I recently saw an advertisement of Accor Hotels claiming that they were really taking care of customer satisfaction. Actually they even wanted to go a step further proposed Nordstrom-like guarantee: “satisfaction guaranteed or your next night free”.

I’m not sure how this guarantee works but at least I like the motto. This kind of guarantee is also pretty unusual in the hospitality industry and therefore deserves a mention.

But is this alleged focus on customer satisfaction (and on customers more generally) real? Difficult to know actually but at least there’s one quick check you can do. Take a look at the annual report … you can find it here.

First of all I found the word “satisfaction” mentioned 14 times in this 124-page report. Accor has implemented a satisfaction measurement tool called “Guest Satisfaction Survey” which was deployed in 2009 in 1100 hotels. Although it’s really surprising that such a big company waited so long to have such a tool, it looks good and promising on paper, but …having read that there’s one BIG question that I want to be answered as a potential investor: “how satisfied are the customers?”. This question is crucial because it gives an indication whether or not customers will probably re-purchase and become loyal.

Great thing … there’s a KPI’s section in the annual report. Let’s have a look …well, I searched really hard but found no KPI’s on satisfaction. You have plenty of accounting, financial KPI’s but nothing that may have a link with customers.

My take:

Do you know of any single company which would claim NOT being out there to satisfy its customers? I don’t. So why isn’t there any company proud enough (or smart enough) to release customer-centric KPI’s? Perhaps because investors do not understand what it means and what impact it may have on financial metrics?