Ms. Knutson

Sales & Marketing

Will You Please Stop Trying to Satisfy Your Guests?

By Bonnie Knutson, Professor, The School of Hospitality Business/MSU

When it comes to thinking about giving good service, everyone in the hotel business talks about the importance of guest satisfaction. You have to satisfy your guests. You have to conduct surveys asking them, “Are you satisfied with...” Guest satisfaction is your number one goal. Bunk! Baloney! Hogwash!

While satisfaction is certainly better than dissatisfaction, in today’s competitive lodging environment, satisfaction doesn’t cut it. Merely satisfying your guests will not be nearly enough to keep you growing and prospering over the long run.

Heresy, you might say. In yesterday’s way of thinking, that may have been true. But not today. And certainly not tomorrow. If you don’t believe me, take a look at what the venerable old dictionary says. Webster tells us that satisfaction means “anything that brings gratification, pleasure, or contentment.” It’s a short-term thing. But you don’t want short-term guests. You want long-term relationships with loyal guests who return many times and then go out and tell or tweet others how great it is to stay at your hotel. So you really don’t want satisfied guests; what you really want is delighted guests.

Again, let’s turn to venerable old Webster. Delight brings “a high degree of pleasure…it is the power of pleasing, the power of giving great pleasure; it is that which affords rapture.” Yeah! That sound more like what you want your guests to feel about staying in your hotel. You want them to be delighted, not just satisfied.

Guest delight is more important than good guest service because it has a different focus. When you focus on providing good service, it is too easy to define it from a managing-the-hotel point of view. It is too technical; too procedural. It’s place the amenity package here, or place the pillow there.

What makes delight so powerful is that it cannot be defined from the hotel’s point of view. It must be defined from the guest’s point of view. To know if your guest is delighted, you have to look at the whole guest experience from his or her perspective. And that, as we all know, it the only point of view that really matters. As my dad used to always tell me, “If you’re not seeing what our customers see, you’re seeing it wrong.” Focusing on delight will force you to see everything that happens in your hotel through the guest’s eyes, and that will keep you more in touch with their total experience.

Remember that delight is based on a personal connection, not on technical execution. Service is about technical execution. It is about timing, and quality, and channels of distribution. Technical execution is certainly important; it is necessary. But it is not sufficient enough to delight your guests.

Delight, on the other hand, is about personal connection. It is about me taking care of you, because you are you, not just one of many hotel guests. In truth, you never serve 100 guests anyway. You serve only one guest at a time in 100 different scenarios. The more personal that interaction is and the more it delights, the more loyal that guest will be. And after all, isn’t marketing really just all about making and keeping guests at a profit?

A case in point that will always stick in my mind: On a Friday night, my husband and I decided to go out to grab a bite for supper. It was a spur of the moment thing. Se we called our daughter to see if her family wanted to go with us.

“Sure, we’ll pick you up about 6:30,” was her reply.

As we hopped into her SUV, our 7-year-old and 5-year-old granddaughters excitedly asked, “Can we go to Kathy’s restaurant? Can we? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Now if you look in the phone book or an online directory, there is no Kathy’s restaurant. But in our granddaughters’ minds, the restaurant belonged to Kathy and they are delighted to go there – not for the food, not for the good service, but because Kathy, one of the evening managers, delights them. With wide eyes and genuine hugs when they come in, Kathy leads each child into her office and over to a “secret” toy box. Here, they can select a toy to play with while eating at the restaurant and not just the proverbial crayons and coloring book either (although they are available too). There are Etch-a-Sketches, little boxes of Legos, toy soldiers and small dolls among other playthings. And if a child has a particular favorite, she will set it aside for him or her when the parents (or grandparents) make the dinner reservation. Kathy also lets each select a piece of candy from a special basket that she brings over to the table after they finish their dinners – with parents’ permission, of course. She admires their “artwork,” talks to them about school, and listens as they excitedly tell her about their other adventures. Finally, she takes a digital photo of the table, quickly prints it in her office, and sends it home with the family for the refrigerator photo gallery. No wonder our granddaughters want to go to there…to Kathy’s restaurant.

In addition to her special toy box, Kathy spreads her delight in a host of other small but meaningful ways. She keeps a supply of wet naps, disposable diapers, bibs, and even an assortment of clean shirts in her office for those unexpected moments that often comes with toddlers. And, when it comes to toddlers, she makes sure they have smaller flatware, non-breakable plates and glasses, and flexible straws for these younger guests. In other words, no guest is too young to be delighted – not to mention the appreciative parents (or grandparents).

The thing about Kathy is that she doesn’t treat our granddaughters any differently than she would her other guests. She doesn’t serve hundreds of guests a night. She served each one in a hundred of different scenarios. And she always focuses on making sure each and every one of her guests is delighted, not just satisfied.

We all know that a satisfied guest will probably come back and may even tell or tweet others about the hotel. But if guests are delighted – if they received more than expected from caring people who connect with them on a personal level -- they are much more likely to be the active, loyal guest that every hotel wants and needs. And their enthusiasm will spill over, increasing the likelihood that they will become greater ambassadors for your property, telling others about the delightful experience of being a guest there. That’s the best Return on Investment on your marketing dollar your hotel can get.

Your bottom line will thank you.

Bonnie J. Knutson is a professor in The School of Hospitality Business in the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. She is an authority on emerging lifestyle trends and innovative marketing. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and on PBS and CNN. She has had numerous articles in industry, business, and academic publications. Bonnie is a frequent speaker for executive education as well as business and industry meetings, workshops, and seminars. Dr. Knutson is also editor of the Journal of Hospitality & Leisure Marketing. Ms. Knutson can be contacted at 517-353-9211 or drbonnie@msu.edu Extended Bio...

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