The seven core competencies at the heart of my company’s signature program which is called Hospitality Brilliance. I will also touch on some of the subset elements that make up the support structure for each core competency and connected examples to the different parts of the article series.
#1 Leadership and Culture
As you have read through this article series, you can start to see that a more balanced business strategy approach by the hotel leadership and management positions around focusing more on guest aspects of their business would definitely have a positive impact on the cultural performance of the organization towards creating a more memorable guest stay. I have repeatedly talked about that the leadership position of the hotel seems to be very internally focused on their own interest which carries over to the entire organization in how they treat and engage with the hotel guest in every operational aspect of the hotel.
So, the question that I would pose to the senior leadership and management position of the hotel industry is do you see everything in your business, as a brick wall that you feel needs to be sledge hammered through, or do you see your business as a brick pile of opportunities that you want to gain leverage on for building a successful pathway for your business to operate in? I utilize this analogy because I’ve created a metaphor of the wheelbarrow to help achieve leadership, management and organizational cultural alignment for achieving leverage through customer experience design strategies to improve the financial position of the business. I call this the Wheelbarrow Culture. There are nine key aspects that make up the wheelbarrow culture, from the cornerstone of the hospitality enterprise to the managerial support structure as well as operational team level of engagement. When it comes to the core competency, these nine key sub elements are critical for achieving guest experience excellence outcomes.
What I like about this analogy is that it allows the leadership and management position to better understand and manage these nine different aspects within their organization. It allows leadership to consider if they have a balanced business approach for moving forward in their business initiatives, or is one of the key parts is in need of improvement.
For the leadership and management to be effective in developing the guest experience design, it requires a more intuitive perspective that balances the logical and analytical side of the company business disciplines as well as the operational aspects with a more innovative and creative approach and perspective for managing the emotional aspects of the business, as well as the physical product and service offerings. This also allows for stronger employee engagement best practices to be made available as well as taking into consideration the employee experience management aspects for achieving a big picture perspective of having every one being on the same page when it comes to taking care of the guest stay and the financial health of the business. This is vital in supporting all these core competencies and especially in the case of the next core competency business strategies. If you’re not happy with your business’s financial performance, I guarantee you that your wheelbarrow culture is in need of repair or tuning up.
#2 Business Strategy
I have talked about and made recommendations around strategically creating stronger guest experience design concepts, services and operational tactics throughout the article series, especially in Part Three of this series. This core competency is the catalyst for achieving guest experience excellence. After reading the first four parts of this article series, I believe you start to see what a vital part these business strategies can add to any hospitality enterprise. It’s just a matter of evaluating your present business strategies and then creating guest experience strategies that align towards adding value with your guest experience. This can be a challenging concept for organizations to undertake on their own without having a more objective and intuitive individual establishing these business strategies, aligning them to your core fundamental principles of your business as well as implementing them to the different business disciplines of the company.
From when my wife and I arrived to the time when we left the hotel, there was very little guest experience strategy being utilized for generating any kind of an emotional connection with the guest towards achieving guest loyalty. Basically without having a guest experience strategy as the number one priority of the hospitality enterprise, you end up leaving at least 50% of your company unmanaged and underperforming. Now, I know that’s a very strong statement, but in the hospitality industry a very accurate one indeed if you’re not managing customer expectations and anticipating your customers’ needs or designing your business to make an emotional connection with your guest. Unlike other industries, the hospitality industry is very experience reliant on how the guest remembers your business. Without proper customer experience business strategies in existence to help guide your organization to better manage all the different business disciplines and operational aspects of the enterprise, it can negatively impact your guest stay as well as guest loyalty and satisfaction scores.
Another key component within these business strategies is your business model design approach. This is specifically around the direction of the value proposition and the other eight key elements that make up most business models. The value proposition of the business model has to be extensively looked at to see if it is structured as being commodity driven, product and service driven, or if it is the total guest experience that your business offers . Is it balanced with the logical and the emotional elements within your business enterprise? In the hospitality industry, I see so many business models that are very lopsided on the transactional side, and not taking the entire experience the hotel has to offer in the value proposition offering.
