I had stayed in the Iveagh Garden Hotel before and enjoyed it very much. A modern, comfortable, quiet, well decorated and located hotel in the centre of Dublin (Ireland) – where I travel frequently to visit Capventis HQ and clients.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try their new “City Pod” rooms – which are a carbon copy of the CitizenM hotel rooms (if you know them). It was really nice, and very cost effective, but there was a detail I didn’t like.

The water from the shower would run down into the room, even reaching the bed area. Something wasn’t right, and I fed that back in the customer satisfaction survey, that the hotel sent me 3 days after my stay.

I was pleasantly surprised by the lightning-fast and candid response from the hotel (see in below picture). The response to my feedback followed every single best practice for closing the loop:

1. Responded within a few hours, with a personalised email
2. Thanked customer for taking the time to feedback
3. Emphasized improvement can only come from voice-of-customer
4. Acknowledged customer’s specific feedback (the shower issue!)
5. Confirmed it was sent to relevant team for correction and improvement
6. Showed desire to recover below par experience by offering upgrade
7. Closed email with personalised signature and job role (accountability)

Despite being a bit more expensive than the various hotels in the same street (there are a hand-full of choices in a few hundred yards), Iveagh Garden Hotel is definitely differentiating itself by focusing and putting some effort in the CX side of things.

P.S. – This reminds me of another similar experience I had and shared in this blog post Close the loop with clients, but mean it! – where, again, you can see how important it is to have personalised and timely closed-loop