What is hotel customer service?

Hotel customer service is support provided to guests by hotel staff, in order to meet their needs, enhance their experience and ensure satisfaction during their stay.

There’s an opportunity to offer great customer service whenever a member of staff interacts with a guest. Hotel customer service examples include concierge assistance, room service delivery, housekeeping services and handling guest complaints.

All hotels offer customer service in some form. It’s the standard of that service that’s important. 

In this guide we’ll take a closer look at hotel customer service, to understand why it’s important, what separates the best from the rest, and how to improve yours.

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What is the importance of customer service in hotels?

It could be argued that hotel customer service is the single most important factor in the success or failure of your hotel, because it has the greatest impact on how a guest judges their stay.

Excellent customer service can seriously increase revenue by generating positive reviews and repeat bookings. Bad customer service will do quite the opposite, no matter how luxurious your rooms are, how comfy your beds are or how incredible your amenities are.

Now that we understand the importance of hotel customer service, let’s explore some practical techniques your hotel staff can implement to enhance guest satisfaction.

Why the best customer service is the key to hotel success

Studies have shown that customer satisfaction holds a direct link to business revenue. 

81% of customers say a positive customer service experience increases the likelihood of making another purchase. 81% are also willing to spend more with an organisation for a better customer experience. On the flipside, 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

For hotels, customer service is primarily about building a reputation through positive reviews, and creating loyal guests who will keep coming back. 

To do that, your hotel needs to adopt customer service systems, processes and best practices that are built to ensure that consistent, high-quality service is provided to every guest during every stay.

Essential hotel customer service skills

Providing an unforgettable experience to every one of your guests is a group effort – every team member needs to play their part. The only way to ensure they do is to give them the skills that they need through hotel customer service training.

Critical hotel customer service skills that you should train your team up on include: 

Active listening

It’s not enough to simply listen to a guest – that guest needs to know that you’re listening. Active listening is the practice of demonstrating that you’re attentive to the guest while they’re speaking, and that you understand the message that they’re conveying, through subtle signals like nods and verbal agreement. Active listening is particularly important when the guest is raising an issue, because that’s when they most want to feel heard. 

Problem-solving

Hotel staff face a wide range of unique challenges which they need to be able to figure out. Problem solving is the act of identifying a specific issue and taking steps to resolve it, which can be done through a range of teachable strategies and techniques. Staff should be presented with a range of hypothetical scenarios that they might come across, and should then be asked to find solutions to those problems.

Critical thinking

A key part of problem solving, critical thinking is the process of analysing information and evaluating options objectively. It takes the emotion out of a situation, which can often run high, particularly during guest complaints. Critical thinking is a muscle that only gets stronger when you use it, so training is key.

Clear communication

Train your staff on getting their message across clearly and concisely, as this avoids miscommunication between staff and guests. For written communication, don’t be shy in using AI to draft or edit comms for clarity.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, understand, manage, use and handle emotions. While some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, this is a skill that can be learned and honed, so it may be worth investing in EI training for staff.

Once you’re armed with these skills, how do you use them? Let’s take a look at a few hotel customer service examples to find out.

hotel customer service

4 of the best hotel customer service examples

What does quality customer service look like in the real world? These four examples are a great starting point for anyone looking to enhance their customer service experience.

1. Going the extra mile

When it comes to customer service, hotels have an advantage over larger hotel chains because they have less guests travelling in and out and can promote a more personalised experience.

This includes things like:

  • Making sure your guest is greeted at the door, or at their taxi/car.
  • Carrying bags to rooms.
  • Giving them a recommendation list for attractions in the area.
  • Offer to make restaurant reservations.
  • Give the option of a transfer to the airport.
  • Providing extras like toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo and body wash.

2. Building a personal connection

Greet guests by name, shake their hand, and introduce yourself and your position at the property. In some circumstances building this kind of connection may be enough to earn loyalty. Gaining customer loyalty is a profitable achievement considering most businesses receive between 60-70% of their income from existing customers.

Using an online front desk system will allow you to research this information prior to arrival and build on the guest profiles of returning guests.

3. Putting a positive spin on criticism

This applies to both in person and online interactions. Don’t be offended if your guest isn’t completely satisfied, every problem should be considered an opportunity to impress your guest and show them you can handle anything.

For example, if you receive a legitimate complaint about a room, then be sure to move the guest to the best room in your hotel. Or, if they leave a disgruntled review, ask them if they would like a refund, or an upgrade upon their next visit.

If a customer does contact you with a complaint, they will be impressed if your staff can quickly pull up their details on their previous stays and any other relevant information. Your staff should be armed with the right technology to deal with the problem from an informed position, such as a front desk system with the ability to build detailed guest profiles.

