Chapter 15:
The Tactics of the Hospitality Mentality
My first trip to the buffet was to sample the offering. It was exploratory, if you will. I took note of what was available, selected a few options, and upon consuming what I picked up in the first round, I decided to go back for more. A few things had caught my attention that I filed in the back of my mind, and now it was time to attack. On my table I left an empty plate, a half-full coffee mug, perfectly adequate silverware that I just used, and a napkin that I crumpled up and left on the table, knowing that I would be throwing it back in my lap in under a minute and a half.
When I returned to the table, I realized it was not the same as I had left it. In fact, it looked like I had never been there at all. The napkin had been folded and placed gently to the left of where my plate was, but the plate was gone. The silverware had been replaced with a clean set and placed on top of the napkin. Not only that, but the coffee mug was completely full and freshly steaming. Was I at the right table? Or was my server a ninja who paid attention to every small detail?
Many people may not have even noticed that that happened, but to those that would, it is a small gesture that exceeds the expectation of cleanliness. It was my mess, and I was still there, so why I would expect it to be cleaned up and completely reset in the 60-90 seconds that I was gone? This element of service was a tactic that brought to life the component of the strategy, “We aim to deliver a personalized experience at every possible opportunity, where the guest feels that they are the only one that matters, even if only for a brief moment.” It wasn’t a monumental “wow” moment, but in this case, it didn’t need to be. It was something slightly above average that the server knew to do whenever a guest goes back to the buffet for seconds. And it felt personal.
This standard of service is an example of one of the many tactics used that follow a strategy that is clearly incorporated into training and brings the philosophy to life. If the philosophy is broad and your strategy is targeted, then the tactics are the granular details that are seen and felt by your guests and staff alike. The beginning of Part 2 introduced “moments of truth” that make or break the experience, and moments of truth are largely tactical. Naturally, tactics vary considerably across departments, job duties, and organizations, yet they are the building blocks of how guests perceive your service culture and therefore are the actions that are defined and led by your guest experience strategy. The buffet experience I described (which I have encountered multiple times at buffets within luxury properties) is a tactic that tells the guest that you matter more when you are here than at a buffet whose servers do not reset your table setting when you stand up. The accumulation of small details like this fed into the overall perception of the experience. By doing this, they subconsciously understood that I did not need to stay at the hotel or dine at the buffet for breakfast and that I could have stayed anywhere else, or not even traveled to this city at all. This gesture showed appreciation for me making whatever effort was necessary to be at the buffet in that moment.
Other examples of tactics include the following:
Representing the basics (as outlined in Chapter 1) by projecting a friendly attitude, including eye contact, body language, and smiling
Using both hands to return a guest’s credit card or identification, rather than sliding it across a counter
Opening a door for a guest approaching
Walking a guest to a requested destination
Picking up trash instead of walking past it
Cautioning a guest to watch their step
Actively offering assistance if a guest appears unfamiliar or uncomfortable
Introducing yourself (when applicable)
Pointing with an entire hand instead of one finger
Tilting your head to demonstrate empathy in a difficult conversation
Thanking the guest for visiting
Inviting the guest to return
The list can go on, although you can determine the most applicable tactics that will bring your strategy to life. Once you have marked the strategy components that need improvement, create a separate list for each one, and define a series of tactics that will help bring the strategy to life. For example, in the previous chapter, we looked at the first component of the strategy to determine what needs to be done at the organizational level to ensure it is true. As a reminder, here it is again:
We treat everyone who visits as a guest, rather than a customer, because they are more valuable than the transaction.
Organizational actions:
We will remove the word “customer” from our training manual, website, and anywhere else (internal or external) and replace it with guest.
Management will lead by example by always using the word guest instead of customer, and will politely correct staff members when using the word customer.
In onboarding and training, we will stress the importance of our guest-centric mindset so new employees are aware of the difference from the start.
Don’t confuse these bullet points with tactics. These are the action items to help bridge the strategy to how they can be realized. Now, let’s take the same part of the strategy and look at what specific tactics need to be incorporated in order for it to be a true statement, and in particular what the preceding bullet points look like in practice. Here is the same statement, representing the first bullet point of the strategy, but now we assign more specific actions that the guest can see and feel.
We treat everyone who visits as a guest, rather than a customer, because they are more valuable than the transaction.
Tactics:
We make eye contact with every guest we see (or as many as possible), whether upon arrival or throughout their visit and when possible, extend a pleasant greeting with a smile.
We recognize that they may be in an unfamiliar environment, and just like a guest in our home, we offer specific guidance that they may or may not request. This can include informing them of their next steps, such as the location of an elevator, when they should be at a certain location, or what they can expect next.
We wish them an enjoyable experience and introduce ourselves as a reliable point of contact if they need anything, including how to get ahold of us.
Same with breaking down the strategy components, your tactics should be unique to your organization and match the service culture toward which you strive, while also fitting into the larger framework of The Hospitality Mentality. In addition to breaking down strategy components into action items of how to get there, create a parallel column that lists the tactics that feed into them as well. By using a table similar to this one, you can use the strategy components defined in Chapter 14 and consolidate your organizational action items along with your tactics in one place. Using this as your guide, you can ensure that the tactics fulfill the need of the organizational actions, which in turn serve the strategy component.
Strategy Component
We treat everyone who visits as a guest, rather than a customer, because they are more valuable than the transaction.
We acknowledge that true loyalty is a result of the guest experience, not loyalty programs, and therefore is driven by the service that we provide.
We recognize that our guests do not need to visit us, and they could do anything else with their time and money, and appreciate that they chose to spend it with us.
We seek to meet expectations before we exceed them, and keep the promises that we’ve made.
