Quality and Service

I often come across hotels, resorts, restaurants, private clubs, and management companies that claim to offer its customers, members, or guests?extraordinary, legendary, remarkable, superb. world-class (take your pick) levels of service; yet how many of these organizations have taken the time or made the effort to define their quality and service standards?

Let us take a moment to define what we mean by service and quality.? According to Dictionary.com:

Service is “the act of helpful activity.”? In private club operations it is the process or performance of some task or event for your members and guests.

Quality is “a characteristic or property that signifies relative merit or excellence.”? In our industry the word is used to express the relative merits or excellence of the facilities, amenities, activities, and service we provide our members.

Given that a club operation’s quality is defined by the relative merits of those things and the service provided to members, let us pose some questions regarding the service to which you aspire or claim to offer:

·??Have you or your club defined what service is for your service-delivery employees?

·??Have you explained or trained your employees what you and your members’ expectations for service are?

·??Do you know what your members expect when it comes to service?? If so, how do you know?? What methodology is used to determine their needs and expectations?

·??Have you identified your key service touch points or moments of truth for your employees?

·??Have you taught or demonstrated for your employees how to handle various touch points in all their possible variations and contingencies?

·??Have you documented touch points and service standards, policies, and procedures to ensure that they are taught consistently to each new employee and new generations of employees?

·??Do you have a means of measuring compliance with service standards, policies, and procedures?

·??Do you have a process to address service failures?

·??Do you have a process to make service failures right for your members?

·??Do you have a process to discover underlying causes of service failures to ensure they don’t happen again?

·??Do you have a consistent process to educate employees about changes to standards, policies, and procedures to eliminate service failures?

·??Do you have a means of monitoring service failures to identify trends or spot problems?

·??Do your employees know that they can self-report their service failures without fear or repercussions?

If you’ve answered “no” to a majority of these questions, you do not provide quality service.? What you do provide is a series of interactions between members and employees that may or may not meet the expectations of either members or management.? The quality you provide is based purely on chance and, therefore, has an unacceptably high risk of service failures.

If the above describes your operation’s quality and service, there is much to work on to meet the promises you’ve made to your members.

For more helpful information and tips on this critically important topic, check out Quality and Service in Private Clubs – What Every Manager Needs to Know.

For more useful ideas and information, check out the wide range of highly integrated and widely acclaimed Professional Development, Operational, and Training Resources at the PCPM Marketplace Store.