All businesses have strategies, models, and customer experiences. Are they designed to contribute to the guest experience and be externally focused on your customers’ happiness for generating loyalty and stronger financial performance, or are they more focused on the internal aspects of the business and just solely product driven for achieving financial performance? I touch on this in the next core competency with regards to brand relationships.
#3 Brand Relationship
The brand relationship core competency can be one of the most key competencies when communicating your businesses value proposition, or trying to create initial engagement with your customer segments that have the ability to create trust, loyalty, and stronger financial performance. In a customer experience design perspective when considering the brand dynamics around promise and message of the business, and how it relates to the brand values is key to closing engagement gaps with the customer. You have to ask yourself this question is your brand values driving decisions about how you engage and treat customers. If they don’t then your business is only playing for customer usage and not loyalty.
In a matter of speaking, you may have the business position that your company value is stronger than the value that your customers bring to the table. If you go back to Part One of the article series, during the reservation process, this is a classic example of what I’m talking about in this core competency. I don’t think that it was a case on their part of supply side economics for pushing stronger ADR.
I have extensively discussed the brand equity trap that businesses so easily get caught in, in trying to achieve the value associated with the brand by the customer, i.e. wanting the customer to like the company. When you utilize these seven core competencies, you’re working towards achieving experiential value with your customers. You have to build experiential value before you can create brand equity with your customers. It’s really true what they say, the customer really does come first in any brand related conversations.
I’d like to share this episode of the show I watch called Shark Tank. Mark Cuban is one of the venture capitalist billionaires on the show. Mark Cuban gave a would-be entrepreneur $2 million for only 20% of their company, just based on experiential value of her product offering to customers in the marketplace. It was the highest deal ever done on the show. Mark’s reasoning was that to win in business is to create experiential value for customers. And that’s where the hotel industry should also be competing for their customers when attempting to achieve brand relevance and loyalty.
#4 Customer Compass
The reason I named this core competency the customer compass is because I think it’s important for business organizations to have a better understanding of the direction in which they should be moving when it comes to better anticipating and managing customer expectations in every aspect of their business, and how they can better design their business to influences their buying and loyalty decisions. In an article I wrote called, What Century Are You Operating Your Hotel In? I expand quite a bit on this topic. A business should not being so overly internally focused on their procedures and policies when it comes to their customers. I think it’s safe to say that 85% of the hospitality industry has a business compass and not a customer compass.
Having a better understanding of the customer journey within your hospitality enterprise is a good starting point. Had this hotel done a better job with mapping out the guest stay within their business, this would have allowed them to create a very proactive guest experience ecosystem that could influence their systems for delivering service/SDS and impact how they develop all the different business disciplines and operational aspects around the guest stay. You want to create positive touching points and memorable experiences throughout the entire business experience.
This can be a conundrum for the hospitality business that keeps doubling down on the physical product and service offerings. It takes your business way off course in achieving strong guest loyalty that contributes to the financial performance of the business.
#5 Service Excellence
When you think about the core competencies up to this point, you might be kind of scratching your head as to why this wasn’t a little higher up the chain. Without establishing a strong leadership and cultural balance, it would be very difficult to achieve service excellence initiatives. When you think about my vacation experience, which was broken down in this four-part series, you can start to see how these core competencies were very diminished from the conversation altogether.
The key to having a great and successful service excellence program is having a well established guest experience design infrastructure to support the integrity and accountability of those initiatives. When you think about my vacation experience at this resort, the warm welcome aspects were very weak, the magic moments were pretty nonexistent, and the fond farewells were also pretty much lacking in the business design. I articulate this in great detail in Part Four of this article series. The service excellence program should be tied to your core foundational principles of your business with a strong emphasis on the customer focused vision and mission statements. The purpose and value structure that support what you want to be great at in your customers’ eyes and the level of passion you want your organization to contribute in your guest experience are the true underpinnings with the service excellence core competency. All the business disciplines have to be highly focused on the service excellence program and initiatives as well as in total alignment with the customer experience design strategy structure. The most vital business discipline is the HR position with regards to the personnel systems structure, from hiring, orientation, development, and firing.
#6 Concept Design
This aspect of the hospitality brilliance program holds all of the physical elements of your enterprise – your product and service offerings and the operational elements of the business. This also entails the sensory components of the business environment within the guest experience which makes up this core competency. The sensory components create strong experience anchors with your customers through smell, site, hearing, touch, taste, and etc. These sensory elements are very powerful in contributing to the guest experience on an emotionally engaging level. They go to the memory and pleasure centers in the brain and create very strong connections around customer preferences towards building brand relevance.
