Building a World Class Hotel Service Culture & Branded Experiences

So you’re wanting to create, sustain or radically flip your hotel service culture? Maybe you’re launching a brand new hotel concept, revitalising that dinosaur or an independent hotelier serious about service. Regardless, building a world class hotel service culture requires discipline and strategy. Guest advocacy (via awesome service) isn’t a fluke.

Profitable hotel service cultures need well mixed ingredients.

I was 2o years of age when starting work on hotel service cultures at Copper Mountain Resort. We lived the mantra “creating memories” and I trained 1200 staff on our guest experience. Since then, I’ve worked on the employee experience at Princess Cruises, helped launch the ‘Service Promise’ program for Virgin Australia and built the hotel service culture, brand experience and guest touch points for Snotels Hotels. The biggest lesson? The strategy must integrate people and process. Here’s a step by step guide:

1. Hotel Asset Strategy
2. Hotel Brand Strategy
3. The Service Experience
4. The Service Framework
 The Levels of Service
Department:          Front Office
Standardised - Share that they’ve been emailed a receipt
Personalised – Engage in upbeat, friendly conversations
Personalised - Help carry luggage to the guest’s vehicle
Personalised - A surprise happy birthday song for them
5. Policies and Processes
6. Create Support Systems

7. Recruit your Hotel Team
8. Training your Hotel Team
9. Engaging your Hotel Team
10. Leading your Hotel Team
11. Measure your Hotel’s Results
12. Go for Operational Excellence

Profit isn’t a dirty word. Hoteliers and Owners demand profit from operating cash flows and capital gains. The asset strategy will distinctly influence the hotel service culture – so what is it? It will depend on sector (economy, mid-scale, luxury etc), profitability plans (commercial turnarounds, property renovations, cost management, hotel sales), market conditions and the Owner’s intentions to expand, hold or sell the hotel.

You need to clarify your brand strategy, visuals and personality. Maybe you’re creating, revamping or continuing with your existing tangible brand elements (like logos, colours, signage, taglines and tone of voice). There must be clear alignment between brand identity elements and your hotel service culture. Check out the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. This is a classic example of brand and hotel service alignment.

Before getting into detail, how can you describe your service experience? What is your vision and guiding principle? Keep it short, inspirational and simple – it should become your team mantra. Here are examples yet create one for your hotel service culture.

a happy hotel team offering light-hearted service, spontaneous animation and brilliant basics with that genuine human touch

OR

empowered and professional people sharing a branded service experience with personalised surprises, wherever they roam

Now define your hotel service culture. Start by creating the ‘Guest Journey’. Map out every interaction or ‘touch point’ guests will experience. This shapes the framework before defining service levels. Your Guest Journey will likely have common hotel experience elements plus unique service touch-points, as relevant for your hotel brand.

This might include hotel rooms, products, services, onsite facilities and critical service recovery steps. When starting your map, crowd-source your team’s knowledge and creativity. Compare your current  journey versus your future hotel service culture vision.

Importantly - involve your team and increase their belief in your hotel service culture.  

Work out which division or person is responsible for each touch-point. You’ll likely also have touch-points where any team member may be involved (i.e. a guest’s spontaneous question to engineers in the lobby or F&B staff helping with local info).

You’ve setup your hotel service culture’s vision and framework – it’s time for detail. For each touch-point, now define the pathway for individuals. This requires levels of service and discretion limits. Every single guest should experience the basic service levels (it’s this consistency that strengthens the hotel service culture and brand). As resources allow, some guests then experience extra and premium service. Also – you don’t want robot team members, so define what’s standardised versus personalised. For example…

//////////////

Touch-Point:          Check-Out

The Basics:

The Extras:

Premiums:

//////////////

For touch-points and hotel services, clearly explain the limits of discretion and decision making autonomy. For mid-scale and full-service hotels, I’d recommend high levels of empowerment, especially for service recovery needs.

Look at your hotel’s policies and processes. Nothing will kill your hotel service culture efforts quicker than policies that don’t support the service vision. New policies must flex around the service vision – otherwise you’ll never cement a branded guest experience. Teams need the support of their leaders via coaching (not punishment) for any incorrect decisions. After all, we’re in hospitality – let’s serve the people, not the process.

Technology has brought amazing opportunities for your hotel service culture. Read about Big Data in Hotels & Travel – Hype or Heaven for Sales and Service . With minimal expense, you can deploy online systems (or manual offline trackers) to support your hotel service culture. There are tools for enhancement (guest recognition, loyalty, employee knowledge, performance management) and for touch-point measurement (service reporting data systems) – get the right info to the right people at the right time.

Now knowing your service vision, change all frontline recruitment and leadership selection systems to focus on the relevant service behaviours. You should describe thebehavioural competencies needed to deliver the branded experience and amplify the hotel service culture. If your workforce includes third-party contractors or uses recruitment agencies, ensure these people really understand the required behavioural profiles. Show seriousness by scribing descriptions into any partnership agreements.

This is critical for achieving your hotel service culture. Every single team member needs to live and breathe the mantra – whether they’re the CEO, Gardener, Accountant or Housekeeper. Train all new and existing employees on your service program and invest extra time with operational leaders. Their efforts make or break hotel service cultures.

Again, any outsourced contractors must receive the same training – it’s your brand they will be impacting. Also, don’t short change yourself on trainers. Get expert facilitators toinfluence management. Infuse service culture behaviours into technical training.

Hotel service culture’s are muscles and powered by many people. You’ve got to exercise, train, motivate and believe. It needs constant attention, reinforcement and promotion. Implement and align your performance, recognition and reward programs to the service vision and framework. Make sure public recognition specifically mentions how they achieved or surpassed the service vision. Share service results and metrics with frontline staff and hold briefings to pump up your team members. It’s simple psychology – what behaviours must you encourage to drive your hotel service culture.

The senior leader’s at your hotel must set the tone. A hotel service culture must become aspirational, meaning that every team member is a passionate advocate and ambassador for the service vision. While recruitment, training and engagement count, it’s thesymbols and signals that leader’s send that others will follow. Ensure service accountabilities exist throughout the operation and that your hotel service culture efforts link to profit. If specific leader’s don’t support the mantra, it’s time for them to exit.

You’ve created the ecosystem to achieve your hotel service culture. Start measuring your service KPIs and every element of the Hotel Service Culture Model. What gets measured gets managed. These measures must be meaningful and relate to the vision and framework elements. For example, for overall guest advocacy you might track compliments received, survey results, tripadvisor trends, loyalty metrics or net promoter scores. For training, are new employees delivering the service levels? Measured results must be acted upon instantly as ready (and medium term trends) to sustain seriousness.

Continual improvements are needed. Review your service framework regularly to check it’s relevance and attain genuine unbiased feedback on your brand experience. Once elements are in motion, aim for operational excellence within your hotel service culture. Importantly – don’t solely be influenced by the quantitative data and metrics.

Regularly conduct what’s called a See-Feel-Think-Do - it means making decisions based on your gut feelings. Trust yourself, the feedback from guests and team member opinions – it will ensure you can adapt quickly to build the needed hotel service culture.

Interested in launching or revamping your hotel service culture and brand? Contact me .