4. Showing that you genuinely care

When a customer checks out, make it a routine to ask how their stay was. This will directly address anything they have on their mind and give you the chance to solve the issue on the spot, rather than risking a bad online review.

If you are not sure if you or your team are hitting the mark, take some time to watch how they interact with customers and how customers are responding. You could also gain insight by sending a follow-up email after guests leave to directly ask what they thought of your customer service.

Hotel customer service standards to boost repeat bookings

Let’s face it: your personal service is what makes your hotel such a unique experience. And while your guests might be satisfied with your current services, it’s important that you don’t grow complacent or stay idle. You should always be focused on improving your standards.

Here are 10 ideas you can use to improve the level of service you offer at your hotel.

1. An effective loyalty program that rewards guests

HospitalityNet reports that 87% of consumers want some kind of loyalty program because they love saving money, but only 41% of hotel chains reward consumers for engaging with them.

This represents an opportunity for you – step in where the hotel chains have dropped the ball.

Guests expect to be personally remembered, especially after booking a stay at a hotel. That’s why storing your guests’ data in multiple spreadsheets is not a good long term strategy if you want to foster loyalty.

You need to be able to search your database and access their information instantly, when you need it.

Your hotel booking engine should be cloud-based and have a customer database built into it, giving you immediate access to all the guest information you need. You could be at the golf course on your mobile, or sitting on your couch with your iPad – all you need is internet access to log in!

That way, when a repeat guest gives you a call to make a booking, you can easily search for them on your database and reserve their favourite room.

2. Develop a rewarding customer loyalty program

In many respects, the airline industry developed the concept of customer reward programs. Even small hotels, such as hotels, can offer rewards programs that are similar to those offered among the top airlines.

An effective reward program will provide guests with various benefits and discounts, ultimately encouraging them to continue booking with your property.

3. Strict housekeeping and cleanliness guidelines

If you’re already a neat freak, use this as a reminder to be religious about cleanliness.

A UK survey found that hotel guests worry about the cleanliness of the room they’re staying in:

  • 60% are concerned over bed sheets, pillows, bed covers and blankets,
  • 52% don’t like the thought of items being unhygienic; and,
  • 44% are worried about catching germs.

Not only will cleanliness enhance their stay, but it will also help to bring them back.

55% said that a high level of cleanliness was an influential factor in encouraging return, whereas almost 3 out of 4 guests said that a generally unclean hotel and room would put them off returning.

Unfriendly service was also a factor that was likely to deter them from coming back, so be sure to have your biggest smile on!

4. A variety of high-quality food and beverage options

Travellers really appreciate the first meal of the day. In fact, Hotels.com found that breakfast is the most sought after hotel amenity.

A satisfying breakfast adds ease and comfort to a guest’s stay, making it a far more pleasant experience overall.

Here are some types of breakfasts you can include in your offering:

  • English breakfasts have become an expected staple at hotels around the world. Use bread, toast, bacon, sausages, eggs, and grilled tomatoes.
  • Fresh fruit and organic foods for the health conscious traveller. Use fresh fruit baskets, yoghurts, organic breads, organic fruit pastries and oatmeal.
  • Ethnic-inspired breakfasts for your Asian guests. Use fried rice, Asian vegetables, Asian chilli sauce, soy sauce, and herbal teas.

Offering a variety of breakfast options is the best way to capitalise on this amenity and cater to all kinds of guests.

5. Fitness options

Travellers want to keep fit – whether they’re at home or at their preferred accommodation.

Gyms and fitness facilities need to keep up with the latest trends to get fitness conscious travellers to stay with you – and the good news is it’s not all that expensive to achieve.

At a bare minimum, offer your guests:

6. A hygienic environment

Cleanliness is a top priority. Provide handy wipe dispensers so guests can clean machines after use, and make sure the floor is always cleaned. This is an absolute must for every hotel gym to ensure guests feel comfortable.

7. All the basic equipment

Your staple weight and cardio equipment should be available. Have at least one cardio machine (treadmill or cross-trainer), and one bench with a full set of weights.

You can also be creative and offer your guests:

  • An in-room workout pack (dumb bells, DVDs, a jump rope, an exercise mat).
  • Passes to your local gym.

8. Wellness options

Wellness tourism is all travel associated with the pursuit of maintaining or enhancing one’s personal wellbeing. The trend has erupted in recent years, and shows no signs of slowing down.

In fact,

  • A recent study from SRI International estimates that health and wellness-focused travel will reach $678.5 billion in the next four years.
  • An estimated 17 million travellers identify themselves as being ‘health and wellness focused’, with 40% of them travelling regularly (HVS).