Concept design also represents your functional design of the concept flow as well as the personality makeup around theme and tone of the physical aspects. The focus is on conceptualizing all the core competencies for achieving strong operational engagement with your employees and customers on multiple levels from the functional, to the human, to the sensory in achieving a strong connection with your customers.
If you remember in Part Two of the article series, I talked about my wife and I having a hard time finding the check-in area because of poor signage. This is a very good example around concept design impacting the guest experience negatively and not utilizing these core competencies for better designing the guest experience. How frustrating and annoying this can be to your guest arriving because subconsciously your customer might interpret this as the feeling that you’re not very empathetic or caring of the fact that it’s difficult to check-in to the hotel. You don’t want to leave these elements left unmanaged because guests will make their own interpretations about your business and more than likely they’ll be negative when left unmanaged.
#7 Processes & Systems
Hospitality businesses are developed and maintained on systems and processes for achieving a high level of standard of operations (SOP), but in this case it’s more about being focused on the customer experience initiatives as the innovative driver for the business enterprise. In this perspective, it’s about aligning all the processes and systems to an experience management system and business process. This core competency works hand-in-hand on the targets and measurements of the intended initiatives and goals around the customer experience design and each business discipline and operational aspect of the business. This is 180 degrees from traditional business processes and systems, which are primarily focused on the internal operations. This is more externally focused in a more balanced perspective when it comes to targeting and measuring the guest experience initiatives performance.
It’s pretty obvious that the hotel I stayed with did not employ customer experience management systems for targeting and measuring the customer initiatives results they were looking for.
The customer experience management process perspective is not about squeezing every last bit of juice out of the business for solely achieving internal operational efficiencies on the product production levels. I know of hospitality enterprises that do use a Sigma Six style business process improvement, and I’m sorry to say that these organizations can become distant and aloof because they become too internally focused on product or skill set. That ultimately the customer connectedness gets lost in the equation, in creating an emotional connection or bond. When you shift your value proposition and product offering to the total customer experience along with the overall business strategy, your processes and systems have to follow suit. With the work that I do for my clients, this core competency plays a big part in measuring the ROI around the customer experience design impact to the top and bottom line performance as well as customer loyalty and satisfaction scores.
Take a moment in your hospitality enterprise and really think about the seven core competencies and how you can apply them in your business. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or send me an email at brett@brettpatten.com about any questions you may have concerning your hospitality enterprise as it relates to the seven core competencies. Also, as part of the Hospitality Brilliance program for achieving customer experience excellence, I offer a hospitality intelligence index, which is aptly named the Hi Index. I basically index the guest experience IQ of the hospitality enterprise on multiple levels around the seven core competencies. Especially around the customer compass in seeing how accurate your compasses really is for keeping your company on the right financial performance direction.
About the author
For over thirty years, Brett Patten has worked in the hospitality industry. He spent those years accumulating invaluable insight, knowledge and experience through his various positions, and studies, from when he starting out has a front line employee at the age of 15, with a four-star hotel in the 1980s’, to recently completing his education as an executive leadership and engagement coach. Brett’s unique management style consistently transformed his work environments by focusing on his people and customers for creating a engaging hospitality experience which generated strong sales and operational performance results. In 2007, Brett launched Fire and Vine of Virginia Beach, a new world wood fire cuisine restaurant built on a hospitality business strategy process that he trademarked and now calls “five-star customer experience design.” Within the first two years under Brett’s strategic business approach, Fire and Vine was recognized nationally for its hospitality management, design elements, employee development, customer service excellence, culinary cuisine, and wine program.
Today, after spending the last 15 years researching, studying and developing customer experience design best practices and strategy implementation for the hospitality and tourism industries. Brett has created an innovative Hospitality Business leadership and management Program. Which aligns all the business disciplines and strategies through a customer experience design approach, for creating a customer driven brand connection, as well as elevating the engagement dynamics of the business culture for establishing positive customer loyalty and sustainable financial performance results through the generating of exceptional and memorable brand and customer experiences.
