Role of Customer Review Management for Hospitality Industry — Deep Diving on Kepsla(Repufact)
This article is about rising importance of customer review management for Hospitality Industry
Through this article, I have also done competitive analysis on a SaaS company — Kepsla(Repufact)
Overview of Kepsla:
- Overall Rating: 4.5/5
- Founded: 2015
- HQ: Bangalore, India
- Business Model: Online Reputation Management(ORM) for Hospitality
- Revenue Model: SaaS-based pricing, similar to its Indian counterparts Zoho, RateGain, Freshdesk
- Target Market: Hotels, OTA’s.
- Customer Details: 60+ Hotels in India, with the likes of Fortune, GRT, Pride Group.
- Key USP: Review & feedback management; and personalized recommendation platform
Timeline of Major Events in Hospitality Industry
• 1995 — Viator Systems(Now Part of TripAdvisor), launched technology business on providing bookings over the Internet.
• 1996 — Expedia(№1 OTA currently) launched its website offering online bookings for air, hotels, and car rentals.
• 1998 — Priceline launched with an Opaque pricing model.
• 1999 — Another OTA Orbitz launched. (1995–2003 was the era for OTA’s(Direct booking platforms) until TripAdvisor came in 2004)
• 2004 — TripAdvisor(Although founded in 2000) launched to build personalized recommendations platform for Hotels.
• 2004–2007 — Coming up of Travel Metasearch engines like Kayak, Wego, Ixigo. This period also saw coming up of vacation rental marketplaces led by Homeaway (Acq. by Expedia).
• 2008 — Launch of Apple App Store.
• 2008 — Launch of Airbnb — Peer-to-Peer(P2P) marketplace for backpacker and budget travelers.
• 2010 — Advent of last minute Hotel booking — HotelTonight
• 2012 — Facebook reached 1B Active users.
• 2012–2016 — Personalization with the focus on overall customer experience management.(Kepsla riding in this wave)
Driving Factors Behind Review Management(on both Earned as well as Owned Media)
- Shift from Supplier Centric to Consumer Centric Technologies: From the above timeline, there is a clear shift from supplier-centric technologies to customer-centric technologies. In the beginning, the goal was to make supply available, hence the rise of OTAs and Search Engines. But, now suppliers can directly connect to the same customers with both direct and non-direct booking options.
- Focus on harnessing User Generated Content(UGC): Consumers increasingly are preferring OTA’s, Metasearch engines, review websites while looking for Hotels. Online reviews influences behavior and decision making for consumers. There are 150+ review websites out there, which becomes very important for Hotels and OTA’s to capitalize; and leverage that as a customer service and marketing tool. Startups are also leveraging social media networks(Facebook, Twitter) for analyzing customer review and building brand loyalty.
- OTA Monopoly on the Hotel Industry: Currently due to competitive prices from OTA’s, The ARR’s of Hotels has grown drastically. Offline agents have swept out of businesses; since OTA’s sell inventory lower than the purchase price. Because of fear-of-being dropped out from OTA’s listing platform, Hotels started paying more commission to OTA’s. Statistics reveal that 75% of hotel bookings for independent hotels happen through OTAs.
- The decline in Service levels: Due to the price war among OTA’s, This industry service level declined in the past and their online reputation being damaged. Hence, the major focus of the Hospitality industry is to better manage online reputation by leveraging social media signals and looking out for solutions with Big data technology applied with semantic analysis(NLP).
- Integrated Omnichannel Experience Management: There is a shift from siloed feedback solutions to Enterprise integrated reputation management solutions. Hotels need to leverage feedback from customers while he is online, at the store or when he is on third party channel. Feedback needs to be collected at the website, mobile apps, on-site(Kiosk, SMS etc.), integrated with social media, review websites and IVR feedback; to better have a customer/guest profiling and segmentation.
- Need for Reviews Ticketing System/Helpdesk — Brands(Hotels) can’t miss out user generated content(either bad or positive). Both can be used to build personalized one-to-one communication channel. There is a need to focus on building a ticketing system(Integrated email, social media conversations, survey tools, SMS, in-kiosk, calling) to build a one-to-one personal touch on review websites.
How Players are solving Hospitality Management
• Vertical Horizontal players like Duetto Research, RateGain are providing revenue management, online channel management Solutions for Hospitality industry(Sales/Ops)
• Vertical players like Revinate, Nor1 are offering reputation management for Hotels.
