Announcing Ratings and Reviews for iBooking Ticket

Have you ever considered collecting feedback from your customers? I’m sure you have. Maybe you’ve done this occasionally with ad-hoc surveys, either using old fashioned paper or personal methods. It’s always insightful to find out what your customers think about your business or the tour, transfer or journey they may have completed with your company. There are some great online survey tools around that make it relatively easy to contact your customers and ask for their opinion. For example, tools we have used include Survey Monkey – http://www.surveymonkey.com and Survey Planet – https://surveyplanet.com/. These tools are great – they allow you to take your past customer list, use some simple, copy and paste type tools, push send, and then wait for the feedback. It sounds easy, but there’s a drawback, actually, there are a few drawbacks. These tools are manual. They require you to find the time to generate and import a customer list, design your survey, and process the results. What do you do with the results? However you use them, the process is cumbersome, and if you want to share a customers feedback with your web-site, that’s a whole new headache to worry about.

Why think about Ratings and Reviews?
In the age of social media, customer opinion can make or break your business. One bad review on TripAdvisor can put off more potential customers than you may ever know about. Taking the time to maintain your profile and reputation on review sites like TripAdvisor is part of the game for any travel or tour business operating online. One of the problems with TripAdvisor is that you don’t always know that a review is being posted by a real customer. It probably is, but do you really want to spend time checking a customer name on TripAdvisor against your own customer list? Verified reviews are reviews submitted by real, paying customers. Those are the valuable reviews. The ones you need to pay attention to, respond to, and use to improve your product or service. At iBooking we decided it was time to make the process of collecting and sharing ratings and reviews easier. We already build a dynamic customer database as you process bookings from all sources. We’ve created a really simple, yet powerful, ratings and reviews tool. Here’s how it works.

New in your Admin Area
Very soon, you will see a new section in your admin area. It looks like this;

These are the settings that allow you to control how Ratings and Reviews are collected and shared. We’ve tried to design this feature to make it as hands-free as possible. It’s all about setting-and-forgetting, to ensure you start generating reviews on auto-pilot. The feature can be switched on or off at any time with the Status drop-down. You can also specify how many days after your customer has used your service to send the invitation email. This email asks your customer to submit their Rating and Review. The link in the email takes them to a simple 2 step form where they can submit their feedback in minutes. The will then trigger a notification back to you so you can monitor user feedback.

You can choose to survey all of your customers each day, or set a maximum number. This is useful if you have a very active account with hundreds of bookings per day. We’ve also added another time saver called Auto-Publish. What this does is allows you to specify that a rating and review will be published immediately without you needing to approve it. When published, the rating and review will be added to your booking engine and made available for other customers to read. We’ll show you in a moment what that looks like.

Next, you can specify up to 5 parameters to survey. These will then be presented to your customer to add a rating from 1-5. We aggregate all of the scores to give your business an overall average score.

On the Reviews screen you can see all of your customer reviews in order of submission. From here you can Publish a review [if you are not using Auto-Publish]. Edit a Review, or Delete a Review. Every review and rating provided has been submitted by a customer and is checked against the customer record for each booking.

What Happens Next?
Now that your customer has submitted a rating and review what do we do with it? We add value to your booking engine by publishing a score for your customers to see. It is an aggregate of all the reviews you choose to publish. In other words, the score is not calculated based on any reviews or ratings you choose not to publish. When a rating and review is published it will appear live on your booking engine behind the link labelled “Verified Customer Reviews”.

Get Started
That’s it in a nutshell. A complete solution for ratings and reviews that automates the process from start to finish. Now, there is no excuse not to survey your customers on a daily basis. You will soon start to receive email notifications letting you know that you have a new review. These will look something like this;

We hope you find this a useful addition to your iBooking Ticket account. Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.