Is OYO listening to its female customers?

YouGov BrandIndex shows OYO Rooms hits low satisfaction among customers, especially women

Hospitality company OYO Rooms recently made news by raising funding worth $1 billion and entering the Unicorn club. While the company is making waves across the globe, customers back home don’t seem too happy with the brand.

YouGov BrandIndex data shows that the overall brand health has declined in the last quarter (Jul-Sep 2018). The index score is an average of impression, quality, value, reputation, satisfaction and recommendation scores.

The Buzz score has fallen from 24.4 in July to a low of 19.5 in mid-September. YouGov BrandIndex’s buzz is calculated as whether someone has heard anything positive or negative on the brand.

Another notable development is that the Buzz score for OYO Rooms has significantly fallen for female customers, from 20.8 in July beginning to 12.2 in September end. Not just this, Recommendation (whether they would recommend the brand to a friend/ colleague) and Purchase intent (whether they would purchase from the brand) for OYO among females also saw a drop in the month of September.

This could be linked to the brand grabbing headlines early September, with the news of an American blogger recounting her horror story of being harassed in an OYO room in Delhi. This incident seems to have adversely impacted the company’s reputation in the market, especially among females.

In the past also, customers have expressed their dissatisfaction through negative comments or reviews about their service. But this incident goes beyond the regular complaints and has raised questions about the brand’s quality and offering.

Commenting on this, Deepa Bhatia, General Manager, YouGov India, said, “When a brand faces any kind of crisis, they need immediate and continuous data on their brand health metrics to take timely action and move towards recovery. YouGov’s BrandIndex offers just this solution offering continuous daily streaming data. Our data shows that of late OYO’s scores are dropping across all metrics, affecting its overall brand health. The decline is more significant among female customers. The brand needs to understand the cause of this issue and build strategies around it before they lose customer trust forever.”