Picking guest 'feelings'
Guests nowadays do not stay at a hotel purely for its physical environment or for the free breakfast. They stay because of the way the hotel’s staff makes them feel. It’s about making guests ‘feel’ from the moment they are greeted when entering the place to how they are treated during the day-to-day movements - where interactions are transformed from the ordinary to extraordinary experiences.
There are two distinct approaches to hospitality; One been the generic approach which the majority of hotels follow, and the second, a human centric approach of ‘putting people ahead of everything else’ . The latter is a challenging approach requiring the hotel to ‘pick a few feelings’ that it wishes to evoke in its guests, particularly those feelings that can be associated with the hotel brand. This can include that ‘sense of place’ vibe, to the music that is played, to the manner in which guests are taken care of when they arrive, during the stay, till when they leave.
“Surprise’ and ‘delight’ are words that are used in marketing by many brands and hotels. Talk is cheap some say, a cliché perhaps – but the idea that what we do is more important than what we say is a fundamental truth. Yes, there are hotels where the staff make an effort to remember guest names, but beyond that, don’t expect to receive that cake, when your birthday falls during your stay in the hotel – despite having provided the date of birth information during registration.
There’s this hotel that surprised a very regular high spending guest, by having a cake delivered to his home on his birthday. What made it so special was that the guest lived in another country. The hotel staff went on the internet to find a patisserie closest to where the guest resided. They then arranged the shop to have the cake delivered on the specified day, after making payment online. Isn’t that amazing? Can you imagine the feelings it would have evoked from that guest?
A slip-up in service, which happens even in the best of hotels, can be turned round by soothing ruffled feelings in a manner that leads to converting unhappy guests into loyal ambassadors. The Ritz Carlton hotel has its ‘$2,000 Rule’ where each employee has the authority to compensate and surprise customers up to an amount of USD 2,000. Unlike the great majority of hotels that consider compensation payments as a loss, the Ritz Carlton approach is to budget for compensation payments as an overhead. Because every customer does not receive a compensation payment that’s a feel-good effect to the hotels bottom-line. Ritz Carlton uses this philosophy because they know how much the value of a life-time loyal customer is worth to them.
First things first though. Hotels that want to outshine other hotels will need to first get the basics right – such as Wi-Fi that works well and meeting other guest expectations all the time. When a guest, as I have done sometimes, thinks to himself in frustration, “better if I do it myself…”, that’s when the hotel is nowhere near creating differentiation nor possessing raving fans and a loyal customer base. Bottom-line is weak retention rates, poor referrals and a low price-line.
For staff to deliver on the promises made by marketing, they need to be provided with the proper tools to do their best work. Empowering staff to take ownership of the space within which they operate is a powerful advantage provided they get all the training, data and support they need. If people are to make the right decisions at the right time, they need the right information. If your hotel is one that puts people ahead of everything, then you need to invest heavily in networks that reliably connect people across departments in real time.
As the saying goes “a happy team makes for happy customers” … and happy feelings.
Shafeek Wahab - Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Customer Service Trainer and Ex-Hotelier
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