Why Every Hotel Needs to Measure Its Digital Customer Relationship (and How to Do It)

“I know that I know nothing”: The great vagueness of performance in hotel customer relations

You know your occupancy rate, you track your RevPAR down to the last decimal point, and you’re maintaining your staffing costs. These are concrete numbers, established metrics, shared by an entire industry. But when the conversation shifts to performance of your customer relationship, the image suddenly becomes more blurred.

For many hoteliers, the prevailing sentiment bears a striking resemblance to the famous phrase attributed to Socrates and popularised by Jean Gabin’s french song: “Now I know that I know nothing.”

This is the heart of the current problem and the initial observation : Today, there is no standard for evaluating the quality of a digital customer relationship in the hotel industry.

Without this common frame of reference, you are assailed by questions without real answers:

• Is your customer engagement on communications a resounding success or a dismal failure?
• Do you communicate enough with them?
• Is your satisfaction rate competitive or does it put you at the back of the pack?

Each hotelier finds themselves isolated with their own data, in an ocean of contextless figures. Hotel management is then done by instinct, and we rely on “best practices” that are often outdated or unsuitable for our own clientele, hoping to do the best we can. This total lack of benchmarking creates an anti-strategic “artistic vagueness.” It prevents us from prioritising actions, justifying investments, and, above all, knowing whether the considerable efforts made daily are truly bearing fruit. You’re in the action, but without any real performance measurement.

 

The Trap of Traditional Metrics: Why NPS and CSAT Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Faced with this concrete need for measurement, the first instinct is to turn to the tools we know. Net Promoter Score(NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score(CSAT) are pillars of customer listening. These are not bad indicators, far from it. They are essential for taking the “pulse” of satisfaction in your hotel.

However, to assess the performance of your digital customer relations, they are like a thermometer that one would use to measure a distance. The tool is good, but the use is inappropriate. It measures a consequence, not the cause of the performance.

The NPS: The flattering but incomplete mirror

The NPS, with its famous question “Would you recommend our hotel?”, measures an overall, post-experience sentiment. It’s a snapshot of your guest’s state of mind at the time of their departure.

• Let’s take a concrete example: A couple spends an idyllic weekend at your place. The room is beautiful, the staff charming and the restaurant meal excellent. They are delighted and give you an NPS score of 9/10. They are classified as “Promoters.” This is great !
• What the NPS doesn’t tell you: This score confirms satisfaction, but it does not answer any strategic questions. Do you really have maximised the experience and potential income of this “promoter” guest through your best practices? Or have you missed crucial opportunities?

The CSAT: The useful but reductive score

CSAT goes further. It measures satisfaction at a specific touchpoint: “Are you satisfied with the cleanliness of your room?” or “Rate your check-in experience.” This is very useful for identifying a point of friction.

• Let’s imagine this scenario: Your CSAT score for “concierge service” is consistently low (3/5). Your first instinct is to review the reception process, retrain your teams, and think of a human or organisational problem behind this score.
• The root cause, often invisible: An analysis could reveal that the real cause is digital. You don’t have an online pre-stay form to allow your guests to anticipate their needs, or even digital concierge information. So your guests all arrive at reception, prioritising arrival procedures over questions about their own stay.

In short, relying solely on NPS and CSAT is like asking a guest at checkout: “So, how was your stay?” These indicators judge the initial picture, not the quality of the journey taken to get there.

 

Towards the foundations of a new indicator: The pillars of a successful digital customer relationship

If we wanted to create a digital performance indicator dedicated to the hotel sector, what should it measure? It should analyse the entire communication lifecycle and rest on several fundamental pillars:

1. Data capture: The hotel’s ability to obtain direct contact information and preferences from its guests, including those from OTAs.
2. Frequency of contacts: The art of communicating at the right time, neither too much nor too little, so that the customer feels expected and considered.
3. Customer engagement: The real test. Do customers open the messages? Do they read the content? Do they click on the links? This is the measure of the relevance of your communication.
4. Satisfaction measured: Direct feedback from customers on their experience, collected through effective surveys.
5. Active e-reputation: The ability to transform satisfaction into positive and public reviews on the platforms that matter (Google, TripAdvisor, etc.).
6. The post-stay relationship: The ability to maintain a lasting, non-intrusive connection to encourage loyalty.

Analysing its performance on these axes would finally make it possible to have a 360° vision and to know more precisely where to act.

XPS the comparison of best practices in hotel digital performance

This need for a global and relevant indicator has led to the creation of new standards such as Experience Performance Score (XPS).

Its approach is innovative because it doesn’t just give you your own statistics. XPS compares your hotel’s performance with the good and bad practices of other hotels.

Thanks to an easy grade (from A for excellence, to E for an improvement to be quickly considered) on each of the 6 pillars seen previously, you obtain an instant diagnosis of your strengths and weaknesses, not in absolute terms, but in relation to the hospitality sector.

Concretely, what is the point of measuring your digital customer relationship?

Managing your strategy with an indicator like XPS unlocks several growth levers:

• Revealing hidden income potential: By identifying that your “Engagement” criterion is rated “D,” you understand, for example, that your upsell offers are probably not engaging. By reworking them, you can increase the return rate by a few points. These few points, over hundreds of stays, can turn into thousands of euros of additional revenue over the year.
• Make decisions based on facts: No more debating what works. By analysing your performance, you have tangible data to make decisions and build an effective customer relationship strategy.
• Align teams and objectives: For a hotel group, a standardised score makes it possible to compare the performance of different hotels, to share the best practices of the hotel rated “A” in e-reputation, and to support the one rated “E” in data capture.