PhocusWright – Day 2 Report: Blogging & Customer Experience

On day 2, after a beautiful run in 70-degree sunny weather to start the day, I had the oppty to attend a few interesting sessions as well as meet many leaders in the travel industry.  Two of the sessions I attended were about Blogging and about Customer Experience.  Way too much info to give you a detailed summary, but here are some key points I took notes on and apply to online vacation home rentals:

Blogging.  Couple of takeaways that I thought might be useful to you.

• When creating, or starting, or continuing  a blog, these are the critical questions to ask:
       Why are you blogging?
       Who is your audience?
       What value are you delivering? (you cannot use this as a promotional tool)

New 'online tools' that were discussed were Facebook and Twitter.  Honestly, no one could come up with a compelling use of Twitter.  As cool and as fun as it may be.

Be significant, meaningful, less data and more structured information.

Customer Experience:  Some interesting notes.

In the past year, 9 out of 10 online customers experiences problems shopping online.
41% of those abandoned the website right away.
47% of those attempted to contact the website company for help.
       Only 50% of those 47% were able to resolve their issues.  (75% of these will never return to the site)

80% will share their negative experience.  58% sharing online and 80% sharing offline.

More to come from LA.  Stay tuned.

Ralf