GUEST-CENTRISM

How to Nurture a Service Excellence Model by Viewing What We Do Through the Eyes of Our Guests

It’s Springtime.?? We all love the arrival of Spring. ?A time of renewal. ???A budding new season of gardening.? Spring cleaning.?? Fresh starts.? ??A time of renewed energy and inspiration, not only for the great outdoors, but also for ourselves and our organizations.?? ?As Jack Kornfield says, ?“The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?”? The professional seeds we sow on fallow work ground today, we hope will soon flower into vibrant organizational gardens.?

The arrival of Spring was a conversational topic at a roundtable discussion with hospitality industry professionals to which I was recently invited to participate.? The working topic of our roundtable, Initiatives in Elevating Guest Service Excellence – What’s Working and What Isn’t, was part of the larger conference issue, detailing how businesses are coping with today’s various labor challenges.?? The group included executives from a variety of enterprises, including restaurants, hotels, spas, and a performing arts center.?? Each of these organizations had undertaken initiatives to transform a good service model into a stellar service model.?? The mixed bag of results provided grist for the larger mill of professional discussion on best practices in hospitality leadership.?

I have a real passion for hospitality. ??And I thoroughly enjoy organizational development. ???I genuinely care about our guests. ?I love serving as host to guests, exceeding their expectations, and helping them make memories.?? And I revel in both the mechanics and the deep personal interactions associated with Organizational Development.?? This includes assessing organizational performance, change management, aligning org charts with strategic goals, training and team building, as well as professional mentoring.??I genuinely care about my team members. Few things in my career have been as personally rewarding as helping team members identify their strengths, tackle their gaps, and then launching them onwards & upwards in their careers.?

Having enjoyed leadership transitions across several different teams and organizations in my career, spearheading a number of initiatives to fix performance issues and elevate service standards, I was particularly keen to hear from this group of talented peers about their own efforts along these lines.??? It’s often instructive to learn from others – both their triumphs and their tragedies.?

Each of these energetic leaders had been charged with plowing under an under-performing garden, and sowing the seeds of what were supposed to become flourishing fields of verdant service success stories.? ?While some improvements sprouted, many of their flowers wilted, while weeds invaded their furrows.??

Of their disappointments, conferees shared several observations:?

Seems the grass was the same shade Outside the Box;? Pivots were humstrung by a lack of Agility;? Ideations hadn’t precipitated Actionable changes;? Drilling down hadn’t brought back up any black gold; and, Omni-channel omnivorously ate up everyone’s time.?? ?Scripted service standards proved to be a screenplay for purely performative guest service.? And even some of the trendiest tools hadn’t produced the hoped for results:? Reach, Impressions, Engagement, Costs Per Click and Share of Voice did not translate into revenue growth. ? ?And AGR, CES, CSAT, CXR, FRT, and NPS melded into an under-reported and under-utilized alphabet soup of disparate data.?

These bright and accomplished professionals had not failed to achieve their service goals for lack of experienced insight or good intentions, or for deficient effort.???? Their initiatives foundered for varied and distinct reasons, each not uncommon to large organizations, some of which were beyond their personal control.?? However, each case shared a common seed making germination improbable – failure to instill Guest-Centrism.??

Guest-Centrism ?

A business administration professor with Harvard describes being Guest-Centric as, “Looking at an enterprise from the Outside-In, rather than the Inside-Out.? That is, through the lens of the guest, rather than the producer.”?? I simply define Guest-Centrism as viewing our offerings, our venues, and our operations through the eyes of our guests.?

Sounds simple.?? And in some ways, it is.?? In other ways, adopting Guest-Centrism in hospitality operations requires significant work.?? As with any corporate initiative, a number of factors or challenges may thwart the effort.?

Guest-centric culture is the mindset and practice of putting our guests at the heart of everything we do. ?It means understanding who they are, why they travel, what their expectations and preferences are, and how we can best deliver for them personalized and memorable experiences.? ?A number of foundational elements must be put in place for this initiative to work.?? And once those are implemented, becoming Guest-centric involves re-tooling the ways and means we interact with our guests – proactively, via sales/marketing, throughout the revenue managing and booking processes, continuing across all aspects of their visit, and concluding with follow-ups which capture feedback far more effectively than traditional methods.???

Guest-centrism is a potent and valuable approach in adapting to the evolving preferences of today’s travelers.? ?And far from being boring, the best hospitality team members find Guest-centrism reinvigorating and tremendously rewarding, encouraging us all to engage our most creative and personalized concepts to really “surprise & delight” our guests, while growing our brand and raising revenues.?

