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Bart Golub, Manager of Slot Marketing for Tropicana Las Vegas, explain how The Tropicana Las Vegas re-invigorated their Players Club by using emerging mobile data collection technology to grow their loyal customer base our On The Spot Systems' mobile survey tool.

As part of an initiative to re-market the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to younger generations to come, the Trop had to look closely at the ways that they were communicating with their target audience.

"We just began a large-scale marketing campaign on the Las Vegas Strip to drive new enrollments to the Trop Plus Players Club," said Bart Golub, Manager of Slot Marketing for the Tropicana Las Vegas. The Trop took the opportunity to look at other areas of their marketing and customer loyalty operations and decided it was also time for a much-needed facelift to the Trop Plus Players Club enrollment process.

The Trop began using the On The Spot Systems mobile survey platform in early December 2012 and have already received over 3,000 submissions for the Trop Players Club in under 4 months. 

Although Golub's responsibilities at the Trop fall under the marketing department, he has been able to see the effect that real-time data has on daily operations at the hotel and casino.

Golub noted, "Given the ability to now sort through survey results instantaneously, with On the Spot Systems, taking notice of and responding to customer trends has become quick and easy." From an operations perspective, the Trop was immediately pleased with the advanced features offered by the On The Spot Systems tool such as scheduled automated report delivery and trend reports for analyzing marketing effectiveness.

"A report is automatically sent to my inbox every morning with the prior day's aggregated survey results (one of the questions asks customers how they heard about our loyalty program), so I know right away what's driving people to our property: which marketing initiatives are working, and which may not be working as well as we'd hoped," said Goblub.

Among the programs that Golub uses the survey to monitor is the Hilton HHonors program. As a member of the Hilton alliance, the Tropicana Player's Club enrollment survey is another opportunity to assess if the hotel meeting the expectations of the HHonors members. 

The ability to react and see results in real-time was another value-added benefit of the On The Spot technology. Golub added, "Gone are the days where I'd have to wait weeks or months to realize there might be a problem, because now that information is literally at my fingertips."

The Tropicana marketing manager quickly realized that he was not the only ones impressed by the transition to a mobile automated signup process.

Golub recounts, "When we used to hand people a photocopied piece of paper and a pen, they were at worst extremely annoyed and at best mildly reluctant.

It's amazing how much more willing customers are to use an iPad, even since the questions haven't changed at all.

We now see almost no hesitation, sometimes even excitement, when our Players Club Representatives ask new customers to complete the four- to six-question survey electronically."

The Trop was also aware of some additional benefits when switching to the mobile survey tool. "Beyond the obvious cost savings in paper and toner, switching to a fully electronic system has already saved us hundreds of dollars in labor.

Before, it took dozens of employee hours each month to manually input data from our paper surveys into Excel (some questions also prompted write-in answers, which took even more time to input and later analyze). On the Spot Systems provided us with instant data aggregation and comprehensive reporting tools, immediately saving my team a significant amount of time and money," said Golub.

Thanks for this Client Testimonial Received February 2013 from Bart Golub, Manager of Slot Marketing for Tropicana Las Vegas! 

If franchisee satisfaction is, as we believe, an important indicator of future actions, the next few years could be challenging for the franchise industry. 

Future success for most franchisors is dependent on the renewal of existing franchises and the sale of new franchises. Current franchisees play an important role in this process. In addition to royalties and other payments to the franchisor, franchisees also serve as referral agents that impact on new sales. The thoughts and intentions of current franchisees is crucial intelligence for a franchisor that can aid in building their franchise network.  Franchisors can improve their operations and growth by understanding current levels of franchisee satisfaction and its impact.

Franchisees have had an exceptionally difficult year - possibly the worst of their working lives.  National Franchisee Survey respondents report that few are meeting their financial goals, seeing increased revenues/profits or would consider recommending their current franchise to a prospective franchisee.  The vast majority do not expect to be with their current franchise in five years time.  Yet a majority consider their operation to be superior to that of the competition. 

