How to compare customer feedback across locations

If you run more than one site (hotels in a group, restaurants in a chain, camps under one organisation), feedback should be one of your best management tools. Each location is a natural experiment: same brand, same standards, different results. Somewhere in that difference is the answer to "what does good look like here?"

In practice, multi-location feedback is often a mess. Each site uses a different survey, reviews are checked by whoever has time, and head office sees a league table of star ratings that says who is winning but not why. This guide sets out how to compare locations fairly and turn the comparison into improvements.

Start with the same questions everywhere

You can only compare what you measured the same way. Before anything else, make sure every location asks the same core questions, worded identically, in the same order.

That does not mean every survey must be identical. A sensible structure is:

1. A shared core. Three to six questions every location asks: an overall rating, a recommend question, one or two questions on the things that matter everywhere (cleanliness, staff, value), and an open "anything else?" box.
2. Local extras. A few questions only one site needs: the spa at the hotel that has one, the pick-up point at the camp that runs a bus.

Keep local extras after the shared core so they don't change how people answer the core questions. And when you change a shared question, change it everywhere on the same day, or you will spend months comparing two different things. Our guide to the hotel guest feedback survey has a worked example of a core set.

Reviews need the same treatment. Collect Google, TripAdvisor and other reviews for every location, not only the ones someone happens to watch.

Use the same topic list for every location

Open-ended answers and reviews only compare well if they are sorted into the same topics. If one manager files a comment under "Housekeeping" and another under "Room cleanliness", you have two half-topics and no comparison.

Use one topic tree for the whole organisation. Locations will naturally have topics others don't (a pool, a ski room), and that's fine: those topics simply show nothing for sites without them. What matters is that shared topics have one name and one definition.

Normalise by share, not by count

The biggest mistake in location comparisons is comparing raw counts. A 200-room hotel will get more complaints about everything than a 40-room hotel, simply because more people stay there.

Use share of conversation instead: the percentage of a location's replies that mention a topic. If 12% of the large hotel's replies mention noise and 4% of the small hotel's do, that is a real difference, whatever the totals.

The same applies to tone. Compare the balance of positive and negative mentions for a topic, not the number of negative mentions.

Allow for what isn't the manager's fault

Even with good measures, some differences come from circumstances, not performance. Before you call one location better than another, check four things.

Size of sample. A location with thirty replies this month can swing a long way on a handful of comments. Show the number of replies beside every comparison and be slow to judge small samples. Comparing quarters instead of months can help smaller sites.

Season. A beach hotel in August and a city hotel in August are having very different months. Compare each location with its own same period last year, as well as with its peers, before drawing conclusions.

Customer mix. A site full of families will talk about different things, and rate them differently, from one full of business travellers. If your form asks trip type or group type, compare like with like: families at site A against families at site B.

What the site is. An older building will draw more comments about maintenance. A site with a restaurant will have food topics that one without doesn't. Note these differences openly rather than pretending all sites are the same.

None of this means excusing poor results. It means making sure the comparison points at things a manager can actually change.

What to compare, in what order

A practical comparison, for a hypothetical group of three summer camps, might run like this.

1. Overall standing. Average rating and recommend score per location, with the number of replies. This is the context, not the conclusion.
2. Biggest topics per location. The top five topics by share at each site. Where they overlap, you have group-wide themes. Where they differ, you have local stories.
3. Same topic, side by side. For each shared topic, its share and tone at each location. This is where the useful differences appear: "Food is the third-biggest topic everywhere, but it is mostly praised at camp A and mostly criticised at camp C."
4. Change since last period. Which location moved on which topic. A site improving fast is as interesting as a site that is already top.
5. The replies behind it. For each notable difference, read ten replies from each location. The numbers find the gap; the words explain it.

Learn from the best location

The point of comparing isn't to rank managers. It's to find out what the best-performing site does differently and copy it.

When one location is clearly ahead on a topic:

• Read its positive replies on that topic. Customers often say exactly what they liked. "Someone walked us to our room and showed us how the heating worked" is a procedure you can write down.
• Ask the manager. They usually know what they changed and when.
• Check it isn't circumstance. Is the difference still there for the same customer type and season? If so, it is probably practice, not luck.
• Trial it at one other site first. Then watch that site's share and tone for the topic over the following weeks. If it moves, roll it out.

The same approach works in reverse. When one location is clearly behind, look at the negative replies, compare against the site that does better, and pick one change to try.

Share the comparison with the people who can act

Every location manager should see their own site alongside the others, on the same measures, every month. A short monthly customer feedback report that compares the locations, with the answer first and the replies behind each finding, does more than a dashboard nobody opens.

Keep the tone of these comparisons practical. A league table invites excuses; "camp A's families mention the evening activities twice as often, and mostly positively; here is what they say" invites a conversation.

Doing this with Userforms

In Userforms, an organisation such as a group can hold several locations: hotels, camps, restaurants. A form shared across them asks the same questions everywhere, and every analytics view can compare the locations side by side, using share of conversation and tone rather than raw counts. Reviews from Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Trustpilot can be imported for each location on Plus and up.

Each shared form writes its own report, and for a form used across locations that report compares them, with the chart and the replies behind each finding.

You can start for free, or see which plan suits a group of sites on the pricing page.