Chapter 16: Measuring Progress of The Hospitality Mentality
Many people consider guest service to be a soft skill that is easy to implement and difficult to measure. That soft skill mindset leads to guest service being an afterthought, with training programs focusing on the necessary job duties that must be carried out in order to check the box of the operation. This isn’t wrong, but it’s not complete. What may seem like a soft skill is one of your biggest superpowers and separates you from your competition. For instance, you can fly many airlines to get from A to B, but Southwest has dominated the airline industry in the United States for being known for friendliness and personality. It is not in place of the functional elements that go into making a flight go smoothly, but rather a layer on top that the guest sees, feels, and experiences when they choose Southwest over other airlines. When you think “airline + service culture,” many people in the United States will tell you that it’s Southwest. When you want to buy shoes online, Zappos might stick out as “online shoe shopping + service culture,” and when you think “hardware + service culture,” Ace Hardware may come to mind. For these organizations, their service culture is their differentiator, because they tell you that the experience of doing business with them will be different than doing business with their competitors.
Side note: I have no affiliation with any of these aforementioned organizations. I present them here as examples of how they built their reputation, and it does not suggest that their competitors have a poor service culture or that I exclusively recommend them over others.
By treating your service culture as a core component of your operation, your checklist for what constitutes expectations from your employees automatically becomes higher than the standard for those around you. The Hospitality Mentality becomes a natural part of your daily operation, rather than something that needs to be forced. It quickly becomes second nature, and it happens without actively trying or even thinking about it. Your goal should be to embody it so it comes across seamlessly.
To put this into practice that can be measured, you can create two checklists that I refer to as being your Guest Experience Checklists. Your first checklist is to meet your guests’ expectations, and your second checklist is to exceed them. Just like any other aspect of guest service, the exceeding expectations checklist is not a fluffy afterthought, but ingrained into your standard operating procedures.
Your first checklist may look something like the following, based on the list of guests’ expectations from Chapter 3:
Safe
Open
Efficient
Clean
Well Maintained
Enjoyable
Friendly
An Escape
You probably have many of these components fully outlined and incorporated into a checklist already (or many checklists). To ensure that you meet the expectation of being open, you may require an opening manager or supervisor to arrive a certain number of hours before opening to complete the necessary functions of beginning operations for the day. Many of the items on that checklist may fall into other areas of guests’ expectations, such as presenting a safe, clean, and well-maintained facility. These are critical for opening, so they are tracked in the checklist. Once you open for the day, your checklist moves to focus on being efficient, enjoyable, friendly, and an escape, while still managing to be a safe, open, clean, and well-maintained facility.
Naturally, these all need to continue to hum on all cylinders in order to meet guests’ expectations. Your second checklist is focused on the key drivers of exceeding expectations. These are the supposed “soft skills” that aren’t tracked as often by most businesses because they usually lack a concrete structure. At a high level, the exceeding expectations checklist can look like this:
Service Personalization
Demonstrating Enthusiasm
Anticipation of Guests’ Needs
Creating “Wow” Moments
Since these are more specific, you can add in the tactics that align with their applicable strategy component. For instance, Service Personalization can be broken down further as follows:
Service Personalization
Learning and using guests’ names
Extending conversation beyond immediate needs
Providing undivided attention to each guest
Customizing recommendations
Since these are more fluid, they cannot be checked off the list and considered to be complete. They must first be incorporated into training, then observed, and then recognized when they are put into practice - using the training and recognition methods briefly discussed in Chapter 15. Management must also lead by example to demonstrate that these are not optional and that they are a compulsory component of how guests are served. Then, in order to ensure that these service expectations can be properly managed, they must be measured in an objective manner.
