Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Previously we discussed the importance of hiring the right people for the hospitality industry. By hiring the right employees for your business and following the hire for attitude (teach the skill) rule, you can ensure that you are bringing excellent customer service to your business.
Now that you have the employees that your business needs, with the right attitude to enhance your guests’ experience, you have to indicate WHAT the experience is, that guests are looking for.
By following these simple tips and examples of customer service and experience, hand-in-hand you will have a better understanding of how to enhance your own.
Defining customer service
A great experience starts with great customer service, this starts with the initial employee-and-customer-interaction. This may be the phone call your guest makes for reservations, or their visit to the lobby desk for check-in. Overall this step is highly important in creating customer impressions, excellent customer service results in great customer experience.
Technology advancements have allowed businesses and feedback from customers to grow online, no longer is customer service strictly person-to-person, but we have the opportunity to interact and start guests off with a good customer experience in new and exciting ways. All areas of your business, weather in-person or online should excel in excellent customer service. Just remember: your business cannot exist without its’ customers!
Defining customer experience
Customer experience refers to the complete experience a customer has with your business. This can involve multiple interactions with different facets of your business from the moment guests check-in online, to ordering from the lobby bar. Every aspect of their experience with your business is part of this.
A positive guest experience translates to return guests and loyal customers. If they like the experience they have received they are more likely to return in the future and better yet, the more likely they will be to refer your business!
Use these tips to enhance guests’ experience
Request feedback from guests
In order to know if your team is doing the best they can do to deliver a ‘Wow’ experience you need to ask for feedback and capture it in real time. This can be done through post-interaction surveys after guests check-out, through email or through a simple phone call… with a real person. Data collected from surveys will better help your business capture a customer’s perception of their service experience, which now acts as a tool to better your business.
Create Emotional Connections with Customers
“People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”
– Maya Angelou
The best way to create meaningful impressions is through meaningful, emotional connections with customers. Interactions should be genuine and shape attitudes to drive decisions … No customer is going to act on a transaction that they don’t feel 100% confident about. Customers become loyal through emotions, and will remember how the service they were provided with made them feel.
Understand who your customers are and what their needs are
Staff members should be fully knowledgeable about the various personas that are common within the company brand, and how to cater to each of their needs. This will allow the delivery of customer service to exude company values, beliefs and personalization, however give the customer service representative the tools to be successful within the interaction. By creating client personas, customer-interactions will be more personalized and authentic, resulting in a better customer-employee interaction. This will also enhance guest experience overall, allowing the employee to be well prepared for common scenarios within each persona type.
So what is the experience everyone is looking for? We hope that you now feel better equipped to service guests with a customer service approach that results to improved customer experience overall. May your approach be genuine, offer feedback and inhibit your company values, beliefs and unique client personas. Don’t forget Braymark offers customer service audits to measure how customer service experience is ranking. When in doubt, invest in an guest experience audit by inviting a secret shopper into your establishment, this will allow you to learn exactly which aspects of your services need to be addressed, in order to provide guests with the experience they are looking for.
