HANDLING COMPLAINTS

You have heard what they say about handling negative scenarios and mopping up guests’ unpleasant experiences in your hotel. Being truthful, empathizing and making up. During my operation years in the field, we received extensive training on how to handle guests’ complaints and bulky SOP manual to refresh failing memories on managing guests idiosyncrasies. Back then, a unit was even created with carefully picked girls dressed to impress to attend to difficult situations in the hotel. That did not work much as guests are more impressed with quality service delivery than beautiful afterthoughts. The two lessons I later learnt is that it is easier creating a near perfect service delivery environment that battling with a costly damage control process. Secondly, how do you handle a non-complaining dissatisfied guest?

Negative issues that are service based can potentially place your hotel in a detrimental position. It is therefore vital that management concentrate more on being proactive than spending scare resources both human and financial in managing distasteful moments. Dealing with guests’ service related challenges can be done live using basic service recovery programme and operating standards. Anything less than this will potentially leave a dissatisfied guest. Guests’ overall expectations from us are decent and minimal. They want comfort, security and cleanliness though not necessarily in that order. Our position is to train and develop employees using this operating standards and service recovery as a baseline. The key here is consistency.

Ten years ago, most hotels were on a manual mode of operation; I remember how I used to sit behind IBM typewriter generating room variance and night reports till the following morning leaving me with little or no time to either be proactive or apply service recovery programmes! We were very edgy then and it sometimes showed in our service delivery. But, a lot have changed since then. At the touch of a button; you can now generate relevant reports, POS at the restaurants relieve employees of the tedious effort of reconciling accounts and ultimately avails the employees and management more time to relate with guests. Anticipating guests’ needs and focusing effectively on guests’ needs is therefore enhanced.

It is however not all good news with technology. The technology that takes care of previous administrative burden is also responsible for social media that guests now use to expose hotels shortcoming and negative experiences. It is possible to be on Facebook on account of bad service delivery while you are trying to recover service! We all know the costly implications of a sour experience gone viral on network.

Handling guests who do not complain to the management is everybody’s worry and rightly so, because there is nothing more humiliating and damaging than hearing about your shortcomings from a third party. At this time, it’s often too late to recover service or do damage control or pacify guest. It is indeed the worst scenario. The only solution is to fervently express management’s commitment to open door policy and makes process of complaints very easy. Guests must constantly be reminded that the hotel is indeed interested in their comfort and to do this effectively, guests’ cooperation is compulsory. This may lure silent complainers into the open. Just may.