Service

The 'Make Mom Proud' Standard for How to Treat Your Customers

In this third and last article, we look at what an ideal QA program would look like, in the hope that third-party QA companies, and/or internal QA programs are listening and decide to upgrade their assessments and programs.

It has often been said that as much as 80% of communication takes place non-verbally. It is certainly true that facial expressions such as what we show with our eyebrows, our smiles (or lack thereof), and body language, which is what we show with our posture and gestures, all are essential for communicating.

I have always believed that the front desk staff played a critical role, now more than ever they truly are the first impression makers, for better or for worse. Chances are that hard evidence for this is available online every day in your guest surveys and/or your online guest reviews.

Services that fail to change with the times, fall out of use: Robust, third-party QA programs are, surprisingly, one such otherwise valuable service that we may see disappearing as social media are increasingly used by guests and management alike, to determine the state of affairs and rankings of hotels and resorts. The replacement of professionals by amateurs, who are armed with a little knowledge and the full confidence of their own particular experience, is not necessarily an improvement; but it is certainly a reality.

Don Quixote tilted his lance at windmills: we tilt ours at service standards that do not meet expectations, which is why I am spending a perfectly beautiful Florida spring Sunday inside, banging away on the keyboard when sensible people are beaching, sailing, golfing, etc.

The reason I train everyone to love guests’ ‘buts’ is because when we can manage to get a good ‘but’ out of a guest, that means that we have shown the guest we are asking because we truly care and want to know. Let me explain…

In the hotel industry we all know how important it is to deliver hospitality, which is the key to a positive guest stay. Otherwise we are simply in the ‘room rental business’ and our guest rooms devolve into a commodity like a seat on an airplane.

Traditionally, the guest experience with a hotel is defined by their interaction(s) with hotel staff, the upkeep of the property and amenities, and the provision of a room which meets or exceeds expectations. However, as any savvy hotelier knows, the current hospitality landscape has outgrown that tradition to make room for improved technology and an enhanced, personalized guest experience. Where guests previously expected to be greeted with cheerful front desk staff, they now prefer mobile check-in, allowing them to bypass lines and interact with the hotel freely (and immediately).

The purpose of this paper is to offer a different concept approach of a corporate objective by turning it into what we call a neuro-objective, aimed at generating the appropriate behavior in the workers to achieve and materialize such goals