A company is nothing without the people behind it, and one of the people behind the world-class and award-winning support that GuestRevu offers is Tersia Luies.
From support member to management, Tersia has grown with GuestRevu, and helped us to grow in return over the past four years. She is the familiar, always-friendly voice that clients come across when they have any questions, queries or qualms about their guest feedback and online reputation management solutions. Sales guru, Amy Branford, chatted to her recently about her role at GuestRevu, the importance of monitoring and managing your feedback, what makes us stand out from the crowd, and more.
Video transcript:
Yeah, sure. So, I work in the South African office and I've been here for about four years now, absolutely love the company. I found out about the job online. I was job hunting at the time, and as soon as I saw it, I knew this was exactly the thing for me, and I went for it, and here I am.
Yeah — four. Four years, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Love it, and I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else.
My favorite bit about GuestRevu is the people and the culture, honestly. Just, like, people like yourself, you know. Everyone makes the day so much easier, when you get into the office and you know everyone is just wonderful, and we all treat each other a bit like a family.
Yeah, I've had a lot of moments. I honestly can't think of any one in particular right now, but at the end of the day, just making a client's day easier, making their job easier, is what keeps me going through the day and really makes it all worth it in support.
“Everyone makes the day so much easier, when you get into the office and you know everyone is just wonderful, and we all treat each other a bit like a family.”
My most frequently asked question is, "How should I respond to my reviews?" If you had a negative review, "What should I say?" You know, from my experience, my suggestion there is to talk to the guests, and just understand what was actually wrong, and hopefully even try and fix the problem. If you just leave them, and you don't respond, or you don't do anything, then there's no chance in them ever coming back. They're just going to think that you don't care about them. That's why I think it's particularly important to always be monitoring and managing your feedback. Continuously. Day by day if you can. Because it really makes a huge difference to your hotel and how people perceive your hotel.
So our TripAdvisor integration actually works great for our clients. From what we've found, it has a 200 to 300 percent increase actually for the number of reviews that you end of getting online, and that makes a big difference in your ranking especially, and hopefully they'll push more people to the book button with your hotel. We've got Platinum Partnership, which we're all very proud of, and it just makes it very easy for guests to leave reviews on the TripAdvisor page.
Yeah. Actually that's true. We also see a better average review rating that gets pushed through onto TripAdvisor. What we find why that is, is because we ask every one of your guests, so you end up getting a bigger amount of people leaving reviews online, instead of before, where it was only the very happy guests, or the unhappy guests that went online. That's how we just ensure that you get a much better average review rating online.
“I think it's particularly important to always be monitoring and managing your feedback. Continuously. Day by day if you can.”
I think one of the biggest things that makes us stand out from our competitors is our customer support, and the way that we just speak to our clients and help them with their problems. It's not just about getting them onboarded and, you know, just them using GuestRevu. It's about helping them and making sure that the product is actually delivering them value and making a difference in their lives. And, apart from that, there's other reasons, like the contracts — we don't have a binding contract — and also we don't charge for our support. It's free of charge. We don't charge for training, so if you ever needed training on the application, you can just pop the support team an email, and we'll schedule it with you without any costs involved. I think that just really makes us stand out from our competitors, because we really care about our customers and your success.
Yeah, sure. I'll give you some small details that we can give. So it's very exciting. Our development team, and everyone, has been working incredibly hard to get this out to our clients. We've made massive improvements with our usability, our mobile friendliness, and also some cool things that we've added that you should look out for is service tickets, and multiple questionnaires, and also multi-language. But that's just some small things. There's lots more to come, and just keep an eye out for it.
“It's about helping them and making sure that the product is actually delivering them value and making a difference in their lives… I think that just really makes us stand out from our competitors, because we really care about our customers and your success.”
Service tickets is basically a bit like a task manager. It lets you keep on top of the things that you need to fix at the hotel, or do at the hotel. Like, if the guest has given you a little suggestion, or anything along those lines, you can create a task and give it to one of your staff members to follow up on. And then that's just a very good way to communicate with your team.
Thank you, Amy, for the time.