How do you shine amongst the crowd?
It is said that a full-service hotel with 300 guest rooms, averages around 5,000 staff - guest interactions daily. With future advances in AI technology, this may become less. Nevertheless, there will still be, on the one hand a great deal of opportunities to shine or on the other hand, opportunities to stumble. Whatever follows would be a revelation to the guest, whether your property should be the hotel of choice or… one to walk away from.
Bottom line: It all starts with the guest.
Having access to an information system that enables managers to see their business as a series of links in an economic value chain is vital. This chain must be understood as a whole in order to manage costs (inputs), and thereby manage yields. At the axis of managing yields sits one question. Which single activity (of the organisation) is at the centre of determining costs and yields?
The answer: ‘Meeting customer expectations’ (CX). Understandably, those who exceed CX – will outshine the rest.
And how can one do this? We’ve all heard the term V.I.P. (Very Important Person) before. But here, we have staff becoming accustomed to a different idea of what V.I.P means. It is about treating each Guest like a V.I.P. where V.I.P. stands for Very Individual Person.
We all agree that to deliver quality service consistently one needs the bedrock of a solid framework. But this should not hinder the service delivery from also being personalised In fact, we have seen that a key to delivering exceptional service is treating every guest as a Very Individual Person and making sure to personalize every interaction to suit their unique needs. Guests feel truly cared for when they perceive that the service they experience is delivered on the spot, just for them.
Each visitor to the hotel brings to the guest experience a different bundle of needs, preferences, capabilities and expectations. Some will arrive happy and excited about what is going to happen to them, other guests may turn up angry or impatient. Even more challenging is that the cheerful and chatty guest, who came on his /her previous visit, is the ‘wanna get to room quickly’ guest, today.
The responsibility for bringing new guests to the hotel usually rests on the Sales and Marketing (S & M) departments’ ability to make promises about what guest expectations will be met. The responsibility for getting the repeat business of both new and previous customers rests on the service providers’ abilities to meet and perhaps even exceed both the promises that S & M made and the prior experiences of repeat guests.
Unlike new guests, who build expectations primarily based on advertisements they have seen or personalized recommendations based on previous stays at a particular hotel, from people they know - the expectations of people who have personally had past experiences with a hotel that they plan to re-visit, differs. It creates an even greater expectation regarding the future visit.
In many cases, this sets a high standard for the hotel to meet. What created a “wow’ experience for guests upon a first visit, may now be only “as expected” on their second visit. Many are the hotels that stumble at this stage. The “Welcome to our hotel” greeting on the guest’s first visit, repeated again, instead of a “Welcome back to our hotel, Mr. Smith”, on his second visit, will be unexciting and dull Mr. Smith’s sense of anticipation.
And that can rub ‘shine’ away.
Shafeek Wahab- Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Customer Service Trainer and Ex-Hotelier
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