Eat. Drink.
There is an immense shortage in available human resources today. I know you all are feeling the pain. There is also an increased demand from your customers for excellent and efficient service. Customers have been trapped for a year and are ready to spend. They actually have higher expectations than ever. They want your product yesterday without hassle. They will pay for your products, services and reputation, assuming you can deliver what you promise.
Are you actually capable of delivering what your team is selling? Do you understand and identify customer expectations based on how you are selling your products and services?
Go through a step-by-step review of your customer’s buying and service experience. Look at what you’ve changed due to your staffing limitations. Perform an operational review of your team and ask them for recommendations to save time and reduce unnecessary steps. Then, make these changes to enhance the customer experience. At that point, you must communicate what’s different to your customers in advance of delivery.
Customers are forgiving but only sooooo forgiving. We are still in the hospitality industry, and customers want a memorable experience, every time. They are paying for it and expect as such. There is a certain threshold for what is and is not acceptable if your doors are open.
Inspire.
I just returned from a week working with clients on the east coast. Getting back in the swing of pre-pandemic office visits and collaborative work was so invigorating, inspiring and exciting. This trip reaffirmed that I absolutely love what I do and working in person in the same room makes all the difference to connect with my wonderful customers.
I stayed in a comfortable, centrally-located conference hotel, rented a car from a leading car rental company and dined out at various restaurants the entire week. I had high hopes for excellent customer service but was also realistic knowing what hospitality companies are dealing with today.
Unfortunately, I experienced a lot of poor hospitality situations this week. I say situations because most team members went above and beyond to try to remedy the challenges. However, these employees had to work harder and spend more time and money on fixing the challenge than if they had just offered me the original product or service. A few examples:
Incorrect return date on my airport car rental. I tried to call the airport rental office and national rental customer service to correct the date, at least ten times. I spent over two hours listening to hold music. (I even called the emergency line as if my car is broke down, but they didn’t even answer.) On the 11th call, a national customer service agent finally answered, put me on hold for another 45 minutes to then disconnect the call. I gave up. I drove back to the airport, returned the car on the wrong date and walked right to the customer service desk to pick up keys for my second car. As I checked out the second car, the agent asked why I didn’t just extend the first car. Ugh. Imagine if they answered the phone. They would have had one less car to clean, one less car to check in and out and one less aggravated customer.
No housekeeping service. I was in a very nice hotel for seven nights at an extremely reasonable rate. I had to call on a daily basis for individual toiletry items that could have easily been stocked for me had the hotel thought about the length of my stay. Rather than bringing me everything at once, a housekeeping attendant would bring me single items delivered in a plastic laundry bag and hang it on my outside door knob. I also left my garbage out in the hall each morning so they could empty it. It made the halls look cluttered and messy. Imagine if the hotel had a housekeeping spot-check employee that simply audited each room, refilled supplies, removed dirty glassware and did a quick trash removal.
Club service. I know, this is a luxury item but as a business traveler, I select hotels that offer this amenity so I save time. Hotels sell this club service by offering a higher rate or by thanking you for your loyalty for this convenience. Pre-covid, I would grab some fruit, yogurt, coffee and bottles of water throughout my stay. Easy, quick and self-service. My seven-day hotel’s club had a broken coffee machine, bags of potato chips and occasionally, room temperature bottled water. In lieu of this club service, the hotel told me to call down and order anything I want from the room service menu for breakfast, compliments of them. This was unbelievably generous, and I expect very expensive in the long run. Now what used to be a quick grab involved calling the front desk to order, having a room service attendant bring the food and the kitchen making my customized breakfast to order. Imagine if they had the club running even at 50% of normal, the amount of money the hotel could save by minimizing all these steps?
These managers should have identified the basics of customer service and prioritized their limited human resources effectively. The employees spent more time running around to satisfy service substitutions. This made everything more difficult for the employee and the customer. Had they measured the amount of steps each employee took to deliver, they may have realized that the original services would have saved them more time in the long run.