Exclusive Feature: Many situations in daily hotel operations teach us power in reacting on anger, disappointment, violence, and so forth; however, the best ability to react is usually required in cases when it is getting personal.
Guests usually do not distinguish when they blame the entire establishment or when they put the blame on the actual employee.
By not understanding the mechanism of hotel operations, the guests take the first or nearest hotel employee and take their angry action on him.
What should hotel employee do in such situations is usually written in hotel standards. However, no trainer tells how difficult it is to think of standards when facing an angry guest yelling on you. That is why we made a model of reaction, which can help addressing guest complaints properly.
In any problem, fear is not the best friend. There are three basic models of reaction when any individual faces a problem:
All three models have their right to exist in various occasions; however, an angry customer talking personally about you requires application of the multiple standards at the same time. And applying these standards requires reaction power.
If we divide all three models into reaction power, the results will be the following:
- Abandoning – 30
- Reacting – 80%
- Facing – 100%
Surprisingly, reactions rich in emotion are less powerful in our model. When a person faces a lot of personal anger and harassment, the worst thing to do is to leave these emotions non-actionable.
The model of abandoning a situation describes an individual who is in panic and cannot speak a word. Abandoning will do not good to a hotel employee and the establishment in general. Silent reaction and no voice would be taken as confession of blame, and the hotel guest will have to leave feeling content and at the same time disappointed that the hotel turned out to be worse than he thought.
Thinking about service standards in the model of abandoning is not possible. For this reason, we divided thinking ability in all three situations:
- Abandoning – 20%
- Reacting – 30%
- Facing – 100%
According to our model, both reacting and abandoning require almost no thinking. However, if abandoning means almost no action, reacting means action without thinking. When talking to an angry guest, the employee completely disagrees with the situation and starts talking back trying to protect himself.
This model involves more thinking ability; however, it is still rather poor because it only involves 30% of thinking. Reacting, however, is having more reaction power as it demonstrates protest.
Facing is one of the most effective models of behaviour in terms of both reaction power and thinking ability. Facing happens a few moments after reacting takes place. If the employee takes a deep breath and uses these valuable seconds for thinking, the complete model changes from reacting to facing.
When facing a situation, the individual not only handles it completely so that the guest is happy in the end, but the overall level of emotion is preserved, and only essential factors within the situation get covered by an employee. This also involves the application of hotel standards. In this case, individual has enough time to think over the situation and to remember the standards to be applied with this particular guest.
Finally, looking at all three reactions in real life with real guests and employees, it is not difficult to conclude that both abandoning and reacting demotivate the latter and create emotional issues among employees and departments.
Facing as reaction power model is the best solution for customer service in hotels, and taking time to think prior to acting or abandoning a guest should be learned by front of the house in all occasions.
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Mila Petruk, CEO & Founder at Milina Outsourcing
Mila Petruk is a hospitality consultant and a founder of Milina Outsourcing which provides project-based consulting and outsourcing services including mystery guest audit, temporary staffing and training support. Being a hospitality industry enthusiast, Mila has a global insight into the developing trends of hotel and restaurant business all over the world. Having graduated from University Centre Cesar Ritz (Switzerland) in 2007 with MBA in Hotel and Tourism Management, Mila has obtained a rich international hotel work experience in Europe and Asia. Contact Mila at mp@moconsulting.com.ua or www.moconsulting.com.uaMila writes a regular column for 4Hoteliers.com.