To appreciate why Guest-Centrism matters, and how powerfully it can help us accomplish our hospitality mission, I think it’s worthwhile to step back for a second and remind ourselves of some fundamental truths regarding travel, tourism, entertainment, and hospitality.

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What It’s All About

As Mickey Wiggins, of the Tourism Safety & Security Association, notes in his industry presentations, “Tourism, travel, hospitality...? We’re all about the Experience.?? We don’t make widgets.? We make Memories.”? ??So true!?? An essential conceptual starting point for everyone working in our industry is understanding that tourism and hospitality is all about the Experience.??? We don’t manufacture a product; we’re not washing cars; we don’t sell socks.?? What we do is offer Experiences.?? Our industry is Experiential.?? We’re all about engaging the senses – sights, smells, tactile aspects, sounds, tastes – in ways that impact the psyche and imprint memories.?

Travel and Hospitality Are Segmented

Travel is segmented.? We travel for business.?? We travel for leisure.? We travel to see a favorite artist, leader, speaker, show, or author.? We travel to indulge our curiosities, to satisfy our human need for novel new experiences, to meet new people, and learn new things.? ??We travel to forge new relationships, or to strengthen existing ones.?? We travel for health, escapism, relaxation, spiritual renewal, or to simply recharge our batteries.?? We travel to nourish our souls, and to make lasting memories.?

But one aspect of travel cuts across all this diversity of purpose – travel is discretionary.?? That is, we have choices.??? We have the choice not only of which destination or venue we visit, but whether or not we travel at any given time at all.?? This principle applies equally to hospitality.?

Although the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan (Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan), built in 705AD, is generally recognized as the world’s first dedicated hotel, lodging and accommodations have been a central component of travel since at least the ancient societies of Persia and Greece, and continuing through the Middle Ages, when various monasteries and abbeys would offer accommodations to travelers.?

Since those nascent endeavors, the hotel sector has grown ever more sophisticated, and increasingly segmented.? Just as with travel in general, the hotel industry is particularly segmented.??? That is, not only are different brands and hotels differentiated by purpose, features, amenities, and service standards, but more pointedly those differences drive very different revenue results. ??This is remarkable when we pause to consider that all hotels offer the same fundamental features – room, bed, bathroom.?? The quantity or quality of those basic common features does not set apart luxury hotels from lower-end hotels nearly to the extent that do Service Standards.??

Service Excellence Pays Dividends

Financial success in hospitality can be powerfully driven by service excellence.??? Service standards are what differentiates the most prestigious hospitality brands from lower tier ones.?? The promise of consistently delivering on personalized service expectations is a large part of what justifies the higher ADR’s of top tier hotels. ?This revenue segmentation is significant.?? A Forbes report indicates that travelers will pay as much as 86% more than average for a truly great guest experience.? ???And a 2023 comparative survey of our industry reveals that the average national ADR of prestigious brands is 41% higher than mid-market brands, and 84% higher than budget brands.? ?Room rates are not the only aspect which sets apart the most lucrative venues.?? The more expansive and varied ancillary sources of revenue a given hotel offers, the more magnified the potential revenue disparity.?? This is why luxury resorts – featuring restaurants, bars, hosted meetings, banquets and special events, pools, cabanas, spas, salons, retail, sports, excursions, activities, and other personalized experiences – can generate far more revenues than hotels with minimal facilities. ??Investing in personalized service excellence pays dividends, as revenue management executives are discovering.? ??

Progressive revenue managers increasingly recognize that traditional strategies focusing on room and space optimization may have reached their limits with well-established venues.? By shifting toward guest-centric strategies catering to guests' nuanced preferences, hotels can enhance guest satisfaction, strengthen the brand, ensure loyalty, and attract more guests in our highly competitive market.?? A guest-centric approach is a viable path to grow revenues and profits in a landscape where traditional revenue management avenues have already been fully explored.??

The work involved in adopting a guest-centric approach in hotel revenue management is considerable and multi-faceted, but worth the effort. ??It demands a comprehensive overhaul – not just in the tools we use, like revitalizing outdated PMS, but also in our strategies and, fundamentally, our mindsets. ?This transformation is driven by a clear and compelling objective: ?to grow revenues and profits by consistently delivering segment-targeted, personalized, memorable, superlative service.??

Keys to Becoming Guest-Centric

The above speaks to the genuine value of adopting Guest-centrism in achieving service excellence standards.??? Effecting the organizational culture evolution needed can be easier said than done. ??As with any collaborative initiative, there is no guarantee of success.? ???

