Empowering hospitality through actionable insights
Starting with your brand promise, we'll help you break down the intended experience into its key components, as shown in the wheel framework.
Hover over or tap each segment to see a typical aspiration for that part of the guest experience.
Within each component, we aim to define what success looks like and to devise the most effective ways to objectively measure quality and consistency for standards, behaviours and processes. Normally this should be closely aligned with what teams are being trained.
STEP 1: Define what matters
Consumers crave for different types of experience, not a transaction.
Get this right (consistently), and your guests will reward you with trust, loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat visits. To make this happen, your team need to know what's expected and know that they will be observed to ensure it happens.
Design the guest journeys - there may be a few of these, depending on what types of experiences you offer (as a restaurant, you might also offer delivery and collection; hotels will need to think about FB and overnight experiences, etc.)
When you are reasonably clear about the guest journeys you wish to offer (or at least trial), talk to us. We'll help you to refine these and turn them into standards which are observable and measurable.
STEP 2: Brief the team
Now you need to make sure the team know what's expected of them. The key things here are simplicity (in terms of processes) and clarity (in terms of communication).
Given the importance of consistency, it should be no secret that these expectations will be observed and measured.
You will already have processes in place for training. HGEM can supplement these by participating in video briefings with your managers so they understand what's important and how they will be measured.
The act of training your team may highlight a need to make subtle changes to the standards themselves or to the way they will be measured - we would welcome being part of this discussion.
STEP 3: Measure objectively
OK, so here's where we'll really get stuck in. We'll design an assessment questionnaire that is directly aligned with the standards that you are training the team to deliver.
And then we'll organise mystery guests to objectively observe and report on what happens at each stage in the guest journey. But we'll also be thinking ahead to how you can make best use of the results.
In designing the questionnaire, we'll take account of the relative importance of different measures and weight them accordingly. We'll also organise questions into categories and journey stages so that we can identify patterns at various levels of granularity.
The visits themselves will be conducted by one of our registered mystery guests, either onsite or at home depending on the customer journey, who will be expected to provide comprehensive detail based on facts rather than opinions. Each report will be carefully validated by a member of our team.
STEP 4: Listen to feedback
Your standards need to be kept under close review as market expectations evolve and as you learn of the impact on guest perceptions. To inform these changes, you need to keep an ear to the ground and listen for subjective opinion.
This will quickly tell you whether there's a problem or an opportunity in a particular part of the guest journey and contribute to a rounded picture of the team's performance.
We'll link into the online review platforms for each of your locations and capture ratings and comments relating to recent experiences. We can also help you to get guests talking directly to you, answering the questions you need the answers to, using a fully branded guest feedback site.
You will be able to see all these results in one place, The Hub. We may even be able to show how your online reputation compares to local competitors for each site.
STEP 5: Continuous improvement
Armed with knowledge on whether your intended standards and processes are being properly delivered by the team, and what your guests ultimately think about the experience, the next stage is to analyse the results and turn them into actions. We can support this in a number of ways.
The first step is to find the patterns, the outliers in the data. The Hub makes this really easy, with lots of interactive charts, performance colour-coding, site comparisons and datasheets. You can create actions against any assessment, survey or review and assign this to an accountable manager to complete, tracking any related conversations. We also make it easy to respond to online reviews or to guests that have left their email address in a survey.
If it would be helpful, your account manager can provide further support by helping to analyse the results or hosting online sessions with managers to discuss improvements.