Leverage guest feedback as your guide
In Chapter 9, we outlined the best ways to collect and utilize guest feedback to make improvements to your guest experience. As you may recall, the answers are often largely operational, and therefore more cost-effective compared to significant capital expenditures. When looking to measure both the tactics and the strategy components of The Hospitality Mentality, most of your answers lie in the feedback that your guests provide. Since your guests are the ones experiencing what you have to offer, they should be the primary source you go to when looking for how to measure your guest experience. It sounds obvious, but I have heard too many times from service providers that they have a firm grasp of what’s going on in front of them at their facility, and that hearing from their guests will only tell them what they already know. While I won’t challenge that statement, especially if you are working in the trenches in your business and are living and breathing it every day, our eyes still adjust to what we’re looking at, and we may not see the same thing that our guests see, or we might see it differently. Even if the feedback doesn’t seem new, hearing it in the words of your guests is critical to measuring, managing, and improving the guest experience. Plus, collecting feedback from your guests allows you to measure aggregated quantifiable demand that can drive decisions from which you have concrete data that shows that you have your guests’ support.
Chapter 9 discussed three main vehicles for guest feedback: onsite feedback, post-visit internal feedback, and public feedback from online review sites and social media. For the purposes of tactical measurement, I will add a fourth and fifth to the list - the fourth is quality assurance audits - including thorough reviews of your facility from third-party guests, often known as mystery shoppers; the fifth is that you should be your own guest. Each of these four vehicles of guest feedback has its own unique attributes and contributions, and while there is the occasional overlap among them, they all have at least one thing that the others don’t have. Take a look:
Onsite feedback: capture the guest’s perceptions while they are still visiting and therefore within your close reach when you need to recover from service failures or boost loyalty potential
Post-visit internal feedback/surveys: collect data privately and learn about guests’ concerns that give you the opportunity to improve while also fostering the relationship with the guest
Public feedback: drive your most satisfied guests to review sites to bolster your reputation, while also showcasing your communication skills when responding to complaints
Quality assurance/mystery shopping: collect far more data points per guest than any other feedback method due to the guest visiting with a specific agenda; while the number of guests is generally fewer, you can measure some of the most granular tactics that do not often appear in surveys or online reviews
Be your own guest: change out of your work clothes and into your guest clothes. Management by wandering around (MBWA) allows you to go through the process that your guests go through, and you should experience your business in the way that they do. Go through the front entrance, wait in line, and pay for it the same way that any standard guest would. While wandering, make sure you are also “wondering” how the experience can be improved.
Each of these pillars, when used in conjunction with one another, paint the most accurate picture of your guest experience that is measurable and actionable… provided all feedback is documented. For onsite and internal feedback, this can be done in-house. There are several software tools available for guest feedback documentation, but even if it is tracked in a spreadsheet, it’s better than nothing. To measure guest feedback most properly, you will want to identify each comment as an individual unit, indicating whether it is positive or negative, and what area(s) of the business the feedback references.
For online reviews, the review sites each have their own algorithm that assigns metrics to each review, and for the most part, makes it easy to track from one timeframe to the next. Additionally, you can merge the public feedback into the data set with your internal feedback to apply the same process, which can help you determine your metrics for internal feedback juxtaposed with your online reviews; in other words, how many guests are submitting feedback to you directly compared to those who post online? If your online reviews show a more concerning perception when compared to your internal feedback, it’s time to change the way you control the flow of feedback, because this is damaging your reputation.
In quality assurance (QA) audits or mystery shops, you can go very deep into the types of questions you ask, because the guest is visiting with a purpose, and you can prep them ahead of time with the questions. Compared to a traditional survey sent out to guests after their visit, you may want to limit the number of questions to 10-12, and certainly no more than 20, otherwise you run the risk of “survey fatigue,” where your results start to drop off at a certain point. With a QA or mystery shop form, that limit is much higher. For an attraction, such as a museum or family entertainment center, the evaluation can contain more than a hundred questions without risking survey fatigue. At a full-service hotel or resort, this number can be in the thousands. Additionally, you can create an evaluation that is laser-focused on tactics that any typical guest would be able to see. For instance, every employee with whom the guest interacts might be ranked on the following:
Was the employee wearing a nametag?
Did the employee smile as you approached?
Was the employee in full uniform?
Did the employee maintain proper posture and body language throughout the interaction?
Did the employee provide you with their full undivided attention?
Was your name used once it was known?
Were you offered additional assistance before ending the interaction?
Did the employee thank you?
