Genuinely real people vs. the 'automata effect'
The nowadays experience, we all too often receive when dealing with retail suppliers and others like them, is service just limited to websites. The age-old method of dealing with a ‘live’ person is rapidly vanishing.
When you phone a bank, a telephone company or an airline office, the voice that answers your call, although sounding human is far from being a live person. Moreover, one cannot get in a word, whilst the pseudo- telephone operator rattles on from a programmed script and until well after the disembodied voice issues the “Press 1 for..., etc, etc.” commands for action!
Hypothetically, given the option to ‘press 1’ to talk to a real person, or ‘press 2’ to deal with a machine, the odds are that the majority of us will opt for the former. What’s at stake here is the perceived importance of human interaction.
Thankfully, this rush towards automation has bypassed the hotel industry which thus far, has steadfastly stuck to assigning a ‘real person’ to answer incoming calls. If one was to craft a collective tagline for hotels; “We don’t have computers at the end of the line”, could be a winning differentiator for the industry.
Even then, the people that customers encounter, be it on the phone or face-to face, don’t always behave like genuine live persons. They function with an aura of automation. Why? Two possible reasons for this to occur, is when management inaction breeds uninterested and demotivated staffs who are disengaged from work, or where management enforces rigid codes of behaviour as standards of operations (SOPs).
Brand standards enable hospitality businesses to maintain and repeat a particular task with zero or minimal variation, whilst delivering a consistently high standard of service to guests. However, despite its good intentions, like strong medication it can have negative side effects. Some define it as homogenous, almost robotic in approach to service and not ideal when trying to provide guests with a unique experience.
Your staff, as brand advocates, not only need to fit within your company culture and work to the guidelines, but must also be creative when providing that unique guest experience. For that to happen there will be times, when staff may have to deviate from standards - to keep guests happy. The guest experience part doesn't require training manuals, it requires encouraging initiative. Developing a good set of standards requires keeping the guest experience in mind – and that can be difficult when standards are cast in stone.
Training people to work from, or read from a script is not the best course of action. Hotels need to train and develop their staff to have a degree of self-determination, (within certain parameters), so as to enable them attain a level of confidence, where the brand is well projected by what they say and do. Self-confident live persons can work wonders for your brand; while those treated like automata will behave accordingly.
In the hotel industry automation will never replace live persons as the face of any brand. Hospitality is all about people taking care of people and that’s something which human beings are uniquely good at.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier
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