speaker 1:Sure. I mean, there is a world, however, you have to you have to know it's like that's probably depending on how good you are with your survey, yourself. But let's say that's 30%. Maybe max 50 if you were super good. But let's say 25 to 30% of all content, that's your own content that you control.
Speaker 1:Because on the review across the web content, you don't have anything about this customer. Even though some claim that, oh, I can match this customer maybe to a customer I know, but it's actually the data is too fuzzy. You don't know is this exactly that person that stayed at this time and did this reservation? You don't know that because it's like benj. Or something that gives something going, maybe it's Ben Joss, maybe it's not.
Speaker 1:So it applies just to survey. And I think the first step that where we are is write a perfect response based on the context I see the customer writing. Adding it maybe the last five to 10% is give it more context by this customer, this is what the customer did in the past based on reservation data. But it's certainly possible because as you said, like, yes, we now have this data on our fingertips. And it could go both ways where we feed survey data into our customer data platform.
Speaker 1:So you can see what does my audience look like that spent a lot and gave positive feedback or negative feedback? Or what is Adrian saying about things and how loyal is she actually? So should we offer something or not? So all of those are possible if you have best data, which is transactional and feedback data combined in a data platform.
Speaker 3:What is the benefit of having all that data in one place? Why would you recommend that a hotel consider having a formal CDP and pulling information from various sources into one place?
Speaker 1:I remember the discussions over ten years now. It's like everyone said, like, we should have more data, we should have more data, more personalised data, and then no one's actually doing something with it. And then it's like, we are overwhelmed with all of that data. We don't know what to do. And I think what happens now, there's a fundamental shift in how we think about, how we should think about as an industry about all of this data.
Speaker 1:And the fundamental shift is driven by AI and by these AI agents. Why? I'll give you an example. I think forever we have been treating the CRMs and CDPs and all of this marketing solutions as one part of the hotel stack. This is the things that we do, we use for outbound communication.
Speaker 1:And we're trying to do the best possible outbound communication based on the data we know about the customer, like personalization, right? So we do that part. But then we had another emerging stack that was all about channels communication. Like I want to send a WhatsApp or an SMS, just a different stack of hotels. Like now with an emerge of chatbots that are popping up on my website, right, and different set of tech.
Speaker 1:And what we believe is those two worlds are coming together and become one. Because if you send a communication independent, if it's a booking confirmation or a pre arrival communication or during stay communication or post stay communication or marketing communication, if I send you something on whatever channel, WhatsApp, SMS, email, you as a customer should be able to respond to me in that channel. And I should be able to respond back to you. And it's a conversation. So we should think about it not an outbound world and an inbound world, we should think of it a conversation world.
Speaker 1:And that conversation world is driven by all of this data for the hotelier to start the conversation and then to give answers on whatever you ask me. So it can be based on public data. So you ask the question, can I bring my dog? I have a reservation but I forgot to ask, can I bring my dog? And then I can say, yeah, we're dog friendly and you can bring your dogs, fine, right?
Speaker 1:Or you ask like, what are the breakfast hours? Oh, the breakfast hours from seven to eleven. Okay, cool. But then you start asking, actually, is breakfast included in my reservation? So how do I know that?
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, I know that because I have access to all of your customer data and I know in your upcoming reservation if you book breakfast or not. So I can answer to you, yes, breakfast is included or not included. So you can really give dedicated, personalised answers. And that is a conversation with an agent on the other side. It'll feel, smell, touch, looks like a human gives you immediate response in every language 20 fourseven, is never sick.
Speaker 1:So it's a dream for the hotel world, But it's also a dream for the customer world because now they can have every answer at their fingertips anytime they want in every channel. And that's where I think the industry is headed. It's not an outbound, inbound, it's a conversation that I have. And then it's independent of where I have the conversation, right? On the chat, website, WhatsApp, SMS, email, voice.
Speaker 1:So that's kind of where we're headed. And this is where it's all driven by the data I have about you because otherwise I cannot answer the question accordingly.
Speaker 3:What do you think is next for reputation management? What's next on the horizon that hotels would be looking toward?
Speaker 1:I don't know if I would say reputation management in general. I think from a reputation management point of view, I think what are we gonna see is, you know, today you have like, let's say a button that says respond to this review and it doesn't, right? Then you have a button that says summarise this inbox with all of the reviews or summarise this chart. You can take all of that information and put it together pretty easily, much easier than before. I think the next leap forward would be as there's a button that says like generate me this insight report.
Speaker 1:That's, I don't know, 25 pages long that a data scientist would do for taking all of these different angles of data, including brand benchmarking and competitor data and recommendations of all specific hotels, what they should do now and focus on and put it together in one precise report. And that is kind of the ultimate kind of executive report, executive summary where you just press a button and it's like it shows you that. So you don't have to do anything. So this is where we are heading, I think, on the reputation management side. There on the survey side, we believe the old days of a post day survey where you open the link and you have 200 questions, Worst case, best case, you only have one question which is the score in the text field.
