At our Nantes office in France, EA Pro Nantes Formation, our passion - and it has been our passion for many years - is to turn your employees into ambassadors for your hotel...
In other words, to turn every interaction between your staff and your customers into an unforgettable moment, full of emotion, empathy and exceeding expectations.
In our hotel world, the words service and hospitality are often used synonymously. This is far from the case, however, and if hoteliers are aware of the vast difference between the two words, they will certainly succeed in building customer loyalty.
SERVICE AND HOSPITALITY: be careful not to confuse the two!
Let's start with an example: your hotel doesn't have a restaurant and your customer asks the receptionist for the address of a restaurant that a friend has recommended. How can your receptionist respond?
Limit yourself to service by giving him the address: 47, rue des Bâtisseurs.
Respond with a sense of hospitality:
Show him the location of the restaurant on a map of the town.
Send him the location of the restaurant on his WhatsApp
Offer him a taxi to take him there, specifying that it will take ten minutes,
Offer to take care of his table reservation
In our hospitality skills training courses, we often use the terms ‘ordinary service’ and ‘extraordinary service’, which exactly mirror the notion of service and hospitality.
Service (which is absolutely essential in a hotel context) corresponds to what a customer normally and predictably expects from a hotel in a necessary and ordinary functional interaction: check-in or check-out quickly, ensure the cleanliness of the room, serve a meal on time, inform the customer, etc. Service is reactive and must be efficient.
Hospitality goes beyond the ordinary level of service, adding a human dimension that personalises every moment of contact between the employee and the customer, creating a friendly, authentic and lasting bond between them, paying special attention to the customer and anticipating and exceeding his or her expectations.
Hospitality is proactive: it seeks to prevent problems or problems experienced by customers, unlike service, which simply resolves them once the customer has experienced the problem.
Providing an efficient service is a good thing, and is naturally expected by customers, who don't come to your establishment to experience problems. But creating a warm atmosphere where they feel pampered, cared for, known and above all recognised, will leave them with lasting memories and the desire to come back...
What will make your establishment different and superior to its competitors will not be its extra star, but will always be its hospitality. Remember, the competing hotel provides the same service as you (it has to), but may not offer the same hospitality.
A hospitality approach transforms an ordinary customer experience into a unique moment to be relived. It creates the brand image and loyalty of a place. It paves the way for unforgettable memories that will be shared by the customer with their personal and professional circle.
How can you turn your staff into hosts?
1. First of all, let's make sure that our employees are happy to come and work for us, by being warm hosts ourselves, as managers. Remember that a host (from the Latin hospes) is both the one who receives and the one who is received. Our employees, the most important part of our organisation, need to feel motivated, enthusiastic, confident and proud to work with us.
2. By providing them with appropriate training to raise their awareness of their behaviour, attitudes, dress, vocabulary, empathy... and the importance of making every moment, even if it lasts five seconds, that they share with their customers exceptional.
3. To leave technology in its (very important) place and focus on our product (service) and our people: we don't build customer loyalty through our reservation system, but through our staff, whose hospitality must begin with the first customer contact, when they call us or write to us to make a reservation.
4. By taking care of our customers, always and everywhere: giving them the impression that they are at home, making them feel that we appreciate them, that we know them and that we recognise them in all the exchanges we have with them.
5. By creating a chain of hospitality within our establishment, with no weak links, so that wherever our customers go, they find the same passion, the same thirst for excellence and the same desire to exceed their expectations. In other words, the passion for hospitality is shared by all your teams.
How can EA Pro Nantes Formation help you?
Soft skills (savoir-être), the common denominator of our training courses, are the keystone of every memorable and loyalty-building customer experience. It is the very thing that establishes the sense of hospitality that goes beyond know-how (service).
a. By organising a mystery visit to your establishment, just before training your staff in the "savoir-être" skills that will instil this sense of hospitality and enhance your service. Over the course of two days, the mystery visitor will be able to recognise the high and low points of hospitality and service, and use them, recently remembered by your staff, as examples they will experience in role-playing.
b. Our general and departmental (customer relations) training courses are designed to turn your staff into genuine hosts with a keen sense of hospitality. We make them aware of all their exchanges (based on micro-communication) with customers so as to transform each customer moment into an extraordinary one. Concrete examples and language elements are defined for each department.
c. We also look at other aspects that are important for a 100% positive perception of the customer's experience: your staff's dress and body, their verbal and non-verbal communication, their behaviour and attitudes, golden communication, handling complaints (just in case)...
In conclusion, if the service is transactional (technical delivery of the hotel product), hospitality is authentic (encompassing passion and empathy) and one hundred percent human (how the delivery of the product is felt by its recipients). Hotels where hospitality sublimates an efficient and responsive service are always the ones with the best results in terms of turnover, loyalty and top ratings on review sites.
Discover our articles (in French) about hospitality and soft skills in our blog, here...
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