Guest Service: Can We Meet and Exceed Expectations?
By Robert O'Halloran
How do we define guest service?
One person's definition may not match another definition, and you often hear that it depends on what you mean by guest service.
If you search for synonyms for guest service, you can assemble a list of terms that may include customer service and or engagement. People often prefer to use the word customer instead of the word guest commonly used in the hospitality industry.
Common themes for customer, guest, client and user experiences include satisfaction, fulfilment, excellence, loyalty, ease of use, environment and orientation. These themes highlight a positive guest service experience and reputation for a lodging and hospitality business. The issue of guest service has changed dramatically since the catalyst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this author's opinion, productivity and speed have begun to outweigh the needs of a high-quality guest service environment. Others would argue that businesses do not have the personnel to deliver a high-quality guest service experience along with a great room and or a great meal.
One can research and find synonyms for customer experience that include:
- customer satisfaction
- client experience
- client satisfaction
- degree of satisfaction
- fulfilment of customers' requirements
- customer excellence
- fulfilment of customers' needs
- customer loyalty
- satisfied customers
- user experience
- client environment
- client orientation
High quality guest service standards have a price-value relationship and need to address a total guest experience. It is understandable that hospitality businesses focused on productivity to survive at the height of the pandemic. However, in the current and continuing pandemic impacts, noting high COVID-19 numbers, guest service is seen as less structured, less formal and in some cases sloppy.
Consider that guest service is structured for a business environment, offered through standards in a hotel and as a personal product by employees of hotel. To dissect personal guest service, factors like, communication, coordination, control, content, and persona are vital components. A new normal experience in guest service may also include a lack of communication. This professor's observations go beyond students in my attempt(s) to be a student of the hospitality industry.
Service includes a regular sustained level of communication based on guests' needs and expectations (not so dissimilar to students). Our family guest service experiences over the holidays included multiple occurrences of service and communication gaps. For example, a New Year's Eve reservation made online at a restaurant visited previously was accepted for 6 people at 6:00pm. The reservation was confirmed, and in place for a week when we received a telephone call telling us the restaurant decided to have a special event that evening, and they would not honor our reservation unless we wanted to book the special dinner.
This occurred less than a week prior to New Year's Eve and there was no effort made to try and accommodate as we had originally booked. In this scenario, more prompt communication was in order but did not happen. The call was not rude but showed a lack of empathy for our situation where we now had to look for alternatives. That is not good guest service. I understand the desire to create a special event, but they let us down on the service. Note, we had a nice New Year's Eve.
Great service is memorable but is sometimes hard to find. Bad service experiences are also memorable and there are more of them than anyone needs. The understanding of what great guest service should be is misunderstood or ill-defined. One solution could be education and training on guest service and delivering observable great service examples from the top down in an organization.
Lodging Service
The headwinds blowing against the hotel industry are many and all too real, from inflation and supply chain to labor and interest rates. At the most recent Lodging Conference, it was noted that "Rates are increasing, but we don't have the labor force, so service is an issue. We are asking for a higher rate but delivering less service to the guest. That elasticity will break at some point and guests won't pay." Hotel customers can expect to continue to pay higher room rates, but their service expectations should potentially not be as high. A pervasive labor shortage is forcing hotels to do more with less staff-and that oftentimes means that guests will have to temper their service assumptions. Conversely, why should guests temper their service expectations?
For example, great food and beverage (F&B) is all about serving delicious, well-sourced food that's not pretentious and sets the stage for a great service experience. However, one of the big issues for F&B is labor. It is hard for a full-service restaurant to fully staff up and deliver great guest service. Conceptually, food and beverage setting scan support guest service by offering more space, guest comfort and a great safe service experience. As one restaurateur noted, organizations must constantly reinforce and remind their service staff that they are in the service business, and service comes before business.
Lodging operators need to define what great guest service is for themselves, their operations and their employees. Planning for great service should include a conceptual guest service definition and the action steps needed to operationalize that guest service concept. Lodging service planners also need to plan their service strategy based on a hotel's physical space, level of product offering (i.e. luxury vs. economy etc.) location and sales strategies. When a hotel can mesh their marketing and sales with customer service strategy, they position themselves to be successful. Knowing your market and the sectors a hotel is trying to attract is critical to a guest service plan.  Â
These efforts focus on all aspects of a hotel and its employees at all levels getting connected to create customer service journeys, including intelligent self-service. Some operators also note that services are consumed on a per-seat, per-concurrent-user or transaction basis therefore, the number of service interactions is huge. A conceptual service plan is about process and personalized customer engagements. Then it is vital in the effort to operationalize a service plan will require developing and maintaining engaged and empowered staff based on the understanding that engaged employees power their guest service strategy. Great staff service also means a well-educated and trained guest service staff that can make recommendations and provide options and alternatives to hotel guests.
