UniFocus Tool To Tally Satisfaction

A new online attendee satisfaction tool promises to give meeting planners an extensive appraisal of citywide hotel performances in a variety of categories and offer hoteliers comprehensive benchmarks of their abilities to attract and retain corporate meeting business.

The tool, MeetingScope, is being beta tested by its developer, Carrolton, Texas-based hospitality performance management firm UniFocus, in a handful of hotels, with a wide release scheduled for year-end. The tool, powered by E-Perception Technologies of Temecula, Calif., was designed to enable hoteliers to solicit immediate feedback, not only post-event but before and during meetings.

Meeting buyers will have limited access to those results, but not on the single-property level. UniFocus will provide aggregate information compiled from no less than five hotels in a single city. "Planners can have a look at cities' performances, as more and more meetings are regional and broader-based," said UniFocus president and CEO Mark Heymann.

The product is designed for hotels seeking a higher level of customer relationship management and sales management analysis, Heymann said. MeetingScope can create a profile of every single meeting that is booked at a given property. From there, convention services or sales managers can solicit online surveys from meeting attendees before the meeting, to gauge their expectations of the hotel, and during the meeting, to monitor how those expectations are being fulfilled and have the opportunity to redress the situation, if warranted. The product also offers more traditional post-event surveys, inviting attendees to critique the hotel's performance.

"The pre-event surveys function as checklists for the hotel, and the mid-meeting survey highlights whether attendees are satisfied and whether there are problems," Heymann said. "The post-meeting survey allows hotels to benchmark their performances with other meetings held at the hotel." UniFocus will compile responses, and hotels will be able to access that database to gauge their performance with other hotels in the region and their competitors.

Planners will not have the ability to see such performance analyses broken down to the property level. But, Heymann said, those planners booking at hotels using MeetingScope will have another method with which to register rectifiable complaints. "If the hotel understands the demands of the meeting planners and attendees, it gets into the broader concept of customer relationship management," Heymann said.

Hotels will be able to cross-reference their sales efforts as well. Heymann said, "The hotel can determine the success rate of the salesperson versus the skill of the planner."