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Emotion is the new frontier in guest experience research and management. Resorts, and businesses of all types, succeed best when they establish an emotional connection with their customers. While it is not easy to quantify emotions, it is possible to identify measurable attributes that contribute to a guest’s emotional engagement with your ski area. And that means you can measure how well you are establishing a connection with your guests, and what that means for the bottom line. 

THE CASE FOR EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT

Studies conducted by neuroscientists and other researchers have found that decisions are based on emotion, and then justified with logic. Pioneering research conducted by Gerald Zaltman of Harvard University in 2003 concluded that “95 percent of thinking takes place in our unconscious minds. People use conscious thought primarily as a way to rationalize behavior.” A 2015 McKinsey study concluded that “70 percent of buying experiences are based solely on how customers feel treated.” Similarly, a 2022 Gallup study concluded that 70 percent of decisions and brand selections are based on emotion, and 30 percent on rational factors.

Given the role of emotion in buying decisions, why do we in the ski industry not measure emotion in our surveys? After all, skiing is a very emotional sport. One reason, perhaps, is because emotion research is a new frontier, and it is not well understood. A second reason is that it is more difficult to survey unconscious feelings. A third reason is the challenge of determining how to measure emotional engagement.

But all this is changing. We believe that we can start measuring emotional engagement through the Net Promoter Score—in part because emotional engagement is closely aligned with loyalty, and we know how to measure that. 

Loyalty, a key driver of repeat and referral business, and thus a driver of improved business results, is an outcome of two factors: satisfaction with past experiences, and an emotional connection with a business. Source: Guest Research, Inc.

UNDERSTANDING NPS

When Fred Reichheld introduced the Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article titled, “The One Number You Need to Grow,” it was revolutionary. Based on research conducted by Satmetrix Systems, Reichheld discovered that “likelihood to recommend” is the best predictor of customer loyalty and top-line sales growth. Almost immediately, NPS scores became the metric to measure.

Since then, Net Promoter Score has evolved into a Net Promoter System, and NPS has been adopted worldwide by organizations of all sizes and types. It is today the most popular metric used to measure customer experience, according to research from CustomerThink. 

The Net Promoter System scores and categorizes guests’ degree of loyalty into Promoters (those who are satisfied and loyal), Passives (those who are satisfied but not loyal) and Detractors (those who are dissatisfied and often vocally negative). The Net Promoter Score itself is determined by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

The system then encourages users to focus on increasing the percentage of Promoters and decreasing the percentage of Detractors. Achieving this generates an increase in repeat and referral business, which typically contribute 70 percent or more of a ski resort’s revenues. This is because Promoters return and ski with you more often, spend more per visit, are more accepting of price increases, cost less to service, provide more positive word of mouth, and write more positive online reviews. And what differentiates Promoters from Passives, who seem ripe for conversion? Emotional engagement.

NPS focuses attention on Promoters because satisfaction, by itself, does not lead to increased visits and revenue. Loyalty is what leads to increased visits and revenue. So it’s important to distinguish between satisfaction and loyalty, the two primary guest experience metrics, and recognize how effectively measuring emotional engagement will enable us to better predict loyalty.   

SATISFACTION AND LOYALTY, A COMPLEMENTARY PAIR WITH DIFFERENT RESULTS

While the likelihood to recommend has proven to be a more reliable predictor of business results than satisfaction, we consider loyalty a complement to, not a replacement for, visit satisfaction. Each metric has a very important, but very different, role in measuring the guest experience. 

Simply stated, satisfaction measures how happy your guests are with their overall visit and with specific experiences during their most recent visit. Loyalty, on the other hand, measures their relationship with your resort. Loyalty is a good predictor of topline revenues, while satisfaction is not, Reichheld concluded.(Other important differences between the two are summarized in the graphics above and on the next page.)

These graphics illustrate differences between loyalty and satisfaction. Source for top graphic: Richard Kane, The Loyalty Switch.

Satisfaction rating questions are rational, and provide the most reliable evaluation of the guest’s most recent visit experience. For example, the satisfaction attributes rated in this year’s NSAA National Guest Experience and Demographic Survey include overall values for rental experience, lesson experience, quality of grooming, value for price paid, food & beverage, employee service, skiing/snowboarding experience and—a welcome addition to this year’s survey—overall satisfaction with visit.

This last attribute is commonly referred to as “CSAT” (for Customer Satisfaction Score) and should be on all ski area surveys.

Ski area surveys have always been heavily weighted toward measuring satisfaction, not loyalty—despite the importance of loyalty. The only two loyalty questions on the National Guest Experience and Demographic Survey, and on most individual resort’s surveys, are “likelihood to recommend” and “likelihood to return.” While guests can be satisfied with multiple ski resorts, typically they are loyal to only one, or to a local/regional favorite and a national destination favorite.

The problem with satisfaction-heavy survey content is that satisfaction alone does not result in loyalty, and loyalty is not fully explained by likelihood to recommend and likelihood to return. What drives or determines those two attributes?

Loyalty and emotion. The answer is that loyalty requires the emotional engagement of guests, not just high satisfaction. Decades of research studies have shown this. As Skip Hyken explains in Embrace Customer Expectations: Master the Customer Hierarchy of Needs, “Satisfied customers come back until something better comes along. Loyal customers come back because they like doing business with you and have made an emotional connection with you ... every time they interact with you, they feel appreciated.”   

IMPLICATIONS TO COLLECTING GUEST FEEDBACK

The research is unanimous in confirming that strong emotional connections lead to loyalty. Research also shows the importance of loyalty to business results. So, what questions do we pose to measure emotional engagement? It is critical to figure this out. Emotional engagement is the differentiator between Promoters and Passives, and Promoters are the key to brand health and profitability.

How do you get started? Perhaps the way we at Guest Research did: using trial and error and statistical correlation analysis. Identify attributes at your resort that you think might explain emotional engagement, add them as questions to your survey, and use correlation analysis to determine which are the strongest drivers of likelihood to recommend and overall satisfaction with the visit, the two most important outcomes. Keep those attributes that are highly correlated, and discontinue using those that are not.

To help you think about what attributes to survey, here are some we have tested during the last eight years that might help you better understand emotion and the loyalty of your guests:

• Level of fun 
• Family appeal 
• Most memorable experience
• “The resort values me as a guest” 
• “I feel a sense of loyalty to the resort” 
• Recommended in past 12 months 

We prefer to ask a mix of rating (e.g., level of fun), agreement (e.g., “I feel a sense of loyalty to the resort”), and open-end (e.g., most memorable experience) questions. These types of questions measure different things, and all have provided good insights regarding emotional connection. 

Once the emotional drivers are identified, the next step is to determine what actions you can take to strengthen them. 

Welcome to the new frontier!

Net Promoter and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.