Freshen Up Your Staff For Summer

Busy times approach. You’ll be hiring seasonal staff and giving them a crash course in how to work at a hotel. How to treat guests, how to present the property in the best manner.

It might be a good idea to have your year-round staff freshen up their customer service skills at the same time. Because the one thing you covet for your customers is for each one to have a consistent experience of your hotel.

When customers, such as hotel guests, interact with a seller, such as a hotel, they view the experience as one thing: “It was a good experience” or “We didn’t really like that place.” What gives guests an overall good, positive experience of your property is having a consistently good experience from check-in to cleanliness to furnishings to staff interactions to any other touch-points.

It doesn’t matter if you do nine things well, if the housekeeper’s rude to the guest, that colours the entire experience to negative. So how should your staff provide a consistently satisfactory experience for your guests?

Make sure each staff member knows what’s expected of them at all times. Don’t assume they know it - a housekeeper might think customer service isn’t her job, that’s the front desk’s responsibility. She couldn’t be more wrong.

Train all staff members, no matter their job, if it’s customer-facing, back office or support, that their actual job is to satisfy the guests. If they’re in billing, their job is to make that as satisfactory an experience as possible for the guest. If they’re housekeeping, they’re as polite, pleasant and helpful to the guest as if they’re the doorman.

Have staff role-play situations. It sounds corny but it’s actually often fun for the other staff and it gets the point across in a humorous, and not easily forgotten, way.