Mr. Boles

Human Resources, Recruitment & Training

Benchmark Your Way to a Better Service Plan

By Jesse Boles, Executive Director of Operations, FreemanGroup

You have to use all of your resources as efficiently as possible in order to achieve the highest level of success for your organization. In the hospitality industry, your prime resource is people. If you don’t know how well your people are delivering your brand and providing guests with the kinds of experiences you are hoping to deliver, you can never really know whether you are achieving your highest levels of success.

Designing a service experience is all fine and good, but effectively executing and evaluating the experience is what separates winners from losers. To determine whether or not the service experience you are providing is both meeting your set standards and satisfying guests’ expectations, ask yourself two questions: “Is everything going according to plan?” and “Is the plan good?”

Is Everything Going According to Plan?

One way to find out if everything is going according to plan is by performing internal inspections. Internal inspections can often be effective when you want to know if you are executing your standards for material service. You can determine things such as whether the beds are properly made and whether the presentation of food is to specifications, and so on. One plus to performing internal inspections is that it allows you to use auditors that already know your standards down to the finest detail. Another plus is the relatively low cost of completing internal inspections.

Finding the right people to carry out the inspections or audits is the biggest challenge associated with internal inspections. You will need to be aware of inherent biases. We often see what we expect to see, and can become accustomed to overlooking poor performance. If an inspector is known to your staff, it may impact the performance the auditor is attempting to measure. Adding a mystery shop component to your service plan will help you measure the quality of actual service delivery to a typical guest. An anonymous and unbiased inspector can provide you with a typical guest’s view of your brand and help you see how staff performs when they think no one is looking.

Whether you use internal auditors, mystery shoppers, or a combination of both to measure performance, the design of the metric is critical. What you measure will determine what your team focuses on, and can either support or undermine your training efforts. We have all heard the phrase “teaching to the test;” it is rarely, if ever, used complimentary. This is probably because there are a lot of lousy tests out there; if there weren’t, there would be nothing wrong with teaching to the test. The bottom line is that trainees are more apt to improve their performance when it is evaluated. Take the time to design an instrument that measures what is truly important about your brand. If you focus on finding out whether everyone is in uniform, wearing a name tag, and smiling, you will likely get team members that are very good at being in uniform, wearing a name tag, and smiling, and little else. A well-thought-out measurement program will yield more than superficial results.

Is the Plan Good?

Implementing a service plan successfully, as rewarding as it may be, is still only a means to the greater end of satisfying your guests. To make certain that your plan is really working for you, you have to be able to accurately measure guest satisfaction, and then be willing to listen to what the guest is saying.

The best way to finding out what matters to your guests is to put in place a solid guest comment program. Designing and executing an effective in-house guest comment program can be challenging, and often times, prove inefficient. Partnering with a third party hospitality solutions provider that already has proven systems in place is usually the more practical solution. Reliable third parties will possess the data you will need to benchmark your own data against, and should be able to give you direct access to networks of analysts that can successfully create and conduct guest comment programs, mystery shop programs, and analyses using ready-built systems designed specifically to collect and report your data.

Whether you decide to design a guest comment program internally or partner with a reputable third party, the biggest challenge you will face is making sure that you are gathering truly valuable information.

Comment cards are inexpensive and simple enough to gather, but won’t give you an accurate picture of your service levels due to the large segments of customers who elect not to fill out comment cards. It can also be time-consuming and resource-draining to enter handwritten data into a system to be analyzed. Comment card data entry performed manually also increases the number of errors that are likely to occur.

E-mail surveys are easier to analyze than paper cards, and also give you an opportunity to follow up with your guests. The main drawback of performing an e-mail survey has to do with the amount of time between a guest’s visit and the actual filling out of the survey. If data collection occurs well after the guest’s visit, their memories will not be as fresh as they would have been had they filled out a comment card while still on your property, and their answers may not be as accurate.

Intercept surveys are a very good solution. Intercept surveys capture feedback from guests before they leave the property, and, because they are electronic, can be instantly loaded into a data set. You will have to make the initial investment in intercept survey technology, but the interface is relatively simple and easy enough for existing staff to administer. Intercept surveys can be easily delivered and gathered through phone apps, iPads, and other hand-held tools.

Whether your organization is big or small, it will probably take 90 days of data gathering for you to begin to get a clear picture of what your customers think of your standards and services. Once you have obtained 90 days of data and entered it into your guest comment system, your third party solutions provider should be able to benchmark the information you have obtained through internal inspections, mystery shops, and guest comments against the characteristics of similar companies housed in their database. Final reports will enable you to uncover what really matters to your guests, where you need to improve, and allow you to develop a fully-comprehensive company profile that should not only empower you to make the proper operational changes, but serve you during budgeting and forecasting.

Analyzing your data allows you to accurately identify your competition. Don’t get caught up in your perceptions of your competitors; instead, look at who your guests view as your competition. Ask them about your competition in intercept surveys and look to TripAdvisor to assess your competition.

Using the Results

By coupling your competitor list with your internal inspection, mystery shop, and guest comment analyses, you can set yourself up to create a plan of action that will allow you to determine the areas in which you may be able to easily overtake your competition, your strengths and how to go about playing them up, and prioritize the areas in which you need to improve so that you can implement high-impact changes that will yield positive results sooner rather than later. As you chart your course for improvement, set timelines for training staff, adding services, and making room for capital expenditures. (Safety, financial, or legal issues will have to be made first priority, regardless of how difficult they may be to resolve.)

Once benchmarking is complete, choose how to apply your presumably limited resources carefully in order to achieve the greatest return. While there will be many variables that affect your choices, keep in mind that in all cases, what matters most to the guest should be made high priority.

Also focus on areas where you are either just below, or on a par, with your competition. These areas will frequently present opportunities for you to gain a competitive advantage at a low marginal cost. A slight improvement in the speed of services may be accomplished with a small investment in man hours, and yield immediate, positive results, and the addition of something such as a more diverse menu may be something relatively easy to implement, and have a high impact on guest return. Slight improvements can have a significant impact and spare you the costs of adding an entirely new service.

The biggest payoffs data analysis and benchmarking can deliver to your business are the retention of your guests and employee longevity. When you know what your guests want and how to instruct your staff to deliver it to them, guests win, employees win, and your organization thrives. Having a knowledgeable staff requires having knowledgeable leaders. Through data analysis and benchmarking, you can get both.

Jesse Boles joined FreemanGroup in 2007, and assumed the role of Executive Director of Operations in November 2008. He is currently responsible for FreemanGroup’s training and measurement divisions, heading projects in conjunction with some of the hospitality industry’s leading service providers. Mr. Boles has worked with leadership teams to develop brand service cultures at both existing and new properties for Las Vegas casinos and luxury hotels. He has been integral in the set up and execution of brand-specific measurement programs for Wyndham Hotel Group, Hard Rock International, Delaware North Companies, and MGM Resorts International. Mr. Boles can be contacted at 972-479-1345 or jboles@freemangroup.org Extended Bio...

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