In my own experience, I’ve both worked through some challenging implementations, and I've enjoyed some notably successful transformations.?? From those experiences, I’ve learned the essential elements which must first be in place, as well as the key steps involved, in achieving sustainable service excellence through Guest-centrism.? These include:?

Inviting Input >>>? Launching, executing, and adjusting any transformational initiative is always best done with the active input of all key stakeholders, including our associates.??? Over the years, I’ve been amazed how many organizations ignore or fail to even solicit the input of their own employees on strategic initiatives.??? Inspired and well-informed ideas are out there simply for the asking.? ?Many of the best suggestions for performance improvement derive from the “bottom-up.”? ??This means accepting and evaluating contrary input, as well.?? If we want to know what obstacles are likely to confound our initiative mid-way through, nobody is better positioned to give us that heads-up than our own associates.?? ?Input from all team members is especially valuable in evolving into Guest-centrism because it is so associated with creativity in action – finding novel new ways of personalizing our efforts to our guests’ preferences.? More broadly, I have always subscribed to Richard Branson’s philosophy, “The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.”? The notion of service excellence encompasses how we treat our own team members.?

Vision Sharing>>> Every aspirational initiative commences with vision sharing.?? In each successful transformation I’ve led, we developed a picture of the future that was readily digestible to guests, executives, managers, associates, and relevant stakeholders.?? A vision says something that helps clarify the direction in which an organization needs to move.?? A vision is inspiring.?? A vision helps inform Management by Objectives (MBO) which is so conducive to achieving consistency in 24/7/365 operations like hotels.? ?

Executive Champion>>> While useful suggestions can bubble from the “bottom-up,” it is often said that major change is impossible unless the head of the organization is an active supporter. ??Executive championing means giving more than mere lip service to the initiative, but rather providing the ongoing affirmative support needed for it to succeed.?? Executive championing involves open communication, ongoing positive direction, assistance as needed in breaking down obstacles like organizational silos, and periodic follow-up as appropriate. ??

Busting Silos>>> An organizational silo is when divisions, departments, or key personnel within a larger enterprise hoard resources or information, fail to support organizational goals, or are otherwise so singularly focused on their own tasks to the exclusion of the greater team. ??Silos are toxic. ??Silos can stymie even the best conceived initiatives. ??Effective leadership of transformational initiatives requires monitoring for silos, and taking concrete corrective actions to end them when identified.?

The Right Tools>>> ? We cannot improve that which we do not measure. ??KPI’s and guest satisfaction metrics are integral to the hospitality industry.??? ?Adopting ourselves to Guest-centrism requires not only certain key measurements and qualitative input, but likely also new methods and tools for making those measurements, and soliciting that input.?? The Sales/Marketing function plays a key role here.?? Becoming Guest-centric involves analyzing everything essential both in advance of visitation, and in follow-up to visitation.?? To succeed, this must be done much more proficiently than the industry has done historically.? Guest-centrism means determining just WHO our target segment is, WHAT their desires are generally, HOW they prefer their experiences to be personalized, and WHY they are next visiting.?? Guest-centrism also requires much better guest feedback following visits.?? Traditional industry surveys receive an average 29% rate of return.?? Consequently, some businesses are making survey-based changes to their offerings and operations while missing 71% of their guest feedback data.?

Additionally, the evolution to Guest-centrism may require updating those RMS and PMS systems which are stuck in more traditional, inward-looking metrics, unable to deliver a comprehensive understanding of guest preferences, behaviors, and expectations. ?Beyond merely putting heads in beds, the Guest-centric RMS reveals and supports ways to capture additional guest expenditures.?? And PMS needs to be reimagined as a valuable tool for unlocking guest-centric data. ?PMS is uniquely positioned to store comprehensive information about guests, track their consumption patterns, and gather insights into their preferences. ??By leveraging the data stored in PMS, the guest-centric hotel can tailor their services and experiences more effectively to individual guest desires.?

Ongoing Training>>> The value of training can hardly be overstated.? The best training is a product of a holistic approach to learning that spans the entire associate lifecycle.?? It starts with the hiring process, continues with onboarding, is reinforced during OJT, is advanced through a variety of in-service programs promoting growth, as well as external opportunities, including training conferences and professional organizations.?? Each of these offers a forum for reinforcing Guest-centrism.?

