Service that Sells
• Sharpening your customer skills
Service Excellence
• A Blue Print to Touism Success
• Service Sells, Its Proven
A Fallacy in the Tourism Industry
• A place of hospitality, must be a vibrant,
living thing, somehow we have got down to
the idea of thinking that a hotel is a place
where we sell beds and food and a
restaurant is a place where we sell food and
liquor. We aren’t selling that, don’t get
distracted by that, those are secondary
things.
Our Business
• We are primarily in business to make
money - awards are great but they don’t pay
the bills.
• We are in the business of creating an
unforgettable experience at every turn,
creating WINET…….at every level.
Winet
• Well I Never Expected That…..!
Exceeding Guest Expectation is the Key
Creating a Culture with People
To be employed….teach your employees the
following:
• If you want to be respected - be respectable
• If you want to be liked - be likeable
• If you want to be loved - be loveable
• If you want to be employed - be employable
What Service Sells - It’s Simply
Service Excellence
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Attitude
Passion
Enthusiasm
Willingness to make a difference
Willingness to learn
It is quite simple - the company with the best
team wins… attitude is everything
So What Makes Companies
Successful?
• Forbes magazine annual list of most admired
companies rates companies by eight criteria:
Innovation
Financial soundness
Employee talent
Use of corporate assets
Long term investment value
Social responsibility
Quality of Management
Quality of produst and services
Employee Talent
THIS IS KEY TODAY
• A Business is a team not a solo performance
• What matters is your ability to unleash the
potential in others, align their efforts and
keep them enthused over time. The more
superstars you have on your bench the
better.
Optimising Your Talent
• Every employee has talent otherwise they would
never have been employed
• Identify your talents needs
• Harness the reason why people came to work for
you
• Begin to understand why people arrive on time for
work everyday
• Get to know people for the people they are and not
just employees who work for you…..
So How Do You Become a Killer
Competitor through Service
• In time of increasing uncertainty, a cool head
and common sense are invaluable business
weapons
• When others are flapping and frantically trying
to apply the latest management tools, it’s a
good idea to remind yourself what actually
matters and to work at it with a vengeance keeping it simple and back to basics
Killer Competitor
• To be more competitive, you have to keep
delivering more for less - and keep moving
the bar
• The further and faster you can improve, the
harder it will be for others to keep up…
how often do we become complacent...
Optimising Resources
• Get to know your people - mentorship
• Get to know your peoples’ skills and
limitations
• Harness the enthusiasm of the people who
work for you
• Build a business around people not the
product… products are a fad..they date and
people copy your great ideas
What Should Be Measured
Yardsticks
• Employee turnover
• Exit interviews
• Talking to customers asking what is good and what needs
improvement
• Ask suppliers who they rate as employees who best represent the
image of your business
• Employee retention vs Profit before interest
• Mystery guests
• Return cients vs new business written
• Source of business
Transferring Best Practice
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Develop a culture of service
Develop your own personality
Instill a service culture
Coach rather than punish poor delivery
Be there…..
Get employees to choose their attitude
Make a difference at every step of guest interaction
Strive to set an example at every employees
interaction with you….not only our guests
Strategic Choices
Is it:
• Product Leadership
• Customer Intimacy
• Operational Excellence through service
Case Study on Why and How
Service Excellence Works
Case Study - The Royal Hotel
Durban
• 159 years old
• Early 90’s voted best city hotel in South
Africa for five years running
• Leader in Hotel Keeping in RSA in 90’s
• 272 rooms, 18 Banqueting rooms, 8
restaurants
The Reality
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1998 - Inner City Decay
Security was a problem
Inner City died after 6.00pm
Inner City tenants began the drift north to Umhlanga Ridge
depleting the luncheon and conference business
• Revenues dropped 3 years running to the point of the hotel
no longer being profitable
• Additional 325 rooms from the Hilton came on line
• Durban had a perception of being the poor cousin to Cape
Town
The Choices
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Close the hotel
Convert into inner city residential
Cut costs further
Close food and beverage outlets
Close room stock
The Choices
• Close the hotel
• Convert into
residential building
• Cut costs further
• Close food and
beverage outlets
• Close rooms stock
• No due to perception
• No - conversion too
expensive
• Cut as far as we could
• No - all restaurants
were profitable
• Due to building
design, cost savings
were not really there
The Decision
• Cut our wrists in a warm bath….
