Complaint management goes beyond complaint handling
Someone once wrote “The first step to complaints management is not to have a complaint at all and have total customer satisfaction”. True...but it’s never ever going to happen! No hotel is perfect, and it’s only a matter of time before you have a complaint. So how do you make sure you’re prepared?
It’s tempting to dismiss the occasional problem as trivial and complaining customers as being fussy, but managers should resist those easy cop outs. No business can afford to lose customers, if only because it costs much more to replace a customer than it does to retain one.
Staff require to know what to do if they get a complaint and who to go to should they need to escalate the problem. That’s when the complaint handling process kicks in; such as: listening intently, showing empathy, thanking the guest for bringing it up, apologising sincerely, gathering the facts, offering a solution and following-up for ensuring proper closure.
In most cases, guests simply need to be pacified when feeling offended – such as a receptionist being impolite to them or of being ignored whilst waiting for service. There are of course more serious issues that can arise as well – involving service delivery or product offerings or both.
Complaint handling in its simplistic form is to first make the unhappy guest happy by resolving the issue and secondly to fix the original problem. In a nut shell, complaint handling means the process of attending to and resolving complaints, including any ongoing transaction with Complainants. It involves the proper use of strategies to solve service or product failures, so that the customers’ faith in the organisation’s reliability is quickly restored.
Complaint management is the process of providing information aimed at identifying and correcting various causes of customer dissatisfaction. Consequently, the development of an effective complaint management process must take into account customer expectations and compensatory dimensions in order to achieve increased levels of customer satisfaction and avoid switching behaviour.
Guest satisfaction surveys provide information gathered from customers and have become a critical component in the complaint management process, since listening to guests enables hotels to support them, learn more about their needs, improve the hotel’s service and product offering, and eventually increasing revenue.
Many hotels continue to widely use the traditional paper-based method, whilst others resort to sending out emails - both aimed to find out whether their guests had a nice stay. Unfortunately, the ‘pen and paper’ or post-stay email approach isn’t the most effective or efficient. Asking, “How was your stay?” – is like bolting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Modern day digital methods and means must be the backbone of the guest feedback strategy for hotels. Asking “How’s your stay so far?” is decidedly better, as it enables the hotel to proactively learn at the right time, the guest’s experience… before it becomes public and causes reputational damage online.
The hospitality industry has the advantage that other businesses don’t have. Hotel guests may be in the hotel for over 24 hours, giving the hotel the opportunity to rectify any problems before the guests leave the property.
On the flip-side of this is that in the hospitality industry (e.g., in a restaurant or hotel), the output is produced, provided, and consumed in a single episode or a series of episodes, where the guests normally consume and evaluate the outcome of the service process in the presence of the service provider. This differs radically from the manufacturing-based processes where product quality and a buyer’s satisfaction with a product are typically assessed far apart from the producer. Hence, the timing of gathering guest satisfaction information in the hospitality industry is critical.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
|
|
|
|