As previously noted, staff shortages create service problems. Alternative options will include automation and self-service options. Lodging operators can't make excuses-they need to find creative solutions to work around challenges. Automating operations and providing service options can help to reduce the need for human service contacts without sacrificing customer experience. Additionally in2023, self-service options may increase and expand to short videos and voice memos to allow customers to solve problems and get answers on their own time. Another guest service option may be "Phygital experiences" that blur the line between physical and digital.
Phygital will expand beyond kiosks and apps to innovative experiences that guests/customers use to make purchases. The prevailing thought process is that every guest service experience matters during inflation and that brands need to showcase empathy and build relationships for the future. Additionally, widespread immersive experiences for guests are expected to become more common and allow guests to step into a new world where showcasing products and brands and building virtual worlds encompassing lodging and hospitality products.
From driving sustainable growth, to aligning your teams and integrating your technology, to empowering employees to do their best work-there's more on a hotel's agenda than ever. Meanwhile, customer expectations can feel like a moving target that only goes up: buyers today are digital first, becoming more informed, more comfortable switching between channels, more likely to ignore anything that doesn't feel authentic-and they expect businesses to follow their lead.
To stay relevant to your customers, leaders are rethinking their approach to guest experience at every touchpoint. Operators need to connect customer insights and data across your organization-sales, marketing, and service-to meet each moment. Experts also note that the importance of AI, analytics, and automation and shifting from 'real-time to 'right time' personalized experiences. Guests and customers are changing faster than businesses can. Overcoming this crisis of relevancy requires shifting from a customer-centric strategy to a life-centric strategy and incorporating guest service planned as a data-centric approach to create more meaningful experiences.
The result of great guest service is focused on guest satisfaction. To increase customer satisfaction, lodging operations will need to focus on communication, service delivery, product quality and satisfactoriness. Going forward, guest service plans should include investments in technology, including options in voice recognition and bots, and consideration of guest emotional well-being, engagement in loyalty programs opportunities, a quick response to guest issues and or complaints, and making guest data privacy a priority. As noted great guest service also needs solid communication. Lodging organizations need communication systems that leverage their expertise and analytics to guide them toward the right solutions today and in the future looking at 2023 being all about customer lifecycle management.
Guest Service Education and TrainingÂ
Service professionals need visibility into the entire customer journey. The State of Service Report notes that making "connections" is at the heart of service. Businesses need to embrace the changes that digital engagement brings and focus on guest service via efficiency, cost savings and the willingness to do more with less.
Lodging organizations need to make a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. Taking care of your employees is important and will help support business sustainability and as a result provide better guest service. A significant part of that process is providing educational and training opportunities for employees that will allow them to perform better and be more profitable for themselves and the hotel.
Guest or customer service has also long been researched and tied to guest satisfaction. The question is, how are we (employees, students etc.) educated to provide great guest service experiences? Do we as individuals have a service attitudes and are we as hospitality industry professionals proud to serve? Employees, students etc. all can read definitions of guest service and view videos showing the "right" (defined by the hotel) way to provide guest service in all guest interactions. The trick is how to have hotel/hospitality employees embrace a service culture and deliver great service. As we all know, working with the public can be challenging! Thinking of service training and education should be inclusive of lectures/discussions, role plays, digital training options, case studies, and more.
Having a teaching-learning and training framework could be helpful to create the optimal guest service education and training programs. It is noted that the delivery of great guest service in hotels is often observable and therefore available for replication, often defined as a high form of flattery, even from competitors.
A framework for guest service planning could include sources for standards and criteria that are available online. For example, one could cite the Malcolm Baldridge Award standards and criteria as a framework for excellence that includes guests/ customers. Included in their standards (planning) and criteria are all aspects of management: leadership; strategy; customers (or, in education and health care, students and patients, respectively); measurement (guest service metrics), analysis, and knowledge management; the workforce; operations; and results (delivery of guest service). Note, I am not recommending fully engaging in the Baldridge Awards program, but to research the structure of their programs and examples of excellence. Additionally, site visits to hotel properties noted for great service would also be useful and illuminating. Great examples of guest service abound in the lodging and hospitality businesses, take a look and it may help develop great guest service ideas.Â
Guest Service Going Forward-Alternatives
There are numerous trends in guest service that embrace the digital transformation of businesses, the labor shortage and inflation. Employment upheaval will complicate customer experiences. Automation, self-service options and more will forever change a guest service experience in a hotel. Ideas that could be helpful and supportive could be a new guest onboarding process, which is probably the most important stage of a guest service lifecycle. While it comes right at the start of their journey, it sets the tone for their whole relationship with your hotel and or hospitality offerings with your organization. A good onboarding process will keep your guests engaged.
