Tag service

Tag service

Is Spa Product Training Dead?

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We believe that spa guests deserve a perfect service. But with 27% of spas at 0-10% in retail sales to service, we wonder if a perfect service is being delivered. Is product training for therapists providing all of the necessary information and tools? Or is something more needed? What gives?

If you missed our March 4th Blab no worries. In this segment we discuss product distributors, manufacturers and expansion of training. Tip:click your mouse on the verbiage to the right side of the screen to read the comments.

 

Next Blab-Can Introverts Sell?

Friday, March 11 7:30 p.m.-8:pm. Bangkok time |  7:30 a.m.-8:00 am East Coast

12:30 pm London | 11:30 pm Sidney,Au.| 2:30 pm South Africa |4:30 pm UAE 

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How the Spa Industry Can Show more Love to Our Introverts

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Stress-free-zone700Despite the proliferation of introverts in the industry, old school methods of training are still being used in spas around the globe! This may be due in part because hospitality companies don’t often conduct personality assessments for their employees.

However, those of us who work in spas know that the serene atmosphere and mellow vibe tends to attract a more laid back soft spoken kind of person.

In the case of sales training, 99% of programs are designed for extroverts. Read More

The Hidden Gap Between Asian Culture and Luxury Sales

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As consumers become more knowledgeable about what other consumers are experiencing, the demands for excellent customer service increase. The vast majority of consumers say they will walk out of a store if they receive inadequate assistance from employees. Nowhere is this more impactful than in the luxury market.

Despite the importance of individual attention at luxury retailer stores, many consumers think today’s brands aren’t delivering. Only 38% of consumers said they receive better customer service in luxury retail than in non-luxury retail.

Want to read more of my article? It’s on Huffington Post-Click Here

How Luxury Brands Can Motivate Service Employees

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Would Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor have tolerated customer service shaped only by a checklist? No. Neither do today’s guests of The Beverly Hills Hotel, a favorite of those two actresses. While leading the 1,000 employees at The Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air, I’ve seen how a customer’s experience can change based on something as small as a smile. At such moments, smooth operations and efficient processes are no substitute for an engaged, motivated employee with the instinct to do the right thing.

Yet luxury hospitality and retail businesses, like many other companies, can struggle to motivate employees. This is often a particular challenge with hourly-wage workers. Few organizations master it. As customers, we have all experienced an overworked and undervalued employee dismiss us with a shrug.

At our hotels, we keep our team motivated and our morale high by focusing on four important factors:

Financial Security
One of the most important ways that managers can help these employees be their best is to start by making them feel safe. Employees can only deliver great service if they have peace of mind. They can’t give their best if they are worried about their incomes or job security. Creating this sense of safety is really about speaking to two parts of each employee: his heart and his head.

Forgiveness
Fair pay is the basis for creating an organization where employees feel secure, but of course, it’s not enough. You also have to manage each employee’s emotions – that’s the heart. One of the most powerful ways to do this as a manager is to forgive errors. No matter how high your standards, perfection is beyond human reach. True forgiveness must be felt, not just stated.

When a person in my organization makes a mistake, I always try to ask: Are they repeating a mistake or making it for the first time? Can we forgive and teach? Sometimes the cerebral policy has to bend to the heart – because the employee made a mistake trying to do the right thing. Perhaps the employee took initiative to solve a customer problem for which we don’t have a policy. Looked at that way, maybe the mistake wasn’t a mistake after all.

It’s just as important to practice collective forgiveness. A hotel in San Francisco where I worked previously lost a 5-star travel rating after an inspector gave us a poor grade for front-of hotel experience. We had to connect head and heart to rally the team to win the rating back– even as customer volume was booming and we always felt short-staffed.

For two years, we nurtured excellence, meeting with employees one-on-one to analyze service. A secret shopper evaluated the team every six to eight weeks. At shift meetings, we shared the results, praising successes and noting mistakes. Individuals who scored well earned gift certificates or salary boosts. Soon, staffers were congratulating each other for 100% test scores. We shared positive reinforcement openly, but gave negative feedback privately, in combination with coaching.

Respect
When I arrived at The Beverly Hills Hotel, the employee entrance and locker rooms were, in the words of one colleague, “horrific” — quite run down and dirty. When you’re asking people to come to work in an ultra-luxury environment, this is a stark way to start the day. So we revamped the employee entrance to resemble the hotel’s iconic front-of-house arrival area for the guests — down to the green-and- white-striped canopy, palm plants, and red carpet. Today when employees come to work, they walk the red carpet, with music playing in the background. They have a sense of arrival and strong team morale.

Decisions like these lead employees to articulate not only that your company is a good place to work, but also why it is a good place to work.

Communication
To make employees feel safe, respected, and when necessary, forgiven, leaders have to make themselves available. At the Beverly Hills we have an open-door policy. Any employee can come see me with a question or suggestion. According to employee survey data, that policy helped overall employee engagement rise by 12% between 2010 and 2014. And at lunchtime, I frequently eat in the employee cafeteria, not the guest dining room, and I sit with different people in order to hear a range of feedback. This also gives me the opportunity to put our company’s good growth news front and center for our team, which reassures everyone in the organization – from the back office to the lobby – that their incomes are secure. It’s a positive, self-reinforcing loop.

To read the complete article by , Click here

 

 

The Shocking Truth About ‘Having to Work on Black Friday’

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Every year from family and friends on I had to hear “I can’t believe you have to work tomorrow. I’m off the entire weekend!” they’d croon. I hated it. I knew that they would be in various stages of enjoyment of the day after the holiday; shopping, relaxing and eating more of those great tasting leftovers. I sighed. And went into the place where I worked, the spa. Read More

First North American Guest Experience Award

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With the term “guest experience” on the lips of almost everyone involved in hospitality it was inevitable that a competition would be created to identify the best in the industry.  The awards are the brainchild of  The International Luxury Hotel Association and TrustYou, the leading provider of online reputation management. Read More