How a five star hotel turns risks into customer delight and competitive edge?

Tjen’s Word

August 4, 2013

How a five star hotel turns risks into customer delight and competitive edge?

by Lei tjen

 

 

Introduction

 

As a big fan of five star hotel facilities and services, I always prefer to stay in one of these hotels during personal overseas trips.

 

So when I learnt that the event manager of my consultancy company would arrange a business study trip on five star hotels in Thailand, I was the first one to enroll for it.

 

We visited VIE Hotel Bangkok during the second day of our study trip.  Its Resident Manager, Banthueng  (or preferably named as BT),  had given us a warm reception.

 

After BT’s sharing with the visiting team, Lei Tjen was amazed at the resilience of the hotel management to survive and to thrive throughout the bumpy political and economic environment since its start-up and impressed by its management capability of turning risks into customer delights.   Here is one of the examples…

 

 

Turning risks into customer delight

 

Perfectly positioned at the heart of Bangkok, VIE Hotel Bangkok offers guests panoramic views of Bangkok skyline from all angles.  Its prime location next to the BTS Skytrain station puts it in close proximity of business districts while the entertainment complexes of MBK and Siam Paragon can easily be reached via Skytrain.

 

Despite its privileged location and attractive French Chic ambiance, it faces more and more demanding travellers who prefer fluent English-speaking front-desk servicing staff to handle efficiently their exceptional requests upon check-in to the hotel. This had been evidenced by the negative verbatim from trip advisors.

 

Efficient check-in is one of the three critical processes leading to hotel customer satisfaction (the other two being housekeeping and F&B).  Hotel management therefore faced significant pressure to elevate fast and smart the customer satisfaction at check-in service counter. 

 

With the eagerness to handle check-in s efficiently, the front-desk staff members even peeped at stop-watches to monitor check-in duration…!  The hotel management then came up with the bright idea of innovative Butler Service.

 

A team of best servicing attitude front-liners with consistently good performance over the last few evaluation cycles were selected to form a butler service team. They are required to attend regularly hospitality English lessons to continuously improve their conversational skills with English-speaking guests.

 

Guests with exceptional requests would be led by a butler into the reserved guest room such that request details would be taken care of by the butler in a more personal and private setting.  Guests’ feedback to the pilot launch had been encouraging.

 

Though there is a designated butler for each guest with special requests, a whole butler servicing team is indeed working behind the sense to ensure that customer request details are taken care of seamlessly once the relevant information is put onto the system.

 

This is a perfect example of turning customer complaints into service improvement opportunities and VIE Hotel even goes one step further to make this a competitive edge of the hotel vis-à-vis severe competition among the Bangkok hotels!

 

Bravo, VIE Hotel Bangkok, keep up the energy and light up customers upon their arrival at your hotel.