• Develop a world first strategy to stay in
business and make profits….
• The Choice was simple…stay in business
What was the answer
• Create a USP
• Develop a service culture unparallel to our
competitors
• In source - do not outsource
• Create service excellence through
passionate people
The Process
• Dissect the business and see what was
profitable and what was ego business
• Dissect the competition and see what they
were not doing right
• Find the best people possible
• Create a workforce dying to serve and who
can made a difference
The Process
• Identified the passionate and enthusiastic members
of management and staff who loved serving
people who did not just come to work for the
money
• Promoted these people and asked the rest to retire
early, leave or moved elsewhere in the company
• Looked around the company and brought people
with a passion and experience to The Royal
The Process
• From 310 permanent staff we dropped down
to 97 permanent staff and introduced..
• 180 management and chef trainees through the
International Hotel School
• We had workforce overnight who wanted to
serve, learn and who had passion and
enthusiasm
The History
• The International Hotel School
– The Carlton Hote
– The future of our business in hospitality lay in
young people
– To many hotel managers and chefs leaving to
go overseas
– A short term answer to the Carlton’s Inner City
Decay
The Problems Encountered
• New experience for our customers was a bit
frightening at first
• 180 people with little or no hospitality skills - just
raw passion
• A dated hotel
• A very critical travel trade
• Competitors criticized and belittled the move “The
Royal has become a training hotel - disgraceful’
The Difference Was…..
We knew what we were doing was right
Actions Taken
• Massive training in service and delivery to
customers
• We spoke to our customers about what we
were doing and asked them for suggestions
and advice
• Created innovative food and beverage
concepts and even a Theatre restaurant to
get people back into the inner city at night
Actions Taken
• An innovative direct mail campaign to our customers
who had left us
• We created a fresh new approach to getting business
through young energetic passionate people
• We got young people to become involved in aspects
traditionally left to the senior managers
• We told our staff what we were doing and what was
expected of them
• We insourced our outsourced temp casual staff through
The Food and Beverage Academy
Actions Taken
• Created new innovative banqueting packages
• Started fun outside catering run by trainees
• Had formal trainee dinners for the groups
management
• Gave trainees the accountability of junior
managers with the responsibility which went
with it
In short, we got people to believe
that every decision in service
made a difference to a customer’s
experience and had an impact on
the profitability of the business
The Results…...
• Profitability in 10 months
• Occupancy grew 13.5% in first year
• Restaurants increased profitability by 18%
in first year
• Reclaimed 83 corporate accounts previously
lost to competitors
• Won the PMR award for best city
conferencing hotel….
The Results…..
• Almost a 0% staff turnover
• 40 - 50 trainees every year now get recruited by
Cunard lines
• In excess of 120 Management trainees now hold
senior management positions in the world top
hotel brands
• More than 26 non Three Cities Group Hotels have
internship trainee programmes
• Three Cities Group now has in excess of 1000
trainees training annually
The Benefits
• Royal hosted the Commonwealth Banquet The Queen stayed for 6 days
• Vice President of the USA stayed
• Government Ministers, Kings, all stay at the
Hotel
The Message
• Service Excellence only comes through training and
adapting to changing business dynamics
• Service Excellence comes from thinking out of the box….
And not worrying what people say about you
• Service Excellence comes from empowering and
mentoring people to become passionate about heir product
• Service Excellence comes from doing what is right for you
and not what your competition does or is doing
The Message
• Service Excellence does not mean winning
every award
– It means that any guest who uses your services
leaves having had a memorable experience
which they talk about and which they talk about
and which keeps them coming back
In Conclusion
• We ultimately build an operation with pride. You
tell people you are the best and now you have to
make it the best
• You may not be there right now, you might be all
the way at the bottom of the list but that
commitment to being the best starts with
developing people. When that happens your
customers and staff will start giving you ideas on
how to be the best
In Conclusion
• Training and developing young passionate
people can be treated as just lip service
However
• Even more rewarding than Service
Excellence is seeing a young person
develop and succeed…..
Service Excellence is the basis of
Everything
Manage It, Harness It, and
YOU WILL SUCCEED