- Identify 4 factors which can affect the sender or receiver's field of experience.
The four factors that can influence the sender or receiver’s field of experience include people’s perception, background, values, expectations, and biases (Sommerville, 2007). Senders can encode and receivers can decode messages only in the context of their fields of experiences. The more the sender’s field of experience overlaps that of the receiver, the more the communication becomes difficult. For example, the hotel manager talk to down to a staff member who resents this attitude and this resentment separates them, thereby inhibiting the opportunity for effective communication.
- Identify communication barriers and give an example of each.
There are many barriers to communication including cultural differences, language differences, and physical location. Cultural differences results in ineffective communication where people speak the same language but use words with different meanings in different countries. For example, U.S. English and UK English have different words for eraser and rubber. Physical location can make communication process fail when teams are spread across the world thereby creating diverse teams. Language also presents a barrier where people speak different languages or where a language is not your first language.
3. What is suggestive selling? Give an example of it for a hospitality business.
Suggestive selling is a sales technique where an employee advices the customer to include an additional purchase or recommend a product or service which might suit the needs of the customer. For example, a restaurant employee may recommend deli ham and cheese or cake and coffee to a customer. Suggestive selling increases the original order of a guest by giving ideas or suggestions that in turn increase guest satisfaction and average spending.
4. Define Service Recovery and give an example of it.
Service refers to the actions taken by service firms to deal with customers’ complaints and problems. A timely and effective recovery procedure can help turn a complaining customer into a satisfied and loyal customer. For example, while having a dinner at a restaurant, you order a steak and it does not come out exactly as ordered. The waiter should apologize and bring a new steak with a freebie given such as a dessert.
5. How can you effectively handle guest complaints?
In order to effectively handle guest complaints, it is important to first focus on the unhappy customer and allow him express himself without interruption. The next step is to emphasize with the situation and apologize to the customer for the problem without blaming any party. The next step is to take action on the best means of addressing the problem presented guest.
6. What are some measures you can use to determine if your attempt at better service is working, list 3.
Some of the measures that you can use to determine if your attempt at better service is working include:
- Customer retention
- Revenue and profits
- Employee turnover
- Repeat customers
In some cases, a company can hire external consultants to measure their service even though this can prove expensive for some restaurants or hotels. Additionally, a restaurant can use online survey tools such as SURVEY MONKEY, which enables a restaurant to send emails to customers and get timely feedback on the quality of the services.
7. Identify problems with surveys.
Even though surveys present many advantages, they also have disadvantages and weak points that require consideration. To start with, surveys are not flexible in that they require initial study design to remain the same throughout the data collection (Tourish, 2010). Additionally, the researcher must ensure that a large number of selected sample populations will reply. Furthermore, determining how and why consumers take a specific decision is hard to analyze and generalize with guest surveys. Even though these questions are quantifiable, it is hard to add qualitatively to the purpose of the survey.
8. Define Local Measures and explain why these are important in your measurement of service. Give an example.
Local measures involve daily measuring of service by each department, as each department provides a unique service. The service measured must be able to be corrected by the employees of that department. For example, if a restaurant is measuring the guest’s level of satisfaction with the quality of food served, then the Front Desk should not get the results, but the catering department should because they make the meals.
9. What is the most difficult part of local measurement?
The most difficult part of local measurement is that each department must develop its own measures because each department offers a unique service. It is also important to ensure that the feedback from the measures is posted where the concerned employees can access them. Some employees can view local measures as means of pointing fingers at departments that do not perform better than other departments.
10. Why is it important to communicate the outcomes of measurement of your service efforts?
It is important to communicate the outcomes of measures of your service efforts to enable employees know what the guests truly think of the services in order to improve. Communicating the outcomes can help departments improve and work towards achieving the organizational goals of excellent services. The results from these measures help individual employees and departments identify areas that need improvements and work toward enhancing customer satisfaction.
References:
Sommerville, S. K. (2007). Hospitality employee management and supervision: concepts and practical applications. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Tourish, D. (2010). Auditing organizational communication: a handbook of research, theory, and practice. New York, NY: Routledge.