This can go on, but notice the granularity of these questions, and that they are presented in a binary format. The answers can only be yes or no, which works well because these are observations, not based on opinion. If you ask, “Did the employee provide good service?” and then offer responses ranging from 1-5, with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best, it will be never be consistent from one guest to the next, especially if the mystery shopper or auditor is different on each visit. By making these questions binary, you can pinpoint which tactics are being delivered smoothly along with which ones need work - not to mention you have the specific employee to coach, along with the time, date, and location of the interaction.
Balance quantitative and qualitative data
The binary questions, such as the ones listed above, provide a wealth of metrics that lead to quantitative data regarding your guest experience. Same thing with your online review ranking and rating, and satisfaction surveys sent out to guests after their visit. Many people think that the numbers are all they need because the numbers can track trends and help to drill down to the necessary attributes of the business that need immediate attention. This is partially true, but for the full picture, the metrics need to be balanced with narratives, or the qualitative data. Online reviews are qualitative data that tell the story of a guest’s visit, regardless of what they indicate as their 1-5 rating and how your business ranks on each of the review sites. Surveys sent to guests after their visits should always include an open-ended response section that lets the guest tell their stories in their own words. Feedback left onsite likely involves a face-to-face interaction where the staff can sense the tone and emotion of the guest who is providing feedback in the moment. Mystery shops and quality assurance audits should require written narratives that explain the scores that were given. Being your own guest is fully qualitative, as you immerse yourself into the environment that you create for your guests. Just make sure to note your observations.
Qualitative data is important to humanizing the data. While you might not have the time or resources to read every single review or comment that a guest leaves, pulling these narratives into the conversation help to understand why a guest gave you that ranking, or why they indicated that they would or would not recommend your business to friends and family members. Looking at scores at the top line is a useful starting point, but it’s exactly that - a starting point. If I told you that your service culture was 87%, what would you do with that information? If it were me, I’d want to know the 13% I was missing. Then, drill down into specific departments or divisions of the guest flow, and go from there. The deeper you can go with learning where the gaps are, the more specific trends you can track, which will direct where improvement needs to be made. Seeing the guest experience from the eyes of the guest will allow you to gain the clearest picture of your operation.
Once you know where the gaps are in your service culture based on the data you collect, you can aim to fill them. Knowledge is half the battle, so being aware of where your scores are dipping is the first step to improving them. Tackling your biggest issues, even if limiting it to three, can help direct your efforts toward squashing the largest factors that are bringing down your guest experience. Alleviating them will keep you on track toward living and breathing The Hospitality Mentality.
Strive for continuous improvement
“How do we know when we’re there?” You might be wondering at this point. Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that you get to keep measuring the progress of The Hospitality Mentality within your organization in perpetuity, no matter how much it improves over time. The bad news is that there is no finish line. But instead of thinking of it as bad news, think of it as the most exciting challenge you can have when seeking to deliver a superior experience that sets you apart from the endless alternative options that your guests have. You can always get closer and closer to The Hospitality Mentality, yet there will always be room to grow. Actually, this is great news.
Every aspect of how you manage the guest experience is limitless. All of the concepts discussed in the book are areas that cannot plateau. There is no ceiling to guest satisfaction. Even “the best” can always be beaten and outdone. If your survey results or guest feedback scores are close to hitting 100%, it means that it’s time to move the goalpost further back. Raise the bar higher, little by little, because you know your team can perform. Your employees are your best assets. Share with them the success that they have achieved and encourage them to constantly outdo themselves. This is what makes their job more enjoyable. Allow them to break out of their comfort zone and their daily routine which, while exciting, is likely filled with many repeatable elements, and empower them to shake up their habits in the interest of keeping it fresh for them, which translates to a fresh experience for their guests. At the same time, point out the habits that yield success in exceeding expectations and are pushing guests toward loyalty, and give them the tools to continue to exercise those muscles on a regular basis.
And along the way, measure the strength of your service culture through guest feedback that comes in onsite, after the guest’s visit, through online reviews, through quality assurance audits or mystery shops, and through your own observations. Find the gaps that need to be filled, and put the systems in place that allow you and your organization to thrive on continuous improvement. Never be satisfied with your current results, because complacency can and will lead to decline. You want to foster your service culture so it always continues to grow, because it can never rest, no matter how great it is today or how great it becomes.