Mr. Ely

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

5 Ways to Shift Your Guest Interactions into Future Sales

By John Ely, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Signature Worldwide

Every interaction with a guest is an opportunity — an opportunity to exceed expectations, an opportunity to guarantee he or she returns in the future and an opportunity to build consumer loyalty. Loyalty leads to more sales, more referrals, and also more leniency when things don’t go perfectly.

I’ve read that a full-service hotel with 300 rooms averages 5,000 staff–guest interactions every day! That is 5,000 opportunities to stumble, or on the other hand, opportunities to shine and demonstrate why your property should be the hotel of choice when a guest is in the area. Here are five ways to ensure you’re building loyalty and generating future sales.

1. Know Your Hotel

This is the most basic, and sometimes the least demonstrated, attribute of all hotel employees. Knowing everything about your property is essential to developing new sales. Every staff member should know your property and amenities by heart. They should all be walking, talking brochures for the hotel.

Say you’re a golf resort and a guest conversation is taking place in the hallway about lessons. The housekeeper a few feet away overhears this and mentions that the resident pro, Roger, teaches Thursday through Monday and to dial extension 2303 for an appointment. Far-fetched you say? I’d say it’s almost a guaranteed sale and most interactions don’t require that much specialization.

I stayed at a big-city hotel a few years back, and I arrived around 7 p.m. to check in. I asked about local restaurants within walking distance and the front desk agent sprung into a description of the steakhouse on property. She mentioned that there were a lot of great eating establishments nearby, but the hotel restaurant specialized in dry-aged cuts of steak prepared in a special aging room. That’s all I needed to make my decision. Not only did she know about the restaurant (anyone on property should know that), she was able to describe what made that restaurant unique!

Does everyone on your property know as much as possible? Could they respond to any guest request or question?

2. Know the Area

Knowing all that your hotel has to offer is paramount, but employees’ knowledge cannot stop there. Knowing the surrounding area, attractions and amenities is also important. Many guests, even at full-service resorts, are interested in the attractions beyond the hotel.

Are you near a beach? Are you in the mountains? Maybe near water recreation or a ski area? Are you located in a big city with great dining, dancing and theater? All of these things will obviously be of interest to your guests. For business travelers, are there additional amenities such as a nearby copy center, office supply store, or Wi-Fi hotspots that can make their stay more enjoyable and more productive?

I’ll never forget the time I visited Chicago on business many years ago. I needed to get away for a few hours and have some “down” time. I asked the front desk agent for ideas, and he suggested the water architecture tour. I didn’t have a car and wanted to know how to buy tickets and get on the boat. “It’s just across the street, and I’ll call to get your seat reserved for you.” By the time I walked over, my ticket was waiting and I had a great couple of hours for myself. Again, by knowing the area and matching my needs to the attraction, this agent solidified my choice of hotels whenever I’m in the Windy City!

3. Build Relationships

You know your hotel and the surrounding activities, but how do you ensure you communicate this information to guests? I hear it all the time in customer service, sales, account management — really in all aspects of business — that building strong relationships is the key to success. But building relationships takes time, right? I’m not so sure.

How many times have you had a dinner and the server was just oozing personality? When he first took your drink order, you felt comfortable talking with him; and by the time dinner arrived, he seemed like an old friend. It happens — not often enough — but it does happen.

How do these service providers do it? It’s easy. They show that they genuinely care about your experience and simply take an interest in you! That’s really all it takes to start to build these guest-staff relationships. When guests feel that the person on the other side of the counter really does care about them and their stay, often times they open up a bit and become friendlier. They start to see that individual as a person and not a faceless employee.

4. Take Ownership of Issues

No matter how friendly, knowledgeable and personable you are there will always be issues. How you and your staff handle those issues will make all the difference in how a guest perceives you and your hotel. My one rule of thumb for all service providers is, no matter what, take ownership of the situation.

Best case scenario is that the first staff member a guest encounters will have the answer or be able to solve the problem on the spot, but that’s not always possible. When a guest has a problem or issue, empathize with him or her and then take care of it. Even if it is something that needs to be passed to another department or person for resolution, stay with the issue until it is solved.

Always follow up. The first staff member who was approached with the issue should be the last to seek out the guest and ensure the issue was solved to his or her complete satisfaction. This eliminates the feeling that the guest and the problem are simply being “passed around.”

5. Think from the Guests’ Viewpoint

This may be the most difficult of all the steps. Because you often live and work in siloed departments, most of the time you see clear divisions amongst the staff members and their duties. Internally, you know there is a banquet department, housekeeping, engineering, sales departments and so on. You know your responsibilities and the responsibilities of your co-workers in those other areas. Many times, there are hard lines drawn between the tasks and accountability of these teams. However, a guest doesn’t experience a hotel this way.

Guests see the entire organization as a whole. Everyone on staff is a representative of the brand. No matter if it’s a housekeeper in the hallway, a groundskeeper on the lawn or the front desk agent — all represent you and your hotel. You or your staff may get asked the same questions hundreds of times, and to you the answer(s) may seem so obvious, but to each guest, that question is being posed for the very first time. Treat everyone as if you’re hearing the question for the first time. Take time to explain, and show you care about even the simplest query. We humans are sensitive creatures. We can tell when someone genuinely cares about us, or is just a bit annoyed.

With so many opportunities for guest interactions, it’s easy to see how you can tip the customer service scales either way. It takes very little effort for an interaction to be steered in a positive direction — moving that guest toward loyalty. But, it takes even less for an interaction to completely fly out of control! By training employees on how to use the five tips above, you can ensure the customer will keep paying you for the experience.

John Ely is senior VP of marketing for Signature Worldwide. He is responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating strategic marketing and corporate growth plans, and has industrial and consumer marketing experience. He has an associate degree in electrical engineering, a bachelor's in technical management and a master's in marketing and communications. He is a member of the American Marketing Association and Product Development Management Association. Mr. Ely has served as a professor at Franklin University and is certified as a "Teaching at a Distance" (TAD) online educator. Mr. Ely can be contacted at 614-766-5101 or johnely@signatureworldwide.com Extended Bio...

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