Whitbread: “Customer feedback is only useful if it is being listened to”

An interview with the winners of the Best Use of Customer Insight award

In November 2023, we held our annual Engage Awards ceremony, recognising those who have implemented outstanding customer engagement strategies.

Whitbread, leading hospitality business and owner of Premier Inn, won the Best Use of Customer Insight award after working with Ipsos, market research and consulting firm, on their transformative Room of the Future project.

In an interview, Whitbread's Customer Experience Lead Katy Jess has now revealed how they brought the voice of the customer into their room design approach and how you too can use customer insight to enhance your CX.

CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING THE BEST USE OF CUSTOMER INSIGHT AWARD ALONGSIDE IPSOS AT THE 2023 ENGAGE AWARDS. COULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE THE ROOM OF THE FUTURE PROJECT?

Premier Inn is the UK market leader in budget hotels with an ambitious programme of investment to grow further.

Whitbread invests a huge amount in updating rooms every few years, rolling out new formats across over 800 hotels and 82,700 rooms. Hotel room design is fundamental to our success and Room of the Future is the strategic review of our in-room offer.

We know our more recent room solutions attract higher likelihood to return, better conversion from search to booking, improved retention and better operational efficiency. That’s why this fifth-generation update was essential to retaining our market-leading position in the UK, while delivering an enhanced customer experience that we knew would be aligned to real-world needs and expectations.

HOW DID YOU BRING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER INTO YOUR ROOM DESIGN APPROACH?

Previously, designs had only been generated by internal product teams working with design agencies.

This time, we entrusted Ipsos to help us understand what customers really wanted and expected from the next Room of the Future. We deployed a multi-method approach into this huge and strategic piece of work, blending research techniques never used together in a single project before. This included research in and outside of sector and methodologies including semiotics, trends and futures analysis, in depth qual, workshopping and trade-off analysis.

The investment in this project is so significant and has a direct impact on future revenues so there is no margin for error. The range of techniques allowed us to explore customer needs authentically and then quantify these into a set of validated concepts.

Working with Ipsos gave the research credibility and insights were packed up ready for activation. Katherine Roe, Senior Manager, Insight said:

“This was an exciting project with Ipsos to design the hotel room of the future. This piece integrated a whole host of interesting methodologies, delivered effectively, and sufficiently early in the development process, to truly drive change.”

THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT CUSTOMERS WERE SO HEAVILY INVOLVED IN SHAPING THE DESIGN OF PREMIER INN ROOMS. WHAT DIFFERENCE DID THEIR INPUT MAKE?

The vision was clear – to bring the voice of the customer into the design approach. Customer input was fundamental in order to implement future-proof renovations until the next room design. We

• Looked at the direct and indirect trends affecting the future hotel room, including accommodation within travel (such as airlines and cruise ships), sleep hygiene and peak convenience.
• Combined CX and semiotics to decode the environments presented by Premier Inn and competitor hotels, looking at materials, colours and sensorials, and the impact on guest experience.
• Created six opportunity spaces – trends, customer stories, needs, semiotics, expectations and gaps in current CX delivery – which we used as a springboard for ideas to test further.

Insights were brought together and we workshopped room features, using posters and movable Velcro icons to create ideal room designs that were sketched on the spot by a designer. Using their simulation modelling, Ipsos provided an estimated ROI for each feature combination, enabling us to compare options and benefits.

The impact of bringing customers into the heart of in-room design has been seismic and we are already seeing fantastic ROI from the refurbished sites, including increased overall satisfaction and value for money scores.

And our customers are telling us:

“We found the London Excel Premier Inn was probably the best we have stayed in. Our room had obviously been recently renovated to a high standard.”

“We stayed in an upgraded room and it was a very pleasant surprise!... The new bathroom was extra nice, gone was the bath and in place was a very powerful waterfall shower!... The proper round table and chairs where you can sit and eat was a very nice touch and so was the upgraded bigger hairdryer. We stay in Premier Inn 4-5 times a year and definitely the upgrade is excellent.”

FINALLY, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO OTHER BRANDS SEEKING TO MAKE BETTER USE OF CUSTOMER INSIGHT?

There are three key pieces of advice I would pass on:

1. Customer feedback is only useful if it’s being listened to and underlying trends are being understood. It’s important to ensure customer insight is made available to all those in the organisation that need to see it. Make your VoC platform accessible with tailored dashboards to different user groups, invite stakeholders to participate in research forums with customers, ensure findings are spread as widely as possible and in appropriate format for different stakeholder audiences.
2. Make use of all sources of customer insight that you have at your disposal to understand the overall picture. Don’t shy away from ‘big data’ like booking or transactional data but use it in conjunction with qualitative research to find out the ‘whys’. And don’t forget about customer insight projects from the archives. There can still be value in returning to findings from a couple of years ago.
3. Lastly, don’t be afraid to be bold and try new methodologies! As we did with the Room of the Future project, work with your agency to design research projects that customers and stakeholders are excited to be part of.

Entries for the 2024 Engage Awards will open on the 1st of February.

Learn more about the Engage Awards here.