Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park has seen people camping there since 1903. The holiday park’s popularity has been due to the amazing location in an elevated position overlooking the Tasman Sea, giving outstanding sunsets in the west, paired with the exceptional customer service that visitors receive while staying there. 

We recently caught up with Anna Crawford, Director of Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park to chat about the key role customer feedback plays in the business — validating that they’re providing 5-star service to their guests and driving continuous business improvement. 

Why gather customer feedback? 

“Excellence is one of our company's core values and we rely on guest feedback to help measure how well we are living this value and achieving excellence in the eyes of our customers. 

Customer feedback is not just important to us in terms of confirming where we are doing well but also where we can improve. 

We also use feedback to keep up with trends and any changing customer preferences. And of course, we use customer feedback to promote our business and encourage new customers to choose us.”

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Your NPS over the last 90 days is 83, which is outstanding. With an NPS so high, why keep asking for feedback?

“We are not perfect and we really want to hear about the times we didn’t meet expectations so that we can improve.  Also, we need to know what guests are experiencing to identify if there are some trends e.g. standards slipping etc. In an industry with seasonal staff, it can be hard to maintain high standards and that is where real-time feedback is very useful.”

Using customer feedback to be a better business

“We use our customer feedback scores, NPS and online reviews scores to measure and report against KPI’s. We have a target of 9/10 for monthly average online review scores. For NPS, we don’t currently have a set target but personally, I like to be able to maintain 80 or above.

We use specific customer feedback to populate our continuous improvement and ‘quick fixes’ work programmes.”  Here’s a glimpse at some of the questions set up in the Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park survey, designed to get constructive feedback:

“For what reasons did you choose Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park?”

“What, in particular, did you like about Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park?”

“And what might have made your experience more enjoyable?”

“We’ve used analysis of customer feedback to help build business cases for capital improvements and to assist with decision making, in terms of the urgency and priority of projects already identified (such as wifi or facility building upgrades).”

You’ve used customer survey platforms for a while. Why did you move to Yonder?

“Yonder was attractive as it provided solutions to a number of frustrations we were experiencing including having no visibility to what booking the feedback related to. For example, we would receive a comment about a bed but we had no way of knowing which unit the comment was related to. We’d also received many comments about cleanliness (mostly positive) but had no way of knowing if these were related more to the facility buildings (i.e. feedback from campers) or the units. 

Yonder integrates with our reservation system, Seekom, which means every survey is automatically sent out after a stay and linked back to a booking.  That means we can see at a glance all relevant details about their stay, like which room they were in. 

The ability to see reviews across other platforms such as Google and Facebook all within Yonder was also very attractive.”

What have you enjoyed about Yonder since you started using it? 

“We like being able to see the feedback live, and knowing the full background of each response is such a game changer for us when it comes to making improvements and following up on any problems.

Because Yonder is used every day by the reception team for conversations, the team now looks at the feedback regularly — it’s no longer something we just talk about at team meetings. 

We’ve noticed a big increase in response rate, it was a big wow for us. We didn’t realise how important the look and feel of the survey emails are and that the design influences how likely people are to do the survey. We love that Yonder has been designed with user ease at the forefront. ” 

Belt Road’s response rate for the last 6 months is 41% on average, which is huge! That’s over 25 guests providing feedback per week.  

“The ‘heard by staff’ field in Yonder is also great — it allows us to input comments from our paper in-room surveys that we still get a handful of each week. This means that all our feedback is in one place, and also means we have gone away from using an excel spreadsheet for this. 

For the first time this year, we will be using Yonder at our Council KPI review instead of spreadsheets!”

Your previous system incentivised responses with a voucher, how do your results with Yonder compare with the results you generated from that campaign? 

“The response rate is just as high, if not higher. That’s pretty significant because we no longer need to give out the monthly voucher prizes!”

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About Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park & Motels

With a superb elevated seaside location, Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park has amazing views of the Tasman Sea and Port Taranaki. Offering a great range of modern accommodation in New Plymouth, including motels, studios and cabins, as well as powered and non-powered sites. Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park is just 1.5km from the CBD and only a short walk along the Coastal Walkway from cafes, restaurants, pools, Breakwater Bay and plenty of other free activities. Rest, relax and rejuvenate at Belt Road Seaside Holiday Park.