Because health and wellness is such a lucrative trend, in 2015 small accommodation providers should try to find ways to capitalise on it.

Why not partner with tour operators to offer activities that your wellness-focused guests will be interested in? Here are some ideas to get you going:

  • Yoga
  • Pilates
  • Meditation
  • Kayaking and stand up paddle boarding
  • Spa treatments
  • Massage

9. Unique features and specialised amenities

By providing your guests with amenities that they don’t often find elsewhere, you can both enhance the guest experience and make your hotel more memorable. Consider offering unique features and amenities like:

  • Accessibility: Attract more guests by ensuring that every room and area of your hotel is accessible to all guests, no matter their mobility.,
  • Sustainability: Do your bit for the planet, and attract eco-conscious guests in the process, by committing to the sustainability tenets of reduce, reuse, recycle.
  • Personalised welcome packages: Show your guests you care by offering customised gifts or amenities based on their demographics or preferences, such as a welcome drink or tailored toiletries.
  • Pillow menu: A simple yet very luxurious touch, offer your guests a variety of pillow types (e.g., memory foam, hypoallergenic) that they can order on arrival.

10. Pet friendliness

These days, travellers are keen to bring their furry friends along, and hotels are beginning to comply.

In fact,

  • The Travel Industry Association of America reports about 30 million people travel with pets each year (Source).
  • 51% of travellers with pets say they would bring their pets along on every vacation if they could (AAA/Best Western survey).
  • 85% of pet travellers travel with dogs, while 21% travel with cats (AAA/Best Western survey).

What’s even more interesting for small accommodation providers is that there is money to made when travellers stay with their pets.

A recent survey found that the owner’s desires and convenience was the top priority, with the pet’s comfort and fun a close second priority. A small minority cited keeping costs down as being a priority.

Pets are a great chance to upsell – you can charge extra for their beds, toys, and any additional services like grooming and pet sitting.

How to provide good customer service in hospitality with the help of technology

There is a wealth of technology available that can improve the guest experience without sacrificing the intimate atmosphere that you have created at your property.

Here are a few tips that allow you to strike the right balance between tech upgrades and maintaining personal service.

Use automated emails to prepare guests for their stay

Begin using technology prior to your guests’ arrival in order to show them that you know how to manage your hotel effectively and efficiently.

Automated emails can be sent immediately after booking to confirm a reservation, but they also can be sent in the days and weeks leading up to their scheduled arrival.

For example, you might want to send an automatic email a week in advance telling guests how to best prepare for their stay.

You can give them packing tips, advice on local attractions and suggestions for restaurants to consider during their stay.

You may even implement technology that allows them to check-in online through an automatic email, which improves their guest experience before they even arrive.

Include technological amenities that travellers crave

Yes, your guests will want to experience and enjoy the charms of your property – that’s why they chose you.

But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested in technology that they use every day. In fact, one of the top amenities requested by guests is Wi-Fi.

Free Wi-Fi is the most desirable in-room amenity (Hotels.com). In fact, travellers now have the ability to filter out hotels that don’t offer free Wi-Fi when searching on metasearch engines and OTAs.

With at least 64% of hotels offering free Wi-Fi, you truly will lose points if you refuse to offer it (especially with millennials or business travellers).

Small accommodation providers have a leg up on the big competition, because bandwidth and signal is less of an issue. Large hotels say it’s too expensive to install so many routers and maintain a system, especially when bandwidth keeps getting pushed to its limit.

If cost is a barrier for you, consider the following solutions:

  • Increase your room rates as needed to cover the costs.
  • Go to a tiered pricing approach; free for low bandwidth users who just want to check emails and use social media; and premium bandwidth for those willing to pay.
  • Use a cumulative approach for the length of time the Wi-Fi is being used. Guests pay to use it for a certain number of hours, and are able to log in and out. They are only charged for the amount of time that they are logged in. This provides more value than a continuous approach where guests pay for 24 hour access but they may not be using it for the entirety of that time.
  • Add a Wi-Fi package as an optional extra at the time of booking through your all-in-one booking management solution.

Create a social media plan for your location

Your guests may be visiting from faraway places, but they aren’t going to be disconnected.

Give them opportunities to connect with you on social media, such as establishing a hashtag for your hotel or setting up a photo spot in your lobby that is perfect for selfies.

Technology allows you to minimise the time you spend on administrative work which ultimately leaves you with more time to interact with your guests.

While you may not want to go fully-automatic at your hotel and eliminate human interaction entirely, you certainly can implement new and exciting technology features that will attract guests and enhance their overall experience.

Little Hotelier is the perfect technology system for your hotel – see why by watching our on-demand demo videos.

