Holiday Inn Looks to Retail Eyes To Be Its Ears

MILTON KEYNES, 21 July 2007 – Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) has appointed Retail Eyes, the UK’s fastest growing customer service evaluation company, to carry out mystery calls at its 64 Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels in the UK.

Retail Eyes has developed a new approach specifically for Holiday Inn and will see calls being made to all 64 hotels on a monthly basis in order to assess how information requests are handled by the meetings and events teams.

Utilising Retail Eyes’ unique technology, mystery callers will call the hotels to make an enquiry regarding booking a meeting room or conference event. The mystery callers will comment about how the call was handled, what information was provided and how they were made to feel.

The mystery caller will then complete a report online about their experience which is then uploaded in real time to a dedicated Holiday Inn reporting website where it will sit alongside an MP3 recording of the call, allowing hotel managers to listen to the call while reading the report in order to get an understanding about how the customer felt.

Richard Bousfield, IHG’s Vice President Hotel Sales for UK and Ireland, commented, “We are delighted to be working with Retail Eyes. Meetings business is very important to us and we have excellent training programmes in place for our conference teams at all of our hotels. It is important to us to have a robust measurement system in place to ensure we deliver a consistently high level of service across our estate, and Retail Eyes will help us with that measurement.”

Speaking on news of the appointment, Jeremy Michael, Commercial Director at Retail Eyes, said, “We are both proud and delighted to be working with IHG and are looking forward to providing the company with a great insight about how its customers are being treated and identify where improvements can be made.”

Michael went on to add, “When a hotel receives a telephone enquiry, the person at the other end has an unknown value; they may be someone wanting to book one room for one night or they may want to organise an event with a budget of £25,000 and the first impression they will receive is when they call a hotel for information. How this initial contact is handled can not only cost or gain a hotel a significant amount of revenue, but impact the hotel’s reputation.”

About Retail Eyes

Retail Eyes is the UK’s fastest growing customer service evaluation business and employs over 50 staff from its UK offices in Milton Keynes. Retail Eyes deploys world beating technology and an innovative approach to deliver customer service evaluation and business development programmes to clients in a variety of sectors. Clients include Virgin, O2 (UK), Choice Hotels, Spirit Group, Charles Wells, Red Bull, William Hill, WH Smith, SUBWAY™, Alliance Pharmacy and HMV. For more information, visit www.retaileyes.co.uk.

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