Speaker 1:But there are still hotel companies that have really a lot of questions and that hurts conversion. And you see over time that there's a fatigue in the user base, in the guest space to answer more and more and more surveys. I think when you go into the conversation part again, what I mentioned before, where you have a conversation along the journey after booking, you know, till post day, I can actually in this conversation I have, I can ask the guests, hey, by the way, I answered you great. I answered you all of the questions. Hey, one question for you.
Speaker 1:How is your stay going so far from one to five? And the answer is three. Oh, what can we improve on? And they tell you. And then after the day it's like, hey, did we improve on?
Speaker 1:What's your experience overall? And they will answer you. And I think that will drive up conversion a lot because it's much more natural how I give feedback because this is the way I would give feedback to a human. They would ask me in the conversation, right? And they go back.
Speaker 1:So it goes the same way of like the conversation I have is I think we need to have that conversation along the journey including feedback. And then if I can answer the question like overall, where are we heading in this conversation piece? I think there are these three stages. And I think we are now at stage two, which is you know everything about the hotel and about the hotel property, because we analyse everything. So we know all of the public knowledge.
Speaker 1:Next stage is we actually know all about the private knowledge. We brought it together in this customer data platform. So we know everything about this guest, Past history, future bookings is great. So what we already have in this conversation is like all of these things that I mentioned. Do you want to change your booking?
Speaker 1:Do I have breakfast included or not? The thing we cannot do yet is the third layer, which is, or at least we cannot do it well enough yet, is execute that task for me. So if I today you ask, hey, can I edit my booking? I'll send you the booking link to edit the booking. Or, you know, I wanna add breakfast.
Speaker 1:Okay, here's how you can add breakfast. This is still great because, okay, it gives me, I click on it, I go on the page, I do it, I pay, it's good. It's much better than before, but it's still not perfect. It's like, yes, I just want to answer. It's like, how much is it?
Speaker 1:$20? Yes. Here's the payment link, pay, done. So it's not an operator that operates everything for me. So I think we're getting there, but there needs to be an operating layer where it's basically operating the PMS and it's the best trained employee in your organization that can operate that PMS.
Speaker 1:And if we're there, and we can have the conversation done, then it's basically everything is enabled. And there's the best trained employee that never gets sick, speaks all languages, 20 fourseven available. It's always for you, always personalised. And this is I think we're not too far away actually from that vision, but that's where we had it.
Speaker 3:One question that I like to ask everyone on the podcast. I'm curious, what is something you believe about technology in the hotel space that your peers or competitors might disagree with?
Speaker 1:I don't know if they disagree with or not, but I think today we have a lot of different technology and a lot of different categories. Take for example, on your side, have a lot of different categories and a lot of different things. And I think a lot of those will actually disappear because what I, for example, what I described to you is a system that knows everything about your customer, including feedback, manages the feedback, manages the conversation back and forth, can operate next time like your PMS on behalf of you in every channel. What is that category? Right?
Speaker 1:You don't have a category for that. Well, if I do that all of this, I can actually also do the booking for you. I can do the upselling for you. I can do the check-in for you, right? So what are the fundamental layers of technology of the future?
Speaker 1:And I think my belief is it's gonna shrink dramatically, which is good news for hoteliers. I think they want that, but it's gonna shrink dramatically to systems, platforms, and then agents that talk to each other for certain tasks, but it's not gonna look like today. And even today, have a hard time, for example, to tell you like, what is that system? What's the name of that system? We call it Hospitality AI.
Speaker 1:That is what we call it. But no one else is calling it. Like, no one would say, oh, this is what you just described. And that's my view on how this is going to look at this in the next couple of years, kind of, do we actually need the IBEs? Is it gonna look differently because is it a conversation to make a booking?
Speaker 1:How is the website looked like? Today, there's, you know, a static website looked like ten years ago, twenty years ago, but it's still static. I still have to find and earn the information but the user expectation is to just to ask something. So this little window that pops up and asks me something, maybe this window becomes bigger, bigger, bigger until it becomes the website. So I think this is kind of the maybe I don't know if it's a contrarian view or not.
Speaker 1:Maybe some people would agree or disagree with me, but I think the tech stack will shrink dramatically and it will look differently.
Speaker 3:Well, cool. Thank you so much, Ben. It was really great chatting with you. Appreciate you sharing all of your insights. I think it'll be a really valuable conversation for our audience to hear.
Speaker 1:Cool. Thanks for having me again anytime soon.
Speaker 2:That's all for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hoteltechreport.com. Our goal with this podcast is to show you how the best in the business are leveraging technology to grow their properties and outperform the concept by using innovative digital tools and strategies. I encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learned from today's episode. Successful digital transformation is all about consistent small experiments over a long period of time, so don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 2:Do you know a hotelier who would be great to feature on this show, or do you think that your story would bring a lot of value to our audience? Reach out to me directly on LinkedIn by searching for Jordan Hollander. For more episodes like this, follow Hotel Tech Insider on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.