Customer care is critical in hospitality.
Customers are pivotal to your business. I know that is pointing out the obvious but how much do we consider that fully?
The customers pay you money and that money you use to pay the bills and then yourself they provide your income.
Ok great – relationship understood all done!
Well, we all know that there is more to it than that…
All business is about commerce, a transaction of money in payment for services and goods but there are loads of industries where you don’t need to know your customer, where you can never meet them, not know very much about them and even not have to care about them.
We are told over and over that customer service and customer care are essential, but this is not necessarily true.
There are those businesses operating as monopolies who can and do behave badly towards customers. They have whole populations needing them and it does not matter what they do or do not do customers will still pay them.
We live in a country where true monopolies don’t exist but there are definitely industries dominated by oligopolies, so a few big players who dominate the market so much that they can still operate and make money without having to care very much about the customer.
We can all think of companies that we use that we feel we have no choice about, say an airline who are the only operators on a route you need or a supermarket which happens to be the only one nearby, your mobile phone provider because it is the only one with a clear signal where you live or your energy supplier who you can choose just based on price (and if you can be bothered with the paperwork to transfer this year) indeed the newspaper you read, cause let’s face it there is not a lot of choice or variety in style.
The point is that these companies whilst they may make a big song and dance about how wonderful their customer service is and, in some cases, they genuinely do try, the reality is that if they fail it is not the end of the world to them. They might lose one customer but actually, if it were you who had experienced bad service with an airline say, next time do you have many choices to change to a different company? In most cases, we complain about it but still, pay for the next time.
Some of these companies will almost taunt the customer with bad customer service, the only outlet to vent frustration for the customer being review sites or Twitter but these companies don’t need to do very much about it because their reputation for customer service is not really going to make much of a dent on future customers spending money with them. Your outrage is nothing, there will be no mass boycott, it is water off a duck’s back.
That is not to say that these companies do not know how to or don’t spend on customer service and relations but often this is more about public image and share price than it is about real ‘care’ for the customer.
I have noticed this more and more in the last few decades as a business strategy had meant that call centers are farmed out with fewer people answering phones, longer call wait times, and then insufficient knowledge to be able to fix a problem once you do get though.
The point here is that these are often not neglect of the customer, they are conscious money-saving decisions; caring about customers and providing the best for them can be expensive, particularly if you have millions of them.
So what perhaps we need to consider in hospitality is: what do our customers mean to us beyond just a transaction, why should we care?
Well in hospitality we don’t operate in any type of monopoly or oligopoly. According to the British Hospitality Association there, are 127,000 hospitality businesses in the UK, and the choices for customers are immense.
Every taste is catered to every option covered and if customers didn’t have enough choice with just those venues we are also in competition with every other leisure activity so the cinema, bowling alley, theatre and then, of course, people’s homes with the likes of Netflix and Marks & Spencers meal deals putting us in direct competition with the supermarkets who can undercut us easily with pricing.
Our customers have so much choice. They can choose to spend money in so many venues for food and drink and even for the spaces to socialise. What we need to strive for is not only to get the customer to choose us in the first place but then to stay, to come back, and then to encourage others to visit and the biggest impact we can have on that is through customer care.
Unlike the monopolies and oligopolies where the product is the most important element of the business, we sit at the far opposite end of the spectrum where the product barely matters(you can buy it in the supermarket) but customer care is essential.
When deciding what business to take on it wasn’t by chance that you chose hospitality. My bet is that like me you fell in love with pubs & restaurants a long time ago. Those of us who operate in this industry know how important the pub has been to us and we all have wanted to operate businesses that share those experiences with others.
Everyone has stories of nights out to restaurants or pubs with friends and family; for casual meet up’s that turned into the best night ever; stories of great nights, special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries; stories where we met someone new or cemented a relationship, where you shared ideas and discovered new interests; stories of feeling you belonged and stories of feeling special.
The places you visit over and over again are places where for some reason you feel you fit in; where the décor suits you; the other customers are your kind of people; you feel unhurried, and even when they don’t know your name, you feel special.
These are venues that are connecting with you emotionally.
When I first started working in this industry it used to be called customer service, now rightly it is customer care and I can tell the difference.
I went to a pub recently where if I was a mystery customer then it would have been difficult to not give them top marks, everything was done in order, everything with a smile, the check back to the table well-timed. But on leaving that is when the cracks showed. As the last to leave the pub we were hurried along and out of the door. The member of staff turned from being attentive to being irritated by our presence with us stood outside 5 minutes before the official closing time it was obvious that there had been no care for us. No worry about how we felt, the embarrassment and shame caused by being herded out, no concern about the tone of voice used, and an easy hiding place behind a ‘rule’ that we were to leave the building before a particular time. Besides the rights and wrongs of that rule, it is the manner that demonstrated the lack of ‘care’ and that is something you cannot simply train staff in but which illustrates that every other transaction during that evening with that member of staff had been just that a ‘transaction’ or ‘service’.
There had been no emotional connection or care and that mattered more than anything else in our experience of our evening.
To be made to feel welcome and that we belonged and that we were appreciated and that we would be protected is the role of members of staff in hospitality. We may not explicitly realise it but the ‘care’ that we are shown when we visit pubs, restaurants or coffee shops may not be the only reason we come and go, convenience still plays a part sometimes, but it is why we become fiercely loyal and why we return the care and support ‘our’ local business.
“People buy with emotion and justify with logic”.
Most people are not aware of their emotional responses to things, but it is difficult to argue with this statement. It is why we are drawn to brands and why we buy things on a whim. We may have a long list of why that purchase was a good one but really, you had made that decision with your heart.
Hospitality businesses are tough, we operate in an extremely saturated market with competition and threats to our businesses everywhere. But the key to standing high above the rest and the only way to create a following of loyal customers who beat a path to your door and then bring an army of followers with them is to know them and truly care about them.
