Hotel as a factory of guest experience: A concept that will change the way you organize your operations (Part 1)
Hotels are without doubt part of service-based industry, and thinking about service, many of us would say that it is a term used to define non-manufacturing processes, or in other words ˝doing something for someone˝ rather than delivering a product. But is this intuitive approach negatively affecting the quality of the service? And what can you do to improve it?
As a noted Harvard economist, Theodore Levitt pointed out in one of his articles, service providers should think of themselves as performing manufacturing functions. Only then will they begin to make some significant progress in improving the quality and efficiency of service. “If creating customer service is treated the same as manufacturing a product, it will be carefully planned, controlled, automated where possible, audited for quality control, and regularly reviewed for performance improvement and customer reaction.”
Just like a factory requires coordination of operations across its sectors to successfully profit from quality products, a hotel should also be perceived as a complex system with many interlocking pieces and dependencies. In fact, a hotel is nothing more than a factory of guest experience and to be able to provide reliable and quality service it must have well established collaborative operations.
There are certain areas that most of the hotels have in common. Regardless of their size, location, target markets or levels of service, hotels’ structure includes management, front desk services, housekeeping, maintenance, accounting, marketing and sales and food and beverage departments. All of them play an equally important role in hotel’s processes and the quality of processes is exactly what separates success from failure to meet the needs of both guests and employees. To emphasize the importance of processes we can refer to Peter Drucker’s quote: “Most companies have good people. The companies that win over the long term have the best processes.”
As already said before, all operations within a hotel are essential and no hotel can sustain itself without them being integrated. Just take the example of the guest check-in process. First, you need to receive guests in the front of house. After being welcomed and escorted to the reception, guests need to be registered and allocated to their rooms. Once they proceed with secure advanced payment, guests are informed about facilities and services offered by the hotel. Check-in formalities are now completed, and the other departments must be informed of the guests’ arrival. Although invisible to guests, back of house is just as important. It keeps things running efficiently behind the scenes and it is possible only by working together to create success and provide the best guest experience possible. Let us think about how our guests chose to come to our hotel. Probably thanks to many marketing and sales activities that run in the background. Furthermore, who is going to ensure that our guests’ rooms and public areas are kept clean than the housekeeping? And on top of all, there must be someone to coordinate this process and keep in mind how to provide hotel staff with all that is necessary to deliver the hotel’s main product – guest satisfaction
To ensure that our “factory” is delivering its product at a high standard, special attention should be given to ensure bringing together front of house and back of house as one unit. With traditional offline methods it is extremely difficult. Find out all about how innovative solutions offered by Špica can help front of house and back of house to achieve seamless collaboration in our next blog.
