How can you ensure your guest service team provides the best local recommendations?

Community building and providing for you guests starts with extensive listening to the end user. Without their input and asking them the right questions before taking any action is key to everthing else that follows like training staff, enabling them to explore the local area themselves and try out with some ambassadros of your brand.

Some of the best guest insight comes from evaluating actual experiences. A well-designed feedback form can feel like a conversation, gradually drilling down to find out the root causes of anything that went wrong or teasing out opportunities. Combine this with a good reporting tool and you're all set to listen and learn as you go.

In my experience, the part that is often missed is measuring performance. This is how you make sure that training is meaningful and not lost as trainees retreat to cultural norms (which may or may not be good). What gets measured gets done. Start by framing your intended experience to match what you are training your teams. Then define what success looks like in a way that can be objectively measured. A good mystery shopping programme should be able to walk through the customer journey on a regular basis and generate assessments that keep essential standards and processes front of mind.

Ensure your team know what and why they are recommending and don't feel it's wrong to do so Everyone has competition and it's healthy Selling our own product is always a priority IF it's the right recommendation for guests/customers

Incentives can be a good way to signal the importance of certain behaviours or actions, but be careful people don't focus more on defending their expectation to a reward. Often, a more powerful tool is recognition. We are social animals and most of us like to feel that we're making a difference. But recognition needs to be meaningful each time and not repetitive, so actively search for where people are doing things that perhaps haven't been done before.

The key thing here is ownership. When your team feel like they have an influence over shaping the objective in the first place, and that they have the tools to achieve it, then they will feel more motivated and be more innovative in striving towards it. Make sure you can track all your KPIs, but rather than simply communicating results to your team, find opportunities for them to present the results to you, together with ideas for improving results.

There are so many ways that you can collect and analyze guest data. The key is to find a good Guest Experience Management platform that can cut through the noise and tell you what's useful rather than just interesting. Managers at each level should be able to see how they are doing, how they benchmark against others, and where there are opportunities to do better. And it helps if you have all this insight in one place. That way, you can learn from sentiment analysis of reviews and scores in guest surveys, and align this with your mystery shopping results which are based on objective measurement of what you intend to happen.