Malcolm Gladwell�s book �The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference� has tremendous applications in the hospitality industry in terms of customer service! Ours is an industry of �little things� � identifying which ones will �tip� our guests positively or negatively is the challenge!

There are many issues affecting the delivery of customer service and how our guests select us. Thanks to web sites such as TripAdvisor, among many others, a potential guest has an opportunity to preview the service delivery at any hotel through the eyes of past guests.
Guest Comment Cards, many hotels� primary measurement of service delivery, tend to be skewed by those guests who had a problem or those guests who had an extraordinary experience (and the goal is for all of them to have extraordinary experiences). It is safe to assume that the �rating web sites� have the same skew, discounting any attempts to seed the reviews by the hotel staff. (You wouldn�t do that, would you?) 

However, the instructive part of these sites is to be able to identify those �touch points� that �tipped� the guest positively or negatively in their perception of the property. Not all touch points are of equal importance and there are some that will not make a positive difference in the guest perception if all is well but will score negatively if it is not. For example, a guest doesn�t smile with glee if all the lights in the room work when the switch is turned on but will be displeased if there are lights that don�t work.

In the delivery of customer service training, we struggle with drilling down customer service delivery to our service associates and they are all service associates, even the maintenance engineers! The more specific our expectations of our associates� customer service delivery the better the chances of success.

The important touch points can be engineered by focusing on them in customer service training so that our GSAs understand them, why they are important and the guest service behaviors that will ensure they are positive. It is an accumulation of positive �touch� points that eventually �tips� the guest perception positively or negatively.

A few actions you can take now to identify the �touch points� that �tip� your guests to perceive the hotel positively or negatively and begin to engineer them:

1. Monitor your hotel�s reviews on the web sites. There are many sites that feature reviews of a hotel including the franchise site, Travelocity, etc and Trip Advisor. Without getting emotional, coolly analyze the reviews for commonly mentioned patterns in customer service gaps. When a pattern emerges, try to break the complaint down into the �touch points� of guest contact.

2. Share the reviews with your staff at departmental meetings. Please remember that we entrust guest service to the least paid and the least committed people in the hotel. People respond to requests better when they understand why you are asking them to modify certain aspects of their behavior. The staff doesn�t log onto the web sites and won�t understand where you are coming from if you don�t show them.

3. Set goals and incentives for improvement in the targeted areas. Why would people modify their behavior if they are going to receive the same paycheck �regardless of whether they implement your suggestions or not? Set the terms of measurement for improvement and benchmarks � the reviews are not going to turn totally positive in one month. �Tipping� the guest is a process � there is no quick fix. Set up incentives, money is always preferable, to reward your associates for making positive changes.

4. Implement a guest service training program not just for the associates but a �train the trainer� program so that your managers have the tools to train the associates. A good trainer can help you do this. If front line turnover is high, and most hotels have high turnovers in these areas, any training you implement for them will last only as long as the last employee.

5. Insert guest service performance into the employee review process. People tend to perform those functions that they perceive to be the most important to their supervisors. If their initial training and review focuses on the technical training they received on the PMS or in F&B on menu knowledge the associate assumes that this is the most important part of their jobs. Imbed your new employee training with guest service training on the �touch points� that �tip� the guest positively in their perception of the hotel.

copyright © Carol Verret, 2002-2003 -2004 -2005