A Customer Centered Approach to Feedback and Development

In 2021, VENZA inaugurated Town Hall Meetings that bring together customer stakeholders and VENZA’s departmental leaders. The objective of this effort is to gather insightful feedback which serves as a qualitative research portion of a larger product evaluation process.

During the hour-long meetings, key topics were presented as prompts that solicit responses. Additionally, the format encourages open-ended discussions where participating customers give comments and ask questions on any topics they like. The web-conference gatherings typically conclude through the sharing of VENZA’s company vision and product roadmap.

Client feedback was recorded using a Likert scale. Answers were turned into scores from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest score represented as “Strongly Agree”, and 1 being the lowest score represented as “Strongly Disagree”. 

Highlights from the structured prompts:

Highlights from the open-ended discussions:

“Our industry fell apart last April and struggled mightily through the whole year, but the team [VENZA] has been very helpful.”

– Richard Raccio V.P. of U.S. Operations, URGO

“We would not have been able to get our SAQ without Larry and the team.”

– Shawn Edie, the Director of IT, Crystal Mountain

“VENZA knows hospitality.” 

– Bryan Hammer, V.P. of IT, Belmond

In general, the results of this effort indicate that overall client satisfaction is high. Clients appreciate VENZA’s personal touch, flexibility and due diligence when it comes to customer support. 

“In everything we do, it’s important to me and my team that we familiarize ourselves with customers’ pain points in a deeper and more intimate way than a simple questionnaire or survey,” said Daniel Johnson, Co-Founder of VENZA. “Our goal is to create a consistent and reliable feedback loop that provides valuable products and services by bringing customers closer to the development process and ensuring VENZA’s personal touch is found in every interaction.”

“The insights we’ve gained via the Town Hall Meetings indicate that this effort has emerged to be a powerful component of our product evaluation process,” said Barbara Espinosa, Product Manager. “As it has throughout its nearly 14 years of existence, VENZA continues to evaluate and update existing products as well as create brand new ones that meet customers ever evolving needs. Through the Town Hall Meetings, we have found a great window into what works and what areas need to be improved. For example, we’ve learned that that clients value both group training and individual (i.e., eLearning) equally. Group training may be more effective when onboarding entire teams as well as for users with no access to company email or computers.

Individual learning is preferred when there aren’t enough users to warrant a group training session and when users have reliable access to digital devices. Since getting this feedback, we’ve relaunched our instructor-led training (i.e., T3) packets and launched the proctored training initiative to provide a more effective group training method to mass-train and mass-certify users. The feedback also validated our efforts to reimagine our individual eLearning courses with modernized, mobile device friendly content.”

One area of improvement for the team relates to VENZA’s Hospitality Webinar Series. The feedback indicates that more webinars and a more bold promotion of those webinars would be preferred.  

“We’ll be launching the webinar calendar for clients and industry members to sign up and plan attendance in advance” said Sean Shields, VENZA’s Brand Ambassador. “We’ll also include new topics of interest in other areas like HR compliance and operations-oriented subjects.”

The next round of Town Hall Meetings is set to begin in May of 2022. Participants are selected at random to maintain the integrity of the process and ensure we get to hear from everyone. If you’d like to learn more about this initiative, email us at success@venzagroup.com or contact your customer success guide directly.