COVID-19 has changed the way we live and work forever. Once businesses are back to their operations, they have to adapt to the new norm and alter the way they used to adopt to get things done on different levels. At this point, personalization is more important than ever to gain back customers’ trust across the hospitality specter. HN spoke to Mark Dickinson, founder of Done! for hospitality training solutions, to know more about it.

I believe that customer service is the be-all-and-end-all in the hospitality industry and yet, it is ignored by many. Managers are so busy managing that they forget to take care of the people that take care of the customers.

What do I mean? 

If you take care of your people, the front line team members will give great service to your customers. The problem is that these people are dreadfully overlooked and under-provided for. Management wants better results in online surveys so they put pressure on teams to deliver.

This is all upside down.

If you would begin with helping your front line people feel important and valued to the organization then you would automatically get great customer reviews because your front line people would shine. 

Mark Dickinson

As we come out of hibernation, I think that organizations should build their structure with the fewest possible managers and the maximum empowerment of front line personnel. Let the people that serve customers take care of their own work. Empower them and watch them perform. Every front line team member knows what would make work go better and how to deliver better results, and the one thing that they complain about is that no one is listening to their ideas. Remove the non-listeners, empower those that know and concentrate all of your energy on doing amazing things for every single customer. Yes, every single customer. Not VIP’s, or special customers. Every customer. 

Make the organization about giving every customer an outstanding experience and you will attract more customers than you know what to do with. The quality of service is in general average, so if you would put your efforts at the front, where the money is made, and concentrate on having highly qualified servers that can self manage and less managers you will win. You will win so big because you will eat the competition. 

Dare to do it differently. Dare to think out of the box. Have a restaurant where the Chef is the manager and the service runs with a shift leader on each shift who reports to the chef-manager and everyone else is a server. Wow! Now that will be a great place to work.  Try it! 

COVID-19 taught every company one thing: Cash is king. If you have cash you live, if you don’t, you may survive. So cut out the people who complicate issues, cut out the heavy salaries, simplify and concentrate on getting your customers happy. When they are happy they will talk about you and come back. When they come back they will spend more and they will bring their friends. 

No fancy gimmicks are required. Just good, honest service by people who love what they do.