Good Customer Service | BE HOSPITABLE
If you believe in friendly service, behave toward customers in the way you behave toward your friends.
Hospitality embraces a warm and friendly reception for all visitors to your premises so that they feel comfortable and are at ease on entering your building. It means being delighted to see visitors and helping them overcome any problems they might have encountered in bringing themselves to you. Hospitality means giving people a positive and even memorable experience. It means making customers feel special.
Jane, personnel director of a chain of chicken restaurants in Singapore, says: “We dare our staff to make the customer a friend.” Asked what she meant by this, she replied that the use of the term “friendly customer service” begged the question of what we mean by a friend. A friend is someone we like to see, with whom we like to spend time, whose company we enjoy, whom we can trust, to whom we can take our problems.
Hospitality embraces friendship. It means presenting yourself to your customers in an open and delightful way. It means being pleased to see customers as well as hear from them. It means putting yourself out for them.
Here are some examples of how the principle of hospitality can be converted into practical behaviors:
Greeting a customer at the door.
Introducing a customer to your colleagues.
Offering to take a customer’s jacket and hang it up for him or her.
Pulling up a comfortable chair for the customer to sit on.
Offering a customer a cough candy if he or she starts coughing.
Presenting the customer with a small gift, even a candy or a cookie.
You can start practicing being hospitable with members of your own team, perhaps using some creative role plays in your weekly half-hour team sessions.
Hospitality not only relates to the hospitality trade (hotels, tourism, travel, conferences, and events) but to all industries, including banks, retail, engineering, public sector, and charities.
It might sound like a truism, but the better the hospitality you provide to your customers, the better the service will be. You should avoid the reverse syndrome, which is to drain your costs so much that there is no scope for even minimal hospitality. What is the cost of a welcoming cup of tea in winter or a glass of juice in summer?
HOSPITALITY GUIDELINES
✔ Hospitality must be genuine. It must come from the heart.
✔ Hospitality must be spontaneous.
✔ Hospitality is a function of people’s attitudes, not of corporate policy and procedure. It is not a function of money, or of costs or budgets. Hospitality reflects the ethos in your organization: that you receive customers warmly.
✔ Hospitality (in its worst sense) should never be used as a bribe or an incentive. It is not something you “trade” to secure business from a customer.
✔ Hospitality should be applied to every visitor, irrespective of status or importance (in other words, don’t reserve hospitality for VIPs).
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE PRACTICE
Create a buzz today by focusing on hospitality and demonstrating it to every customer (internal or external) who enters your department.
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE QUOTE
Do you really want to work for an organization that is inhospitable to its customers? Hospitality is not a waste of time and money but an essential investment in building buzzing relationships.