Another option is to go where your guests are, by using the instant messaging services that they already use. Speaking of which…

Ways to improve hotel customer service online

In the hospitality and travel industries, the customer service landscape is always evolving. New technology is introducing new guest expectations, and for hotels to manage their revenue profitably, they need to quickly adopt these changes.

By implementing Facebook Messenger for their business, hoteliers will transform their customer service by building loyalty, engagement and optimising the guest experience.

Here’s how Messenger surpasses expectations as a customer service channel…

Utilise Facebook Messenger to build personal relationships between your guests and your brand

Facebook Messenger has historically been an informal chat platform, reserved for conversations with friends and family. By contacting customers through this channel you’ll be communicating on their terms and in their own dialogue.

You can then use this to informally listen to customers’ opinions, respond to questions, and gain more insight into your business.

A few ways Messenger works to build brand advocacy include:

  • Enabling communication with customers directly from your hotel Facebook page.
  • Allowing hoteliers to answer concerns or complaints privately. This will mean removing conversations that could reflect badly on your business from the public domain.
  • Continuously display when you are available to respond to messages and page comments.

This approach can extend to Facebook itself. Airlines were also some of the first major brands to adopt social platforms as a customer service tool. To this day, people continue to offer feedback and address customer service issues with airlines on social media. You can do the same by frequently monitoring your social activity and offering prompt, professional responses to all inquiries – even negative feedback.

Reach customers where they are already browsing

Despite being around for almost a decade, Facebook Messenger is still one of the top 10 most downloaded apps in the world.

So generally speaking, the majority of your customers are using this app daily, and are much more likely to engage in conversation here than picking up the phone to call.

Visitors to your page won’t need to be a guest or hold a booking just to start up a conversation, allowing you to capture their attention before they lose interest or end up on another hoteliers site.

Hyatt, for example, introduced the Facebook integration on Messenger and increased their messages by nearly 20 times.

Improve the customer experience

Not only will you be able to communicate with customers from anywhere at anytime, you will also be able to let them know if you can’t be there with instant replies and away messages.

This helps you maintain your responsiveness and set expectations with your customers so they don’t feel ignored.

Additionally, Messenger allows you to tailor your messages. When a customer contacts you, you will have a past record that you can quickly review before responding.

KML airline, for example, started using messenger with the goal of refining personal communication to make the customer experience easier. And by adding a “Send Message” button to their business Facebook page, they received a 40% boost in customer messages.

Save time

Utilising the saved replies feature is a great way to cut time writing out responses. These can be especially useful for frequently asked questions like opening hours, check-in times, email address or phone number.

You will also save time for the customer in many scenarios: such as, a guest running late for check-in and wanting to let you know quickly between transfers.

Hotel customer service tips from the airline industry

The best brands in the airline industry are renowned for their ability to manage customer needs and provide exceptional service.

Here are 3 lessons you can take from the airlines to apply at your hotel:

1. Use the data you collect to personalise guest experience

The business technology you utilise at your hotel should help you collect the most valuable and relevant data about your guests, and subsequently compile this data into digestible reports. Your technology can get you to this point, but it’s up to you to use that data effectively to improve and personalise the hotel guest experience.

The airline industry has long been using data to do this, and it results in an increasing number of loyal customers who will only fly with their preferred airline.

2. Consider mobile technology a priority

Recognising most people are searching for flights on aggregate websites, OTAs and other online search tools, and that users are predominantly using their smartphones to complete these searches, airlines have adopted a mobile-first approach.

Unfortunately, far too many hoteliers still think of mobile technology as the alternative rather than the standard. With a mobile-first approach, you will be able to improve the guest experience at your property and encourage more travellers to stay with you.

3. Create a flexible room rate strategy

Consumers know flight price rates are going to fluctuate, and that those prices can change at a moment’s notice. Since travellers consider this the norm, the airlines are able to quickly adjust their rates to maximise their profits at any given moment.

You can use the same strategy to improve your revenue management. The rates at your hotel should fluctuate depending on current conditions in the market. This will allow you to earn higher profits throughout the entire year.

Another thing that airlines do is rely heavily on purpose-built internal systems to help them manage their customer service, and provide high-end experiences to their customers. And that’s something you can do too.

By Dean Elphick

Dean is the Senior Content Marketing Specialist of Little Hotelier, the all-in-one software solution purpose-built to make the lives of small accommodation providers easier. Dean has made writing and creating content his passion for the entirety of his professional life, which includes more than six years at Little Hotelier. Through content, Dean aims to provide education, inspiration, assistance, and, ultimately, value for small accommodation businesses looking to improve the way they run their operations (and live their life).