How Do I Start?

The first step in launching a successful web-based market research survey is to decide who you want to study and why. Of many uses for surveys, I’ve given three scenarios where this tool provides important, actionable data. Putting together a clear statement of purpose first will become invaluable as you write and order your questions. Your statement should include who you are surveying, why you are surveying, what data you hope to accumulate and what business decisions data will help you to make.

Next, how do you want to present data? Are there concepts or ideas that you want to compare? Do you want to compare data from two different demographic groups? If you plan to present data, choose formats and software that make graphing data easier (or graph data automatically).

Write your questions. Keep questionnaire short and on topic or you will lose your audience. Longer, more complex surveys do not necessarily give you enough incremental data to justify potential frustration of tabulating responses – or decreased response rates. Avoid adding questions that don’t have particular bearing on your business decisions. For instance, if your product or content is not gender-specific, you don’t need to ask respondents’ gender.

Decide how you want your respondents to answer. Choose single-choice, multiple-choice, agree-disagree or sliding-scale reply formats. Do you need more information? Add a block for a verbose response to an open-ended question. Thinking through response mechanisms clearly will facilitate tabulating your data. Remember, you can always launch a follow-up survey, if necessary.

Publicize your survey. Decide whether you want to have survey appear as a pop-up window or if you want to send out e-mail notifications. If you send e-mail invitations, you can also send follow up reminders to encourage responses. If you send out e-mail invitations, make certain to use BCC (blind copy) field in your e-mail for all of addresses. You can reinforce confidentiality by keeping all of your audience from knowing who else has received invitation.

Receive and analyze your results. Unless you have chosen a user-friendly program, this may be most complex and frustrating aspect of your research program. As mentioned earlier, graphing results will be very useful in analyzing and presenting them. Conclusion

With current, accurate data at your fingertips, you can make winning decisions about programs that you implement. Using tactical surveys regularly allows you to adjust your messages and strategies quickly to meet a changing market. You can know who your customers are, what their needs are and whether your company is meeting them – and you can show objective data to your colleagues to support important decisions you need to make every day.

Advertising and Promotion Budget - Resist urge to cut A & P budget. Don't throw your money away on any advertising or promotions that can't be tracked and evaluated as to direct revenue produced. Do use your budget to keep your frequent guests in your franchise loyalty programs close to you. Build in value adds to keep them from going down street. Advertise only in vehicles proven to be effective - if an ad rep comes to you, make them show you their numbers, results produced for other clients in industry.

Sales and Marketing Staff -- Resist urge to cut sales staff. Recruit additional staff from competitor down street who's stealing your accounts. Train them - remember, many sales people for last ten years have been answering phone. Train them to prospect and sell, then reward them with incentives.

Customer Service -- Now more than ever, focus on GSAs and their customer service skills. Train your managers and supervisors to train them on nuts and bolts of delivering good customer service. We have been cavalier about our customer service during period of time when demand was high. Who cared if we alienated a few guests - there were plenty more waiting to get in. Going extra mile was exception rather than rule.

The NYC police and firefighters have offered us a hard lesson and a wake-up call - extra mile is only one that matters.

It is time to get back to our 'core competencies' in hotel industry. As Carol Walter and Mark Haley alluded in their article of September 14 in Hotel-Online, we have become asset managers, real estate brokers and statisticians. While all of above have their role and none of us intentionally operate non-profit organizations, we have lost our focus.

It is no longer 'build it and they will come' -- it is now how do we locate potential guests in a contracting market, how do we persuade them to come to our hotels rather than competition and once there, how do we keep them coming back? If we accomplish above with skill and a motive of providing hospitality -- guests and revenue will follow. A very wise and prominent man in our industry, Bob Alter, President of Sunstone Hotels once said, "It is easy to bring dollars to bottom line when you have them coming in on top line." This should be self-evident but is it truly sales and customer service that drives your hotels?