• Horizontal players like Qualtrics, Medallia and Clarabridge are offering Integrated omnichannel experience management solutions.
• Upcoming Players like Alice are solving the problem of guest communication and internal collaboration inside Hotels.
• AI based Travel assistants like Lola are driving mobile messaging into the travel booking process for users.
Market Sizing(TAM)
- Customer experience is the most pressing mandate for marketers, the top area of marketing technology investment in 2014, and it will lead innovation spending for 2015.
- By 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago.
- According to Industry sources, Customer experience management, which covers(feedback management, speech and text analytics, web analytics; and covers both calling and digital channels) market size is $4.36B, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.9% to 10.77B by 2020.
- • Assuming Hospitality Industry has a 20% share in the above market — Hospitality experience management/Reputation management comes out to be — $870M




Key Strengths of Repufact
- Tracks user generated content in 26+ languages. Also, offers competition and market benchmarking solutions. Allows surveys to be published on the website or social media, for SEO improvement.
- Medallia started their operations by partnering with Hotels in creating department specific dashboard. Repufact is doing the same by providing custom dashboards from C-level executives to bottom line staff.
- Repufact allows two-way conversation on reviews collected. Increasing focus of the companies is not just to build real-time end-to-end feedback monitoring engine, but also to build a two-way communication channel on top of that. Clarabridge acquired Social Helpdesk Engagor in 2014; Medallia launched “Medallia Engage” in 2015, Zendesk built a platform to turn online App reviews into 2 -way conversations. Repufact allows two-way conversation on reviews collected.
- Although OTAs are costly partners for hotels, they still cannot be ignored considering their overarching reach and marketing might. For Independent Hotels(1–3 star hotels Or Mid and Budget Hotels), OTA ìs the primary channel for booking. Repufact offers Travel recommendation platform, through which OTA’s can provide persona and semantic based search options.
- Similar to TrustYou, It offers review summaries based on semantic technology which can also be integrated on Hotels, OTA websites to drive SEO.
Key Weakness:
- Targeting a very difficult market to crack. In India, Vertical reputation management companies have started coming up since 2012. Only one company — Repup has received institutional funding as of now.
- Hospitality sector remains weighed down by a lot of legacy technology. Some systems are incredibly dated and don’t always provide the amount of detail necessary for hotels to understand their customers.
- Since the USP is social feedback monitoring through semantic technologies, bigger AI players can easily enter the market.
- It does not offer a tracking mechanism(Ticketing system) for review management at the back-end.
- Repufact is only managing limited channels of the digital customer journey and as such is a very niche business model.
Key Opportunities:
- Meta-Reviews:
Similar to TrustYou, It is launching Meta-reviews, which summarizes reviews through semantic technology. It can be used in the form of API on brand websites, OTA and metasearch engines.
- Guest Communication:
During the customer stay at the Hotel, It only collects guest feedback. It can build real-time customer service messaging platform(Through SMS, Messenger, E -mail).
- Travel Recommendation:
It offers Travel recommendation platform to OTA’s and other intermediaries.With more than half of the bookings done through OTA’S, this is a big market.
- Guest Profiling:
Through social media monitoring and on-site guest feedback collection tools, It can build “Guest Profiles” similar to Revinate, which can be used to build a one-to-one marketing automation tool.
- Venture into other Markets:
Since the Hotels share the same feedback structure with Airlines and other Hospitality & Travel Verticals. Its NLP engine can easily be tuned to enter into new markets — Restaurants, Airlines, Travel and Healthcare markets.
Key Threats
- Its Indian competitor Repup has onboarded 500+ Hotels and ventured into other markets and also received an institutional round of funding.
- Revenue management SaaS platform, RateGain has 5,500+ customers, percentage(10–20) of which also uses its reputation management solutions.
- There are bigger social media monitoring players like Dataminr, NetBase, Visible Technologies, Brandwatch who can easily enter into this niche market.
- Entry points to this market are very broad. Pure play social media monitoring, NLP applications and marketing automation can easily venture this market.
- All the leading players like Medallia, Clarabridge, ReviewPro, Revinate, and TrustYou already have Indian Hotels as their client. Medallia has a couple of branded hotel networks in India — Taj Hotel. In India, TrustYou has partnered with MakeMyTrip and is actively serving Indian clients.
If you have any suggestions or queries, you may comment here or write to me — deep31993@gmail.com
