Research: Lessons from hospitality that can serve anyone

Paper (2001) by: Robert C. Ford and Cherrill P. Heaton. Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0090-2616(01)00039-0.

I have read the paper so you don't have to. The 5 biggest lessons that teach you about the essence of hospitality, tourism and leisure management.

Hospitality organizations, and most other service organizations, are different from traditional manufacturing organizations in some fundamental ways.

• First, the people “manufacturing” a service experience are not hidden away in an “authorized access only” factory floor. They are “on stage” all the time while they are producing lunches, hotel check-ins, Disney magic, or trips to New York. If they don’t make the experience work, it won’t work, and there is no rework pile for a bad experience.
• Thus, employees in the hospitality industry—like those in most service industries—not only have to be capable of producing the service experience; they have to do so while guests or customers are talking to them, distracting them, and watching everything they’re doing.
• Additionally, these employees have to fix any errors made in this production process on the spot and appropriately. The skill set required of hospitality employees is considerably more complex than the set required to participate in the production process of a tire, refrigerator, or auto in a manufacturing plant.
• What’s even more amazing is that the hospitality guest contact employees producing these consistently outstanding experiences are frequently the same young people whose parents can’t get them to clean up their rooms at home.
• The hospitality organization has to serve a multitude of “very individual people” or VIPs, each of whom expects something a little bit different from the experience. The hospitality product cannot be packaged and put on a shelf for
  purchase. It is ever changing and defined anew in the mind of each guest every time it is experienced.

Traditional organizations rely on policies and procedures to ensure proper command and control of the employees producing the products. Hospitality organizations have to substitute culture and empowerment [...] for command
and control, because no one is smart enough to anticipate and plan for every conceivable desire and requirement that each unique guest will bring to the hospitality experience.

Unlike the manufacturing industry, which can rely on statistical reports to tell managers how things are going on the production line, managers of these benchmark service organizations inform themselves about how things are going by staying as close to the point where the guest experience is produced as possible.

Being recognized and acknowledged as an individual is or can be a key driver for just about every customer. Everyone wants to feel special and be treated as an individual. Personalizing the experience is one way to wow customers.

Ritz–Carlton [...] asks its employees to provide information related to service delivery. Employees are asked to listen for and record in the database any relevant guestrelated information that might assist the hotel in adding value and quality to the guest’s experience.

Like managers everywhere, the managers of the best hospitality organizations know that making every customer feel special is an important way for an organization to differentiate its customer-service experience. The difference is that these managers aggressively use this knowledge to make their guests feel personally treated.

Many organizations now have access to the power of building personalized relationships with their present customers and offering such relationships to their future customers. The best hospitality organizations know that success is never final, and that the drivers of customer satisfaction today may not work or may be too commonplace tomorrow.

Before making every decision, they ask the question, “How will the customer feel about this?”

The goal should be to fail no customer.

The value and quality of the product are determined exclusively in the mind of the customer. Only that person can tell you if the service experience was a “wow” or an “ow,” and whether the experience was worth the time and money spent on getting it.

Because each customer determines the quality and value of the service experience, how should the organization concentrate its efforts to make sure each guest has a good one? Almost invariably, the customer’s judgments of quality and value depend on the excellence of the customer-contact employees.

The empowered service provider can personalize the service experience to meet or exceed each customer’s expectations and can take whatever steps are necessary to prevent or recover from service failure. [...]

Every organization has a culture of some kind, whether or not anyone is managing it, defining it or teaching it to employees.

Front-line employees frequently face problems and decisions not covered by their formal training. In those situations, employees must be able to translate the cultural principles of guest service into the appropriate behavior in each situation where they are responsible for making the customer experience work well.

The organizational culture fills in the gaps between (1) what the organization can anticipate and train its people to deal with and (2) the opportunities and problems that arise in daily encounters with awide variety of customers.

There is no way to anticipate the many different things customers will do, ask for, and expect from the service provider. The power of the culture to guide and direct employees to do the “right thing” for the customer becomes vital.

The more intangible the product, the stronger the cultural values, beliefs and norms must be to ensure that the customer-service employee provides the quality and value of customer experience that the customer expects and that the organization wants to deliver.

All organizations can use stories, heroes, myths, and legends to help teach the culture, to communicate the values and behaviors the organization seeks from its employees in their job performance, and to serve as role models for new situations. Most people love stories. It’s so much easier to hear a story of what a hero did than to listen to someone lecturing about “customer responsiveness” in a formal training class.

Every organization should capture and preserve the stories and tales of its people who do amazing things, create magical moments, to wow the customer.

All organizational leaders are crucial in transmitting and preserving the organizational culture.

Organizational leaders in all fields know intellectually that “culture is important,” but they do not always teach and live the culture with the force and consistency necessary to drive employee behavior.

Ed Schein suggests that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and maintain the organization’s culture. Leaders who appreciate the importance of culture spend more time communicating values than they do on anything else.

Only in walking around can managers see for themselves that the quality of customer experiences is high, that concerns of customers and employees are being met, and that everyone remains focused on the customer.

Leaders [...] teach the culture by what behaviors they support and don’t support.

A popular buffet restaurant decided to add a “greeter” position to welcome customers as they entered the restaurant. The manager told the newly hired employee explicitly that is primary responsibility was to greet and welcome the customers. However, as time went on, to keep the employee busy when customers were not entering the restaurant, the manager added responsibilities to the position—such as checking periodically to make sure there were enough trays or making sure that the butter dish was always full. The greeter quickly realized that the manager never complimented him for properly greeting the customers, nor did he ever say anything to him when he missed a customer because he was too busy with his other duties.
But if he ever let the buffet line run out of trays or butter, he was strongly reprimanded. Therefore, by her actions or lack of action, the manager had redefined the job description. The manager made her real priorities clear, and the employee adjusted his actions accordingly.

Many a company tells its employees that they should make every effort to satisfy the customer. Then the company evaluates and rewards employee performance only according to the budget numbers. This practice has been called “rewarding A while hoping for B.”

Clearly, employees have to be not only well trained, but also well trusted to make the right decision for the guest without requiring time-consuming checks with a senior manager for approval.

in the best circumstances when the measures of guest expectations and employee performance are clear, fair, and completely understood by employees, they will be able to measure for themselves how well they are doing. Self-management through self-measurement is a fundamental premise for the W. Edwards Deming quality-circle movement that anchored the quality-improvement literature and efforts in total-quality management.