CUSTOMER STORY
Hornblower enhances global customer experiences
Learn how Hornblower uses SurveyMonkey to connect with customers and maximize NPS data.
US HEADQUARTERS
San Francisco, CA
COMPANY SIZE
5K+
INDUSTRY
Transportation and experiences
USE CASES
Customer experience
Voice of the Customer
Marketing
OVERVIEW
Hornblower offers dining and sightseeing cruises, food and walking tours and ferry services in over 10 countries and 50 US cities. To stay connected with its many customers, the global company needs rich, reliable insights. With SurveyMonkey, it collects feedback across its businesses, uncovering everything from trends in travel preferences and booking motivations to actionable Net Promoter Score (NPS®) data.
THE CHALLENGE
Staying connected with 20 million customers
Hornblower serves 20 million annual guests, including commuters on the New York City ferry system, tourists headed to Alcatraz Island, foodies exploring global delicacies, corporate clients on sightseeing cruises, and more. “We offer a lot of different experiences end to end,” explained Consumer Insights and Rewards Manager Greg Shapiro, “and each individual business has its own guest feedback survey with its own questions, branding, and stakeholders.” Building and managing all those surveys, and collecting feedback that’s actually useful, could easily get overwhelming. But SurveyMonkey Enterprise simplifies the entire process, helping Hornblower centralize data and chart a course for better customer experiences.
“We use SurveyMonkey to get customer feedback from all our business units, all in one platform. It’s the information that we need to make sure customers keep coming back. Where did they hear about us? What went right, what went wrong? How can we improve? Asking those questions is vital for us as a business.”
Greg Shapiro
Consumer Insights and Rewards Manager
Hornblower
THE ANSWER
Powerful AI and survey features that get the job done
Everyone within Hornblower can access SurveyMonkey, which empowers employees to prioritize customer feedback. Surveys can be quickly customized, thanks to a library of logos, themes, and brand assets for each Hornblower business. Plus, Shapiro and team rely on powerful AI for expert survey design recommendations.
“SurveyMonkey AI optimizes our surveys,” said Shapiro. “It lets me know if a question is too complicated, if the flow of a survey doesn't make sense, if it takes too long to finish. The end result is that my surveys are faster, easier to complete, and they get a much higher response rate from my customers.”
SurveyMonkey also makes analysis easy for anyone to dig into precise insights. “SurveyMonkey makes it possible for managers of each of our ports to access data on their terms,” said Shapiro. “They can go in and see exactly how many comments they’ve gotten on a specific day at that port, and even drill down to a specific vessel.”
“SurveyMonkey allows me to be very effective as the insights guy at my company. My role is to bring the voice of the customer to stakeholders throughout the organization, and SurveyMonkey makes that possible.”
Greg Shapiro
Consumer Insights and Rewards Manager
Hornblower
THE RESULTS
Smooth sailing with actionable customer insights
NPS is a throughline across all Hornblower customer surveys and SurveyMonkey helps the company make the most of its data. The SurveyMonkey for Salesforce integration automatically creates detractor alerts that flag low scores and initiate fast customer support follow-ups. The company also segments results to understand correlations between high NPS and booking channels, which guides its ad strategies and investments.
In a survey of its international walking and food tour customers, Hornblower investigated travel preferences, booking motivations, and what activities people would be willing to pay for. This unearthed trends and patterns among different customer personas, which Hornblower uses to shape its marketing and product development.
Survey QR codes displayed on posters and tour guides’ name tags have not only led to more timely feedback, they’ve also enabled Hornblower to connect with hard-to-reach customers who book experiences through third-party websites. It can then drill down to compare responses that come via QR code versus email collectors.
Corporate client surveys have helped Hornblower pinpoint why people plan corporate events and use that data to create website collateral and marketing materials that speak to those needs. One corporate client survey even prompted Hornblower to change its cruise times, once it discovered that client preferences had changed.
“SurveyMonkey helps us listen to our customers and find out what they actually want,” said Shapiro. “We put those insights into our website, our marketing collateral, our photos, our product development. A survey quantifies which ideas are best and creates the two-way relationship with our customers.”
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