What are the issues?
We serve 9 million customers every month in our 1,800 outlets in the UK. We want each of those 9 million customers to have the best possible experience with us. An important part of that is making them feel confident that we, and therefore they, by choosing to eat, sleep or drink Whitbread, are doing the right thing by people and by the planet.
We want to tell our customers about Good Together and to take them with us on our corporate responsibility journey. To do this well we needed to better understand how our customer currently experience our Good Together activities and what they really want from us.
Gaining customer insights
Our ambition is to build the best large-scale hospitality brands in the world by becoming the most customer focused organisation there is. Anywhere. We therefore place significant emphasis on gaining customer insights into our performance.
In the last fiscal year we have developed three key initiatives around our guests and our Good Together programme. Improving our insight into customer attitudes to corporate responsibility issues through our customer surveys, engaging an expert stakeholder panel to evaluate the current guest experience and integrating Good Together into our Brand Standards.
Measuring guest attitudes to Corporate Responsibility
In our Hotels & Restaurants business, we run a customer satisfaction survey, which we call Guest Recommend. Every year this is completed by about half a million hotel guests and about 130,000 restaurant visitors. This makes it one of the largest customer surveys in Europe. Costa surveys approximately 25,000 of its customers in a rolling monthly survey conducted for us by YouGov.
Since March 2009 we have been measuring how guests think we perform on corporate responsibility. We ask two key questions, one to rate our environmental performance and one to rate our social and ethical performance. We also ask about ten per cent of our guests 12 supplementary questions about their attitudes to different corporate responsibility topics such as healthy food, waste and recycling or our charitable contributions. We are able to change the supplementary questions month on month and so see customers' reactions to piloted initiatives in real time. All in all, we had about 330,000 responses to questions on these topics in the fiscal year.
This provides us with a robust survey on what our guests are thinking and, as we roll out Good Together, it creates a solid tracking tool so we can see how our guests' views change over time.
What have we learnt?
Our survey results tell us that a key challenge is to improve the way that we communicate to our customers about our Good Together activity as 40% of customers are currently unaware of our activity in this area. During the last year:
- 68% of our hotels and restaurants customers told us that they are concerned or very concerned about the environment and climate change. This is an increase from 63% for Premier Inn and 59% for restaurants in the surveys that we completed in 2008 when we were developing our Good Together strategy.
- 81% of customers say it is important or extremely important to have healthy eating options available on our menu.
- 55% of our customers tell us they are concerned personally about ethical and social issues for example participating in the local community, charitable projects and ethically produced products.
Reviewing our guest experience
In November 2009, we started a project to further deepen our understanding of our guests' experience of Good Together and how we can improve. The review process covered both hotels and restaurants and our Costa stores so we created a review steering group that included senior representatives from across the two business units.
Independent process
We wanted to be challenged and to see our brands from a fresh perspective, so we thought it made sense to invite external experts to come and give us their views. We appointed hospitality industry and sustainability experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers to design an assessment and feedback process and coordinate the project. We then convened a diverse panel of experts to conduct the review.
The panel included senior representatives and sustainable hospitality experts from:
- Sleepwell Consultancy
- Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF)
- International Centre for Responsible Tourism, Leeds Metropolitan University
- PricewaterhouseCoopers
- Visit England
- Grayling (Communications agency)
Four stages to the review
There were four stages to the review process:
- Desktop review - Review of our Brand Standards and other related documents.
- Panel visits to our sites - During the month of March 2010, our panellists visited ten hotels, ten restaurants and eight coffee shops as mystery customers, then met the manager and housekeeping teams and saw how we operated behind the scenes.
- Panel and Steering Group workshop - The panellists were asked to record and feedback their observations on how we performed from a corporate responsibility perspective and how well we communicated what we are doing to the customer. Their views were shared with the steering group at a day's workshop.
- Report, recommendations and implementation - On receiving the final report from the panel review process, we are working internally during 2010 to communicate what we have learnt to our leadership and operational teams and to develop our own action plans for how we can implement the recommendations we have received.
Reviewing Brand Standards
In order to give our guests the best possible experience and to make it consistent across all our sites, we created our Brand Standards. Born out of what our guest research has told us over the years, this is a comprehensive manual where we plot each stage of our 'guest journey' and detail the service and standards that must be delivered at each point. For example, we detail how the receptionist greets a hotel guest on arrival, what the housekeeper uses to clean the room and how we serve breakfast.
Customer insights from Guest Recommend feeds into the Brand Standards and the standards are audited twice a year. An external company visits our sites and runs through an extensive checklist, assessing how well we are following the standards at that site. Each site's score goes on the General Manager's WINcard (that is our internal key performance indicator balanced scorecard against which every site, region and brand is measured). Brand Standards audit scores are an important key measure on the WINcard against which General Managers are rewarded financially at the year end.
One of the important results of our Guest Journey review will be to revise our Brand Standards to incorporate the environmental and social standards and activities that are fundamental to our Good Together programme and to our guests' experience of Good Together. We will be working to do this during 2010 to complement our Good Together education and training programmes for our teams.
Next steps
1. Brand Standards
The final guest review workshop was in March 2010. The Good Together steering group is reviewing the outputs of the review process and the Brand Standards will be revised accordingly and relaunched in September 2010.
2. Responsible Sourcing
We are also working to develop a comprehensive responsible sourcing programme. The recommendations from our panellists that are relevant to what we buy and how we buy it, will also inform this element of our Good Together programme in the coming year. Learn more about our work to date on Responsible Sourcing.
3. Communicating with guests
Implementing the feedback from the panellists should see improvements in our Good Together performance. The challenge will be how we effectively communicate that to our guests.
We are aware that people want to visit hotels, restaurants and coffee shops that are addressing corporate responsibility issues. Today however, corporate responsibility is rarely the main factor that influences guests and customers on which hotel, which restaurant or which coffee shop they want to choose. We believe that this will change over time as there is a growing societal awareness of environmental issues in particular and retailers are responding to this by providing more and better products and information.
We currently communicate to our guests about some aspects of our Good Together programme, such as the Costa Foundation and the ways we are working to save energy in our hotels. During 2010 and beyond, we plan to do more to communicate our Corporate Responsibility messages consistently across all our brands and to tell our customers about some of our newer initiatives, such as the recyclable Costa Cup. We also want to make sure that we provide the right information at the right time, providing clear messages and making it easy for our guests to make 'greener' choices.
It is an important priority for us to do more to actively communicate and engage with our customers on our Good Together programme, so that they can become a part of our journey.