Helping guests and potential guests clearly understand their experience and the value they will get from your hotel's service experience will give them a reason to come back. For example, by recognizing past purchase history and knowing the customer's name, address and contact info, the customer service experience can be highly personalized. Also noted are the growth of chatbots and expansion of omnichannel experiences to help to personalize a guest experience. Omnichannel is a multichannel approach to sales that seeks to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience, whether they're shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar business. While technology will remain a critical part of guest service and increased speed and quality of a guest service experience, it is still critical to have humans involved in the process.
Although frontline service role performance is typically classified as prescribed or discretionary, the increasingly diverse needs and expectations of customers suggest that frontline employees may have to engage in a variety of behaviors in order to enhance the customer experience. Great guest service is always going to be critical for lodging operators and their guests. A service skill set in this author's opinion should include attributes such as product knowledge, clear communication, listening, attention to detail, time management, persuasive speaking, empathy, and composure. Â
How do organizations build an internal capability to implement a service excellence strategy? A competitive advantage can be gained as a result of service performance, proactive customer service, and customer focused voice-operationalize service role performance.
To assist guest service experiences one recommendation seen in guest experience literature includes the creation of Customer Journey Maps (CJM). The development and use of CJMs -- it is argued -- can assist customer experiences. A customer journey map is a visual picture of the customer or user journey. It helps you tell the story of your customers' experiences with your brand across social media, email, live chat, and any other channels they might use. Their results in some business sectors have included an increase in return on investment in marketing and advertising spending and public relations campaigns. CJM can be thought of as a mesh of customer service, sales and marketing and helps facilitate cross-department communication and decision making.
Additionally, the creation of sound guest service metrics can create decision making tools and guideposts for guest service plans. Some guest service metrics could include, satisfaction ratings, revenues, retention of guests and or low employee turnover, average response time, average guest interaction time, employee experience documentation, volume of guest service interactions per employee, resolution time of guest issues and cost per contact of guest service.
Wrapping up this discussion, everyone needs to define guest service for themselves and their organizations? Guest service is a process that guides a guest experience by meeting and or exceeding guest needs. The guest service factors can include efficiency, effectiveness, communication, and quality based on a price and value relationship. Recalling great guest service scenarios often focuses on final results but also how the experience and interaction or touch point(s) made them feel. Did a guest service experience reinforce a guest's decision to select the hotel and or did it make a guest think they made a poor choice?
The labor shortage, as noted earlier in this discussion, impacts guest service struggles. Hotels and hospitality businesses in general are hiring and the evidence of job postings is everywhere. Where will additional employees, guest service providers needed to enhance guest service experiences, come from? We can look to the future and the next generation of hospitality professionals but current demand for employees could mean penetrating other service sectors and or other employment markets. We can remember that when the pandemic hit and so much closed down in hospitality, separated employees were welcomed in retail, healthcare, grocery and more. Former hospitality employees have settled in their new service sectors, and it will be hard to lure them back. What can hotels and other hospitality businesses offer employees in other sectors to join or rejoin lodging and hospitality.
Guest service needs employees that are "Proud to Serve" and want to be service professionals. My vision of service makes me recall a technology "service" incident I had years ago. My computer was malfunctioning at my office, and I requested a technician to come and fix the problem. The young man quickly noted that it was the brand of computer that was causing the problem and that I would just have to live with it because that what happened with that brand. My frustration was that this computer was provided by my employer at the time and not doing the job. I directly requested the technician to leave, and I requested that a "tech service" professional be assigned. Upon arrival the new technician informed me that he brought a temporary replacement just in case he needed to take my laptop with him to fix it. My files were backed up, he took my computer and then returned it in a couple of days, repaired. A great service recovery, in my opinion!
In the pandemic the hospitality industry reacted swiftly and implemented numerous mobile applications to enhance service and operations in hotels. We can all note that the use of mobile applications remains widespread. Technology can be a great tool for guest service, especially when focusing on guest interactions and guest safety and sanitation. The current news of layoffs in multiple sectors begs the question, how will these companies and sectors support great guest or customer service?
Great guest service is needed and appreciated, but as noted, may be difficult to find and experience. In a time digital options, more casual settings and work environments, and limited labor doing more with less, guest service may need to lean heavily on personality, kindness, and mutual respect.