The following table shows three leading indicators that are incorporated into our National Franchisee Survey,  from 2010:

What we see is troubling. By a wide margin, surveyed franchisees report that they would not provide a positive referral to a prospective franchisee. They also report that they would not have invested in their current franchise had they known what they now know. Since overall numbers can hide crucial differences such as those between newer and older franchisees, we also look at these indicators based on years in operation. We find similar results regardless of how long a franchisee has owned the business. This suggests that current concerns have existed for an extended period of time.

When asked about future plans, only 16% of respondents anticipate doing the same thing in five years. While only 14% anticipate retirement, 70% anticipate either owning a different business or being an employee for another business. 

Should these patterns persist, many franchises will encounter significant challenges in the coming years. At the very least, a very large number of new franchisees will be needed to maintain the current infrastructure and revenues of the existing franchise networks. These new franchisees will be harder to find if current franchisees are not prepared to provide positive referrals. Some franchisors may choose to ignore these trends and could very well see a decline in their franchise network.

More enlightened franchisors will look inward to determine if the patterns we have identified are reflected within their network. Should these patterns be confirmed and reversed, short term benefits would likely include a reduction in costly internal litigation. Longer term trends would include a larger and growing franchise network plus a growing dominance within their respective industries.

QSRs and hotels have embraced the notion of customer feedback. We’re inundated by surveys, comment cards, and “tell us how we did” prompts.

The interesting thing is that all of these methods of gathering feedback produce structured data that can be (unintentionally or not) manipulated by the business. For example;

• “Please tell us how good your food was” – Manipulative because it positions the food as being “good”
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• “What other restaurants would you compare us to? Please choose” – The comparison restaurants may or may not be similar in concept or food and beverage offerings.  The business is forcing the survey respondent to  limit their answer to a pre-selected set of answers.  This type of question (multiple choice) is inherently manipulative for a survey response.
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• “Rate your experience” – This question limits what a respondent can discuss.  They may have 20 great details they wish to share, but the one negative detail will cloud their overall perception and therefore skew their score.  This is the fundamental problem with the “stars” rating system used by so many review sites.

 

By limiting the methods of response, cleverly wording questions, or simply using different types of questions, a business can “force” the responses of their customers.  Not all of this type of manipulation is bad however.  A business may have a known problem area they wish to address and can use a survey to ask specific questions about it.  They may wish to use the information to measure or track their employee performance and use quantitative scales to do so.  These are tried and tested uses of surveys that can help a business optimize their operations.

Approaches like these are valuable tools, but the one key element they struggle with is the ability to uncover what’s actually on their customer’s minds.  You may be asking about your service when your customers are really more interested in telling you about your food and beverages.  In order to best understand what a customer really wants you to know, we need to open up our options of receiving and understanding feedback.

Think about it from this example.  Which of the two methods of feedback is more valuable?  Consider that they are both commenting about the same topic, “service”, and that it is the same customer providing both methods of feedback.

• A traditional survey response rating “service” as a 1 out of a possible 10 points.
• A Facebook comment from that same customer that says “The service was fine, but the waiter spilled a water glass on my shoe!  At least they apologized about it, but c’mon!”

 

The Facebook comment explains why the customer was unhappy with thee service, but it also informs you the service the customer received appeared to be okay. These types of nuances simply cannot be ascertained from a traditional survey question and can be a critical to your evaluation of a disgruntled customer.

Over the past month alone, we have gathered and analyzed over a million customer comments posted on sites like Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Twitter for our clients.  An amazing amount of feedback that continues to see double digit growth month over month.  These are unprompted, top-of-mind comments directly from customers who ate at your restaurant, stayed at your hotel, or shopped at your store.   Just gathering and reading this feedback alone is valuable, but we take it one step further and analyze it down to individual insights that can be used to optimize your operations.

While traditional surveys have been the benchmark for guest satisfaction for many years, the smart businesses are starting to realize that using unprompted customer feedback gathered from Social Media sources can be at least, if not more valuable to their business.