Changing times in hospitality; are you prepared?
The most effective leaders continuously strive to bring together the right people, give them the finest tools and inspire them to deliver unforgettable guest experiences. They know that legendary customer service is not about smiles and simply being nice. It’s about vision, systems, training and creating a magical moment for each and every guest becoming truly customer intimate.
The majority of companies don’t realize the level of customer service they are delivering or that their own standards for good customer service are considerably lower than their customer’s standards.
Most organizations make significant investment in customer service a very low priority and it is the first thing that is cut out of the budget when times get touch, not realizing the major impact it has on the bottom line down the road.
Business has never been tougher than it is today, the only businesses that are surviving with long term sustainability are fanatical about differentiating themselves through the customer experience they deliver.
Customer service is not an event; it is a cultural evolution, and a journey. It is one that many companies, especially world class companies, feel they never complete.
One of the few ways to create long term brand security is by differentiating yourself through service.
Customers are becoming less tolerant of mediocre customer services. Companies will benefit if they make customer service a major focus and make a commitment to providing consistent, excellent customer service. This can’t be handled as a periodical focus or flavour of the month. World-class companies dominate their markets and do not have to compete on price and disappearing margins.
Three critically important questions you need to ask yourself are:
- How do you go from good to great?
- How to you move your guests from satisfied to extremely satisfied?
- How do you move your employees from engaged to fully engaged?
To win brand loyalty, you need to establish strong emotional bonds with your guests.
Companies need to see the impact that customer satisfaction has on their key metric drivers (i.e. customer retention, average rate, referrals). This demonstrates the critical importance and focus necessary. This also allows management teams to hold employees accountable for providing a great customer experience at every level of the organization. If you don’t measure the results, how will you ever know if you are achieving them consistently? How can you remedy the inconsistencies and celebrate the successes? It is imperative to have several tools in place to track and measure the consistency and results of your customer service systems. Once these tools are in place you can hold people accountable for any system inconsistencies until the system inconsistencies become a rarity. Equally as important, you need to celebrate the success of the system and the employees who are delivering them.
Measurement tools can be anything from customer surveys, third party companies that measure customer satisfaction or secret shoppers to statistical benchmarks that provide a benchmark to measure the impact of the new systems and to determine whether they are being consistently executed.
Twenty five years ago we had employees with excellent people skills working with marginal technology. Today, we have employees with marginal people skills using excellent technology.
The pendulum has swung so far to the high tech side that customers are now starving to be recognized as individuals with preferences.
You should never be content and should always be raising the bar.
How many successful hotels provide the kind of unforgettable guest experience that keeps customers coming back time after time and year after year?
It is said that the element of surprise and novelty are what jolt the attention of today’s guests and create and experience that’s memorable, because it is so different from the expectation.
In order to be remembered by your guests and create their loyalty, you have to earn a position in their mind. When great service is the sole area of serious competition, then it is the guest experience that will differentiate you from the others.
When you raise the bar on service excellence and your team exceeds the expectations of your guests, then you’ve ultimately mastered the guest experience.
Tags: hospitality
