Hotel Manager & Customer Experience

Customer service skills are exactly what the phrase suggests: the skills required to provide a service to your Hotel Customers. Customer service is an essential part - some would say the most important part - of delivering a successful Hotel Customer experience.

“Customer service” and “customer experience” are often confused or used interchangeably. Hotel Managers must remember they’re not the same thing, but they are related.

Customer service is the assistance and advice provided to a customer for your Hotel service when needed. Customer Experience refers to the broader customer journey across the Hotel and includes every interaction between the customer and the business. Customer Experience is the broader of the two.

Good customer experience - whether before, during or after a sale in the Hotel - results in Happy Customers, or even, if you have done particularly well, delighted ones.

This often translates into good reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations to other people, and repeat custom. A Good Customer Experience.

Bad Hotel Customer Experience can result in unhappy customers, poor reviews, and a lack of repeat custom. It is not hard to see why Hotels should strive for Good Customer Experiences.

In the last twenty years or so, the number of ways in which Hotel Customers can communicate with Hotels has expanded hugely from letters and telephone calls to include email, instant messaging, social media, websites and discussion forums.

These resources have also massively expanded the ways in which unhappy customers can spread the word about poor treatment in your Hotel and the speed with which they can do so has increased rapidly.

Achieving successful customer experiences continuously could be seen as more difficult and it could be seen as more important that we get it right.

But, it is actually not particularly hard to deliver good Hotel Customer Experiences. The key is to focus on the Customer, and what they need and want from you, at all stages before, during and after their purchases from the Hotel.

Responding rapidly to customers, whether face to face, online, on social media or by phone. Especially electronically, and particularly by social media, customers expect a more-or-less instantaneous response.

Getting to know your customers by keeping records of your interactions. Having accurate records of conversations, email exchanges and so on, and, crucially, keeping them so that you can track by customer rather than separately by channel, meaning you will be able to respond to your customers as individuals.

Acknowledging and fixing mistakes as quickly as possible. As often as not, all a disgruntled Hotel Customer wants is an apology and a way to fix the issue when they make a complaint.

Going that little bit further can be the difference between ‘satisfied’ and ‘delighted’ customers, and it often takes very little additional effort. It is especially worthwhile for good and long-term customers. Always make sure that what you do will actually solve the customer’s issue: it is no good putting in extra effort if what you do doesn’t actually help.

Listening Skills, Communication Skills, Patience, Empathy, Resilience and the ability not to take things personally are the most essential skills needed for Hoteliers dealing with Customer Experience: the key to developing good long-term Hotel Customer Service.

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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.