Benchmarks for Excellence in Hotel Management: A Best Practices Analysis for the Caribbean Market
As the service sector continues to expand in today's economy, the hospitality industry also experiences rapid growth accompanied by a heightened demand for superior customer service and a stronger need for process optimization. This benchmarking report offers insights and guiding practices for hotel managers who seek to improve or redesign internal operations with the goal of gaining and retaining customers; building a stable, service-oriented workforce; and optimizing overall hotel profitability.
The hospitality industry is of central importance to the overall Caribbean economy and the competition for tourism dollars among the islands is growing intensively. This report outlines best practices, productivity measures and lessons learned for managing hotel operations successfully while taking into account unique attributes of the Caribbean economy and culture.
Chapters in the report highlight best practices and metrics for operational performance; customer service excellence; personnel development; and marketing excellence.
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Industries Profiled:
Hospitality
Companies Profiled:
The Sandy Lane Hotel; Dover Beach Apartment Hotel; The Savannah Hotel; The New EdgeWater Hotel; The House Hotel; Colony Club Hotel; Crystal Cove Hotel; Accra Beach Hotel & Resort; Tamarind Cove Hotel; Turtle Beach Hotel
Study Snapshot
This best practice benchmarking study employed a two-pronged data gathering approach. The field research team designed and conducted a performance benchmark survey that gathered statistical insights from nine of the participating hotels, representing a cross-section of the industry. The Best Practices research team then conducted in-depth interviews with more than 15 key functional leaders at 10 participating hotels to harvest qualitative insights, process excellence observations and managerial lessons learned.
The report evaluates multiple fronts of hotel operations that have greatest impact on customer service excellence. Some areas are directly related, such as training staff for attentiveness and courteousness in guest interactions, and effectively managing complaints. Other areas are indirectly related, but no less important. Incentives and recognition programs, for example, help sustain staff energy and morale so that customer service levels are maintained over the long-term.
Well-planned, yield-management systems help managers maximize profit in high and low seasons, anticipate swings in business and plan for staff and resources accordingly, so that the customer experience remains consistent. Fully realized marketing plans help managers define the customer segments most important to their financial and strategic goals and enable them to plan accordingly.
While any one of these areas could be benchmarked fully in its own right, a complete overview study seemed the most applicable way to suggest improvements that would improve productivity overall.
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Key Findings
The following are two sample key findings from the report. In total, the study includes more than 150 best practices, data charts, narratives and performance metrics.
1. Customer Service Excellence: Formalize and codify processes for customer service to establish specific quality standards for staff behavior and guest expectation.
All interviewed companies indicated that their top priority was enhancing the overall customer service excellence. General training for specific jobs is a given for all hotels, but different price points and service levels can create ambiguity and confusion about what activities are required specifically in each role. To eliminate this confusion – and to create a clear value proposition for guests and manage expectations – hotels should do the following:
- Establish a step-by-step standard of behavior for greeting, interacting with, and problem-solving for guests in all situations. All customer-facing employees should be trained on this common standard.
- Create a plan for handling complaints that enables fast resolution, prevents multiple negative experiences for individual guests, captures details of such events to enable analysis of customer experience shortcomings.
- Develop active methods for monitoring customer satisfaction. Probing for passive dissatisfaction helps hotels “catch” subtle or unseen problems in customer experience and drives customer loyalty.
This roadmap for employee behavior delineates what customer service excellence is within the organization, and provides a clear framework for all customer-facing employees to follow when dealing with guests. In addition, this framework empowers employees to make decisions that will benefit the customer and the organization.
2. Personnel Management: Direct employees to desired performance levels with personal, hands-on coaching techniques and milestone-setting activities.
The most common challenges for hotel managers revolved around motivating staff so that negative behaviors such as high absenteeism and resistance to customer service requirements are reduced as much as possible. The hotel managers that have the most success in guiding their employees to desired performance levels conduct intensive, personal coaching and set specific behavioral requirements that are easily understood and monitored. For example, one general manager actively coaches all staff on an ongoing basis; in these sessions, he probes for elements of their life situations and personalities that drive them – “motivational triggers” in the general manager’s words. With this information the manager can discuss job requirements that speak to each employee’s most personal needs and ambitions, and helps them set out to realize those goals through their current jobs.
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