There are plenty of reasons why people pick a hospitality venue, its location, cuisine: décor or any of a dozen other factors. However, there is one main reason why people choose to come back again and again: quality. You may have all of the other factors going in your favour, but if the quality is not there, the customers won't be there either. This week's topic is data, and how data can lead to better quality.
If you are interested in achieving quality there is one bit of advice that will serve you well: If it is important, set a standard and measure performance against that standard. Quality doesn't just happen. Quality happens when time is taken to define exactly what to look for in hiring service staff members with the potential to deliver high quality. It happens when time is taken to determine performance standards. This means taking the time to identify all of the things that must be done and how each one of these things must be done to be perceived by the customer as a quality offering. After all, everything is in the details. Quality happens when time, effort and care are taken to train staff members not only in what they should do, but also how these things should be done correctly. Finally, quality happens when time is taken to periodically measure the performance of service staff against the standards that have been set to ensure quality.
Details in the Data
Data obtained from these measurements is quite similar to a doctor taking your "vitals" when you go in for a check-up. Pulse, blood pressure, and a range of other measurements are compared to standards to determine if you are healthy. Periodic comparisons of staff performance to standards that have been carefully set allow you to determine if your business is "healthy" when it comes to providing quality. This data serves to show where improvements need to be made through additional effort, training or staffing moves. Data can also indicate where standards are routinely met or exceeded so that attention or resources can be shifted from these areas of excellence to other areas that are not meeting standard or not performing consistently. Data lets you get away from "Yeah, I think we are doing OK," (wishful thinking), to "Performance increased by 10% since training," (evidence of what is really happening).
Data can help with all of the components of quality. Beginning with your hiring, if statistics are kept that allow comparisons of performance with such things as experience, education, background, prior training, etc., tendencies will begin to emerge showing important things to look for when hiring service staff. Persons from one kind of prior employment may come in with bad work habits that take extra time and money to break or may never be broken. Other staff members from specific circumstances or with prior training may have lower learning curves and may become highly productive more quickly. Tracking these tendencies can lead to better hiring decisions which can mean lower turnover, reduced training costs, better performance and higher quality.
The basis for setting standards that lead to quality begins with data. How should "Quality" look? Is it how quickly something is done, attention to detail, attitude and body language of the service provider? Is it in knowing the right thing to say or do and doing these things at just the right time? Yes. It is all these things and many more. For each of the things that lead to customers' perception of quality measures can (and should!) be developed and standards set against which performance is compared to ensure every important detail signals quality.
Data as a measure of quality
Data can provide clear evidence of where, when and with whom corrective actions such as training are needed. Rather than feeling that "something" is wrong and quality seems to be slipping, data collected from measuring performance and comparing those measures to quality standards provides real-world evidence. This data can not only indicate whether things are on track or not, data can actually diagnose what specific things are falling short and the service personnel involved. This makes correcting substandard performance much easier as the data points out specifically what needs to be corrected and to what level. This saves money and time by only fixing what is broken.
Negative trends in service performance can also be identified and turned around through the use of data. Smart managers and forward thinking organizations conduct periodic measurements of key factors involving staff performance. This may take a little effort, but it is effort that can pay huge dividends. There are also ways to reduce the amount of effort involved. Those performance items deemed critical or easy to drift to sub-standard levels get measured more frequently. Those items considered less critical or more stable are measured less often… but they are still measured. Anything considered to be important enough to have a standard, is important enough to be compared to that standard. Management can decide how often comparisons are made.
The good news is that through data, quality can be achieved and once achieved, quality can be maintained. The other side of that coin is that it takes managerial time, know-how and effort to do so. Yet, the payoff for creating a targeted data-centered quality control system can be massive in terms of repeat business, more frequent purchases, patrons bringing their friends and satisfied customers spreading positive Word-of-Mouth (WOM) about your business. In the hospitality industry, Word-of-Mouth can be the most effective means of reaching and influencing new customers. The key is that positive WOM arising from customer perceptions of quality can do wonders in building your profits, while negative WOM arising from low levels of quality spreads both faster and wider and can severely damage a business' reputation resulting in declining sales.
Reputation: hard to earn, easily lost
While a data-centered quality control system does have a good bit of up-front cost in terms of manager time to develop and implement the system, in the long run, such a system actually reduces the time required of the manager to maintain high levels of quality. Once in place, the system only requires periodic measurement while many of the problems that normally take manager time and effort tend to be greatly reduced. Problems are identified while they are still small and easy to handle. Bad trends are discovered early and turned around before they become detrimental to quality. Employees know what is expected of them tend to perform better because they know that their performance is being observed and tracked. A well-designed data-driven quality control system is an excellent investment paying dividends in time saved, money saved, reputation boosted and positive influence on the business' bottom line.
Yet many managers will still say, "I don't have the time or the know-how to create such a system, much less make it work." For those of you who have those concerns, there is help. First, there are many books on the market that provide information on how to develop and operate a quality control system such as the one being advocated here. A little reading and learning what is involved can get you started. While this addresses how to get the know-how, it does not help on the time requirements. For that, it is recommended that busy managers can overcome the time requirements of such a system by seeking assistance from a hospitality training organization that utilizes data-centered quality control systems in its training. We are pleased to offer advice utilizing just such a quality control system in training for service providers and in the consulting services that we provide to clients. The key here is it is well worth the effort to develop and implement a system that does what is required to produce the quality that you (and your customers) desire.
Authors: Roman Fix with the assistance of Dr. Scott Roach. Romax Fix is Chief of Learning & Development, Kingsmen Hospitality Services, a leading advisory and training organisation for the hospitality industry. He can be reached at [email protected]
Series Editor: Christopher F. Bruton, Executive Director, Dataconsult Ltd, [email protected]. Dataconsult's Thailand Regional Forum provides seminars and extensive documentation to update business on future trends in Thailand and in the Mekong Region.
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