I recently attended a Forbes five-stars training at my hotel. The Forbes trainer started the training by explaining how it feels to receive five-star service as a guest, and the genuine care and attention to detail that come with it. The trainer continued that while many of us have been working in the hotel industry for very many years and believe to exactly know our customers that we should never assume that a certain guest doesn’t care about us offering service that goes beyond and only cares about the basics.
If the guest is asking about a specific service and we deliver the service in the manner requested and on time while using the guest name, we really only deliver four star service. The difference between four and five-star service is that extra step, what the guest didn’t ask for because he didn’t even know that he wanted or needed it at that time. The simplest example of five-star service would be to deliver toothpaste, mouth wash and dental floss as well, when the guest asked for a toothbrush only. Having your employees understand that just doing things in the manner requested, even if executed perfectly, is only going to get you four stays, no matter how beautiful the rooms and the hotel are.
The Forbes training wasn’t really anything new, and the trainer didn’t really say anything that I haven’t said many times at my trainings and meetings before, but the effect on the team was much different. Well for one the message about having to go above and beyond didn’t come from me and it wasn’t me asking for extra work, and the Forbes trainer telling us what it takes for us to remain five stars made a great impact on the team. The trainer also told stories and had the teams do exercises to understand first hand what it means to deliver and receive five stars.
What amazed me is that employees who had been working at the hotel for over 20 years, were excited about the training and kept talking about the training and how important it was for them to go the extra step and how much they learned.
I came to realize that when the trainer told us at the beginning not to assume that we already know what our guests want and need, and not to use this as an excuse to deliver excellent and genuine service because of that, that she wasn’t only talking about our external guests, but about our internal guests, our employees as well.
How often do we say as leaders that our employees should know something already or get upset when things go wrong because we wrongly assumed that our employees are here for so many years and are probably not interested in another service training anymore.
Training is continuous, and as leaders we must understand that we can never assume that our employees wouldn’t care about another training or wouldn’t learn anything new from it and should always strive for our teams to deliver the best service by training them this way.
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