Want customer satisfaction? Satisfy your employees first - Professionally Speaking

If you want to be customer-focused, start by focusing on your employees. Give them the go-ahead to meet your customers' needs. That's the lesson we've learne during the past three years at Guest Quarters suite Hotels. Does it work? Absolutely.

Consider these two recent examples of outstanding customer service:

When a guest at our Waltham, Mass. hotel ripped a suit that the local dry cleaner couldn't repair overnight, Juan Gallego, a member of the bell staff, took the suit home with him. His mother repaired it and he delivered it in time for the executive to wear to a meeting the next morning.

In the course of adopting a child, a couple made repeated visits to our hotel i Philadelphia. When they came to town to pick up the infant and bring her back t the hotel, they discovered that hotel employees had turned their suite into a fully decorated nursery, complete with crib, balloons, a teddy bear personalize with the baby's name and a big greeting card signed by every member of the hote staff.

Employee initiative

Needless to say, here were two customers who were extremely pleased by the leve of personal service they received from someone at Guest Quarters--and they'll probably come back. In neither case did a manager make the decision to exert th extra effort nor direct an employee to do something above and beyond the call o duty. Instead, as in the hundreds of other such anecdotes we hear from guest comment cards, these gestures were initiated by employees. It's a level of initiative that's difficult to achieve in a culture that fosters dependence and relies on the traditional chain of command.

What we've learned is that the only way to put the customer first is by putting the employee first.

The logic may not be obvious, but we have certainly found it compelling. Satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers, the only kind you can afford t have in a service business like ours. We focus on employee satisfaction three ways--employee empowerment, training, and career development and employee input

* Employee empowerment. We believe the only way to deliver quality service is to empower employees to do so--it cannot simply be mandated. All employees know that they can take the action necessary to satisfy a customer. No checking with the manager, no need to say "I'll see what I can do." Employees have the power and responsibility to deliver customer service on the spot, and they do.

Some of our managers were worried about opening a Pandora's box when we wanted to give employees more power and flexibility to meet the demands of our customers. What we found was that employees' judgments were much better than we thought--and they still ask a manager for a decision when that's appropriate.

* Training and career development. We train employees to learn how to satisfy customers--how to be empowered--thus avoiding the "not my job" syndrome and enhancing their innate creativity and initiative. We offer more specialized training--English as a second language courses, for example--to employees, to help them communicate better with guests and hotel management. And we subsidize college course tuition for employees interested in management-level positions.

The idea of employee empowerment extends to career-development. We offer a career-path-planning program to develop high-potential line employees and managers for promotions within the company. Some 75 percent of the management positions are filled from within the company. Employees set their own career goals and objectives, which managers must support. If a housekeeper wants to ge into restaurant management, for example, the manager must create an appropriate path for that employee to follow.

* Employee input. We also believe that our employees are the most valuable resource we've got in terms of suggestions for improvements, so we regularly as them, through surveys, about ways to enhance our ability to meet the needs of guests. That way, we take the best practices of an individual employee and institutionalize them throughout the Guest Quarters chain.

Higher productivity, lower hiring costs.

These programs improve our level of employee satisfaction, and satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers. Our employees stay longer, which means higher productivity and lower hiring costs. In fact, our annual employee turnover is half the turnover rate for all hotels and less than a third the industry rate for all-suite hotels. (The American Hotel Motel Association estimates a turnover rate of 89 percent for all hotels and 140 percent for all-suite hotels like Guest Quarters; our rate is approximately 45 percent.) Many all-suite hotels have fewer conventions, special events and food service facilities and are therefore perceived to offer fewer career paths--thus the higher turnover rate. Guest Quarters, on the other hand, is a full service company which offers its employees multiple career path options.

Our low turnover rate is one indication of employee satisfaction, but we also measure the absolute level of employee satisfaction through an annual anonymous survey. Interestingly, but not surprising to us, there is a positive correlatio between training, employee satisfaction and guest satisfaction. We were surprised, however, at how direct the relationship was on a per property basis. We found that our hotels that offer the highest level of training enjoyed the highest level of employee satisfaction, and the customers who stayed at those properties had the highest "intent to return" and "friendliness of staff" level in our system, as indicated by guest comment cards. This demonstrates dramatically that satisfied customers can and do affect the bottom line.

There's another benefit to the strategy of employee empowerment: It gives the responsibility and authority for handling those "moments of truth" to those who are closest to the guests--our employees. That helps us stay competitive and contributes to still greater customer satisfaction, since it reduces the number of people who get in the way of meeting a particular guest's needs.

Customer service has become a kind of mantra for many U.S. businesses, and with good reason. Dissatisfied customers quickly turn into former customers. But wha many companies must discover is that customer service is only as good as the weakest link in the value chain, which connects the most elemental supplier to the paying customer. At Guest Quarters, we've strengthened one of the critical links in that chain by focusing on our employees, giving them the power to be their best. And that fuels their ability and motivation to deliver the best service to our customers.

John J. Weaver is vice president of human resources, Guest Quarters Suite Hotel based in Boston, Mass.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Society for Human Resource Management
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