Vision sharing must be followed by nuts-n-bolts training.? All managers and associates must benefit from a structured training program which addresses the “5 W’s + H” of their roles in bringing the vision to life, and how exactly they are to do that.??? Training does not stop with the structured program.?? Training is a continual process, which encompasses a variety of daily reinforcements of expectations.? ??As one of my colleagues with Forbes Travel Guide likes to say, “Achieving genuine excellence in service sectors requires meticulous training, daily role modeling, and endless nurturing.”?? Ongoing training includes things like quarterly refreshers, reminders at daily ops meetings, role modeling by managers, and real-time corrections of unacceptable performance.? ??Operations managers play a key role in that last point.?? “Silent approval” is my term for managers who fail to take prompt corrective actions when needed.? Left unchecked, silent approval can undermine the even finest initiatives.? ?

Celebrating Progress>>> Good things rarely happen overnight.? Real transformation takes time.? Innovative efforts risk losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to meet and celebrate. ???I’ve found real value in cheering progress, marking milestones, rewarding those actively advancing the initiative, and otherwise making the journey as enjoyable as the outcome.? Planned, calendared, and spontaneous reward & recognition are all motivational components of celebrating progress.

The Right Mindset>>> Lastly (and perhaps most essentially), ?a team composed of members who are well-suited to hospitality is a foundational root to a flowering culture of Guest-centrism.?? The hospitality industry can be delightfully rewarding in so many different ways.?? But it’s not for everyone.?? As conference speakers noted, we are now in an era when more workers say they value being “remote” and want weekends and holidays off.?? But we work in a field which very much requires us all to be present in-person, and operates around the clock, every day of the year, including holidays.??? As many have heard me say over the years, “We work while others play.”?? As a People job, so singularly service oriented, success in hospitality is inextricably linked to the quality, character, and performance of our team members.?? Hospitality demands top-notch “soft” skills, as well as considerable patience in the face of what can sometimes be challenging circumstances.?? The best hospitality associates are naturally Guest-centric, and enjoy interacting with guests.? ??They are curious and caring.? They are creative problem solvers. ?They love playing host, serving others, and helping guests make memories.? ?Guest-centrism is a mindset at which anyone willing can excel.?

Guest-centrism in Action

So, having thus thoughtfully tended our garden’s bed, and carefully seeded its furrows, how do we help our Guest-centrism initiative take root, and flower...??? Having laid the foundations for success by implementing the above described paradigm, tools, and process, the real work of becoming Guest-centric can commence – first, determining who our guestbase is; and second, engaging them directly and in detail to learn their desires and feedback.??

Our first step is determining the Why, What, How, Where, Who and When of our guests’ desires.???? And I do mean OUR guests.??? Being Guest-centric does not mean that our particular property should try to be All Things To All People.?? Besides being untenable, that’s actually inconsistent with the principles of Guest-centrism.

With the organizational foundation in place, our first concrete step toward Guest-centrism is determining just WHO our guests are.?? That is, examining our current guestbase profile, and then deciding who and what types of business we will strategically target going forward.??? Our approach here should realistically reflect the nature of our destination and venue, as well as our organization’s capacity to deliver on our strategy.?

Our second step is direct and continual engagement with our guests to learn everything we can regarding their motivations, desires, preferences and habits, and how we can best serve those in a genuine and caring manner.? ?

Guest-centrism involves analyzing everything essential both in advance of visitation, and in follow-up to visitation.?? To succeed, this must be done much more proficiently than the industry has done historically.?? Guest Journey Mapping plays a role here, which the best Sales/Marketing teams are adept at analyzing.? Focus Groups and other special invitees can generate useful input.? ?Other valuable approaches include outreach to key decision makers (e.g. conference managers, travel agents, wedding planners), as well as clubs, charities, special interest groups, speaker bureaus, and other organizations who generate meetings/group business.? ?Guest-centrism requires that our follow-up efforts with guests of all types is not only more tailored and detailed, but also benefits from much stronger rates of return than has historically been the case.? Incentives to complete feedback are one method some businesses use.?? But the highest rate of return of all feedback methods I have used is the In Person survey, which enjoys a 59% response rate.?? Guest/client engagement is a vital component of Guest-centrism, and is open to a variety of creative and even fun avenues for energetic sales/marketing teams.? ?The more we understand about both what our guests want, and then how well we executed in delivering on that, the more successful we become.?

Summary ?

Guest-centrism is a rewarding and valuable approach in adapting to the evolving preferences of today’s travelers, who seek personalized experiences delivered with service excellence.?? By strategically determining just who our guests are, and exactly what their priorities and preferences are, and by then viewing our offerings, our venues, and our operations through the eyes of our guests, we can achieve the pinnacle of hospitality success – growing our brand and our revenues as we care for our guests and help them make memories.?