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How Carnival uses their insight community to uncover actionable feedback in hours, not days

Uncovering actionable feedback in hours, not days

Global Director of Consumer Insights
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“We have access to millions of data points at Carnival. While valuable, they lack qualitative specificity. By augmenting that data with deep, rich, contextual feedback from our insight community we can produce actionable insights our leadership can use to make truly informed, data-backed decisions.”

Irene Jofre

Global Director Consumer Insights, Casino Operations at Carnival Corporation
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83%

Response rate for pre and post sailing activities overall

<24 hours

Carnival can surface high-quality feedback for leadership teams

Data-first culture

Richer insights support the development of a data-first culture

About Carnival Cruises

Carnival Cruises Carnival is the largest cruise line in the world based on passengers carried annually. Carnival operates a 4000+ member Insight Community of cruisers. The community is used to understand the relationship of cruisers across three major lines of business, including gaming and casinos.

Carnival Cruises

The Challenge

Feedback from traditional data sources lacked the specificity required to make strategic decisions

Carnival runs a multi-million-dollar program called “Voice of the Player.” The program is designed to help their team explore the guest experience from pre-departure to post. The result is millions of data points that highlight key purchase drivers yet lack specific details their teams need to make truly insights-driven decisions.

Take, for example, the notion of “atmosphere.” For thousands of cruisers, it’s the “atmosphere” in the casinos that keeps them coming back. But what does atmosphere mean from one cruiser to another? Irene and her team needed a rapid and reliable way to iterate on and contextualize CSAT feedback to identify specific areas of improvement that were not revealed through traditional methods.

The Solution

A truly agile, in-the-moment research platform that augments, enhances and contextualizes feedback from conventional sources like CSAT and NPS. With this need in mind, Irene worked with Rival Technologies to launch an insight community of 4000 cruisers.

She selected Rival for three key reasons:

  • She needed speed, agility and most importantly deeper, more contextual feedback that could uncover the nuances of key purchase drivers.
  • She needed a survey platform that was fresh and engaging. Rival’s conversational, mobile-first approach appealed to cruisers of all ages and made it possible for her to collect quant and qual along with video feedback in one agile learning stream.
  • She needed world class support. With a lean team she needed to know that her research partners understood her objectives and resource limitations. In her opinion, there was no other company that offered the level of service and support she gets from Rival.
Conversational and mobile-first surveys for hospitality and tourism companies

 

Carnival relies on their insight community to run a variety of research on:

  • High value customer engagement

  • Packages and promotion

  • Future planning

  • Rewards program optimization

  • Ad-testing and recall

  • Concept testing

  • On-board feedback

Results

Rival’s conversational approach to research, coupled with its speed, agility and broad appeal, has driven engagement rates of 83% with cruisers of all ages; especially Gen X and Boomers. The ability to layer in cruiser video feedback brings data to life and adds credibility to the insights collected. As a result, business decisions with clear revenue implications are made with greater speed and confidence.

Rival’s platform plays a vital role in a fully integrated insights program system that uses conventional surveys in parallel with the insight community to generate a deep, rich, and multifaceted understanding of their guests’ expectations and experiences – sometimes as rapidly as overnight. For example, the cruise line was looking to update its policy on smoking inside the casino. The leadership team could not reach a consensus, so they engaged the community to better understand the potential impacts of their decisions.

Feedback from the community was rapid and definitive. The policies were amended based on community feedback, and Carnival enjoyed a smooth transition with absolutely no impact on casino revenue bookings. Moreover, their research highlighted additional key insights that were used to inform campaigns focused on the “fun” of gambling in the casino on a cruise ship.

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