10 Customer Service Skills for Food and Beverage Hotel Teams

There are certain Customer Service Skills that every Hotelier must master if they are forward-facing with customers; without them, you run the risk of finding yourself in an embarrassing situation, or simply losing customers as your service continues to let people down.

Today I'll go over the 10 most-needed skills that I believe Food and Beverage Staff need in a Hotel (in no particular order of importance):

Patience If you don't see this near the top of a customer service skills list, you should simply just stop reading ....

Attentiveness Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions, but it's also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive from everybody.

Clear Communication Skills Keep it simple and leave nothing to doubt. Make sure you're getting to the problem at hand quickly; customers don't need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.

Knowledge of your Products and Services Without knowing these you will not be able to help customers when they run into problems.

Ability to Use "Positive Language" Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your Hotel based from the language that you use.

Acting Skills Every great customer focused employee needs those basic acting skills necessary to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.

Ability to "Read" Customers You won't always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won't even hear a customer's voice!

A Calming Presence … The best customer service staff know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to become aggressive.

And the Ability to Handle Surprises Maybe the problem you encounter isn't what you expected or maybe the customer isn't reacting how you thought they would? Whatever the situation, it's best to be able to think and act quickly.

Closing Ability Being able to close with a customer means being able to end any communication or conversation with confirmed satisfaction (or as close to it as you can achieve) and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of (or will be).

If you came across this article and have read all the way to the bottom or watched the entire video, you probably already have this skill (nice!).

Through his electronic work, Stephen attempts to help those without the time or often the money to attend College by providing them with Learning.

My posts are intended for hotel workers, supervisors and managers around the world, who are (or want to become) actively engaged in learning and development.