We aim to deliver a personalized experience at every possible opportunity, where the guest feels that they are the only one that matters, even if only for a brief moment.
We are even more enthusiastic than our guests, and we do not let the novelty factor wear off or become redundant.
We anticipate our guests’ needs by answering questions they did not know they had, combining our proficiency of the business with awareness of each guest’s unique circumstance.
Whenever we can, we create “wow” moments that surprise and delight our guests, and go far beyond even their highest expectations.
We seek and embrace guest feedback as the driving force for continually improving the experience.
We recognize that service failures are a natural part of the business and we have plans in place to recover when we fail to meet our guests’ expectations.
We encourage our satisfied guests to return by providing compelling reasons to visit again, and we recognize that our most satisfied guests are our best marketing for influencing others to visit.
We celebrate every guest.
Organizational Action
Tactic
These tactical elements each act as quick doses of guest satisfaction. As discussed in Part 2 of the book, these moments of truth add up over the course of the guest’s visit and in turn, they determine the satisfaction level at the end of the experience. The more you can focus on these tactical elements, no matter how minuscule or insignificant they might seem, the greater the chance that the guest will reflect on their visit with the perception that you pulled it off flawlessly. Even if it is as simple as folding a guest’s napkin when they go back to the buffet.
Bring your employees into the conversation
When filling out the table above, you will find that creating tactics can be done in multiple ways. For starters, you can fill this out yourself. Additionally, you can involve several members of leadership to ensure full alignment across multiple departments within your organization. And lastly, arguably the most exciting way is to turn this over to your frontline staff - the ones who are interacting with guests on a regular basis. By sharing the philosophy and the strategy (along with each component of the strategy), you can turn them loose into developing tactics that might be worth incorporating into training and operating procedures, or they might own it with their own personality, knowing that it might not work the same for anyone else. When employees know that they are empowered to inject their own personality into their guest interactions, the job becomes more fun, and yes, guests notice.
The biggest pushback to this type of employee empowerment is the fear of employees going too far off base, and ultimately disrupting the guest experience and the service culture strategy. This is a reasonable concern because they might make mistakes and upset a few guests along the way. However, the opposite of empowerment is scripting the delivery - while it may create consistency, it strips out all the flavor. Linda Rose Hayes, Founder of Hospitality Connect in Orlando, FL, believes that instead of providing scripts, it is more productive to empower the team, even if they might make a mistake. “You can tell the team member what to do, or you can allow them to make the mistake themselves and they will never make the same mistake, again. It is amazing the solutions people discover after they have made a mistake!”35 Linda stresses that hospitality is not brain surgery, and there should be more flexibility in the way that guests are served, as long as they are fully immersed in the service culture. “Allow people to find their own style. It doesn’t have to be your style, as long as it gets results, and their heart is in the craft. Let people make the mistakes with full acceptance to try again. Then their mindset will be ‘That is not the way I want to handle it. Next time, I want to do it differently.’”
When you incorporate the philosophy into day one training and then incorporate each component of the strategy, the tactics should naturally flow from their own creativity.
Reinforcing tactical behavior
The tactics of The Hospitality Mentality are flowing in the fast-paced river of your operation. They either accelerate the flow of the river and improve the guest experience, or they create friction when they are poorly executed that slow the flow down, leading to guest dissatisfaction. The way in which you reinforce the behavior of your team when they either hit or miss the mark will determine whether they help the river flow faster or if they slow it down.
One of the challenges of training employees, especially new hires, on a large number of tactical elements of their job duties is how much information they can retain and then put into use. If everything is covered in one sitting or one training session, there may be bits and pieces that the staff remembers the next day, but it is impossible to retain 100% of the information. Matt Heller, Founder of Performance Optimist Consulting and Co-Host of the AttractionPros Podcast, says that putting it all in front of the new employee on their first day makes them feel like they’re drinking from a fire hose. “When you are drinking from a firehose, you can’t take it all in. There’s just no way.” Instead, give them the most important tactics or behaviors that they must know on day one, and then spread the remainder out over time - through pre-shift meetings, one-on-one coaching sessions, or other ways that instead of feeling like they’re drinking from a fire hose, are more similar to having it dripped from a faucet. It resonates better, and it is easier to retain. As the training is dripped out over time, the employee is likely to pick up habits (hopefully good ones) from observing their peers and leaders, as well as developing their own natural style.
It can be difficult to identify every single time a guest service tactic is correctly carried out; however, recognizing them when you have the opportunity goes a long way. If you have an employee recognition program, such as rewards cards or other types of incentives, these work excellently in combination with these specific service elements that you and your guests alike love to see. When you see it in action, providing these rewards to your employees and specifically tying it to why they are getting them helps to reinforce the behavior and encourages it to continue. Even without a rewards program, thanking your employees and being specific with your feedback shows them that what they are doing is appreciated, which will help keep it within their routine.
On the flip side, it is also important to recognize when tactics are missed. A handful of poorly executed tactics will destroy a service culture, but letting them go unnoticed can lead to the figurative death of a thousand paper cuts. If the poor performance is not addressed in a timely manner, it sends the signal that it is okay to skip over these tactics, which leads to the deterioration of service… and guests will notice. When having these conversations with employees, tie it to something objective, such as an observation, guest survey, or online review, rather than giving the impression that this is your opinion. Point them to where the staff has agreed to these tactics, whether in training or in operating manuals. And most importantly, make it a coaching session, not necessarily a discipline session, because your desire to see improvement should exceed the desire to make the employee feel that they’ve done something wrong.
This is the tip of the iceberg when coaching employees for greater performance. There is much more to be said about leading a team toward optimal performance; however, the guidelines presented here fit within the context of The Hospitality Mentality.