Make it easy to be a guest

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Making life a little bit easier by Ann Elliott

How often do you think “It’s too hard to buy from this business, I just won’t bother?” I think like this more and more, whether I am buying online or face to face. If it’s not easy or quick, then forget it – I don’t seem to have the time or patience to persist. Amazon? Easy, unfortunately. Zara? Not always quite so easy, fortunately.

?I experienced just this situation the other day when trying to book at table at a local restaurant. Nothing was available within a two-hour window of the time I wanted to book, but no other options were offered. I really wanted the system to say, “Why not try this other time or this other date, or this other restaurant?” Too much to ask?

?It just meant that, if I really did want to eat there, I had to keep scrolling through other dates and times to see when they might just let me have a table. It was incredibly frustrating. For some reason, I always end up trying to do stuff like this in between doing other things and in a hurry. So, I ended up booking somewhere that I didn’t really want to go to, and at the same time feeling irritated with the restaurant I had wanted to go to in the first place. The words cutting off my nose to spite my face came to mind.

Booking a hotel room is equally difficult sometimes. If a room isn’t available on the day I want, then I just have to keep working away, trying other options until I find one. It would be so much easier, quicker and less frustrating if the online booking system told me when there were rooms available rather than telling me when they aren’t. Or theatre tickets! Actually, last week I did find a system which let me know when they had tickets available for a show I wanted to see – hallelujah! Tickets booked and paid for in three minutes, and I could then get on with the rest of my life.

?Earlier this week, I was talking to the chair of a successful hospitality group who said that, as a brand, they are obsessed with making it easy to be a guest with them. They had taken apart all their guest-facing processes and removed any which made it harder to be a guest. This meant reviewing their online table/space booking procedures in depth. Now they provide options and suggest alternatives for their guests if their desired time slot/day isn’t available. It helps their guests, and it helps their own labour management too. They also look at their welcome-and-hold at the bar, their order-and-pay -at-table tech and their feedback systems. They also wanted to make it easier for their guests to post about their brand – motivating their guests to market their brand was a win-win.

?This is all much easier to talk about in theory than it is to adopt in practice. It’s so difficult to think and act like a customer (to put your customer hat on, as one marketing director used to say to me) when you have been in a business a long time. It’s a challenge not to be defensive, to think objectively, to be brutally honest with yourself and others and to admit that things need to change when they aren’t necessarily broken.

?I think that human resource directors have been doing this now for some time, but in terms of making it easy to be an employee. The issues around team retention and recruitment through Brexit and the pandemic have forced them to think through their own processes, particularly in terms of new recruits. They have had to make it easy, simple and quick to join their team. They have simplified their job ads, their recruitment processes, their interviewing techniques and their whole applicant tracking systems. A mantra of making it easy to be a guest (or employee) is really powerful and inspiring for an organisation, and the impact can be transformational.

Ann Elliott is a hospitality strategist, connector and adviser