Integrating Staff Feedback in Guest Experience Strategy

Enhancing guest experiences directly boosts profitability. The challenge for managers is reacting in real-time to customer and staff feedback to ensure a positive guest experience. Frontline employees possess critical insights into customer satisfaction, making their feedback essential. To increase employee engagement and create a real-time feedback loop, managers need to enhance how they collect and solicit feedback.

Why Staff Feedback is so Important in the Service Industry

Not sure how to improve your guest experience? Ask your staff. Your employees are on the front lines interacting directly with guests daily. They know exactly what customers are looking for, including pain points and ways to improve the guest experience. Those interactions occur at the point of sale, during the first face-to-face interaction, and throughout the dining experience or hotel stay. 

Despite the constant feedback that your staff receives, many times they don’t think to communicate that feedback to management resulting in an issue that is never solved. It is important to ensure you and your management team have a feedback system in place to ensure you can quickly and easily receive and act on staff feedback in real time. It can be as simple as asking your team about the customer experience, analyzing that feedback, and identifying common themes in those responses.  With this information in hand, managers can identify real-time actions to improve the guest experience.

 

How to Collect Staff Feedback

Let’s pivot our attention to the strategies for gathering staff feedback. While periodically asking your team for input is straightforward, it lacks scalability. A more effective approach begins with leveraging online feedback tools. These tools enable you to circulate employee surveys tailored to capture insights derived from customer feedback and grievances. The insights shared by your team unveil the authentic narrative of the guest experience.

With Harri’s cutting-edge platform, facilitating the collection of employee insights becomes seamless. Our suite of feedback tools empowers your staff to communicate firsthand observations about the guest experience to upper management or ownership, thereby facilitating the enhancement of service quality and prompt resolution of any customer concerns.

Harri Engage connects your workforce, facilitating their active participation in offering constructive feedback via a unified platform. Engage simplifies the process for your team to submit and share feedback as part of their daily tasks, enabling you to connect with them directly in their work environment for enhanced adoption and engagement. Give Engage a whirl, and you’ll discover how effortless it is to pose quick queries, receive timely feedback, and leverage employee insights to enhance the customer experience. Moreover, the platform empowers you to initiate targeted communication tailored to specific roles and locations within your organization.

Harri TeamLive communication tools foster team cohesion by providing a convenient hub for dialogue, operational enhancements, and an enhanced customer experience. Our communication tools streamline your team’s interactions, offering a centralized platform where information is neatly arranged for analysis and swift action. Harri’s TeamLive goes a step further by generating personalized newsfeeds and custom message groups to cater to your team’s unique needs.

The communication tools mirror the interactive nature of a social network for ease of adoption no matter where your staff is located. Invite specific team members to your targeted group channels that can be organized by location, responsibility, or role.  Managers can also use it as a central hub for feedback, announcements, updates, and other forms of communication. The end result is greater operation efficiency and a stronger and more connected team.

In-person Meetings With Employees

Harri’s technology can solve many problems, including streamlined communication, real-time feedback, increased employee retention, and engagement, but you can’t discount the human touch. Personalized face-to-face communication is still important. While Harri enables efficient employee and manager communication you must also integrate in-person communication cadences to continue to boost engagement.    

Meet face-to-face with your team in both one-on-one and group settings to learn more about their experiences serving guests. Pay attention to the details of those interactions that you can not get from communication tools, including facial expressions, tone, and inflection that reveal emotion. 

Monthly meetings with employees provide insight into the details of the guest experience, creating reciprocity with those employees for an ongoing productive dialogue. Even a brief 15-minute employee feedback session can make it clear that management and ownership appreciate their contributions.    

Anonymous Suggestions Boxes

Anonymous written employee feedback is another tool that helps shape better business policies. Place a suggestion box at your hotel or restaurant and empty its contents at the end of the week.

If you find the suggestion box empty most weeks, create a digital suggestion box where employees can send anonymous emails detailing their takes on the best ways to improve the guest experience. Anonymous suggestions also help improve team morale, which directly affects positive customer interactions and the overarching guest experience.

Identify Issues Before They Trickle Down to Guests

In hospitality, problems are constantly arising but an integrated approach to feedback gives you the power to catch a possible problem before it becomes more serious. Collect staff feedback to identify emerging problems, act quickly, and you’ll prevent those issues from trickling down to the guest experience. 

Keep in mind that no one in your organization is more aware of issues than the individuals serving on the frontlines. Empowering our team members to voice their concerns is essential, as is taking action on their suggestions to maintain a culture of valuable feedback. By proactively adjusting service operations in response to employee feedback, you can address emerging issues before they escalate into deal-breakers for customers.

Show how Staff Feedback Creates Meaningful Change

Now that you have collected and analyzed feedback, and then implemented changes based on that feedback, it’s important to close the loop by sharing examples of the improvements made. Present specific examples of how the changes made created a meaningful impact on the guest experience and you’ll reinforce the value of staff feedback, inspiring them to continue relaying information about the guest experience for ongoing change. 

This is the feedback culture every business needs to drive more customers and engagement and elevate the guest experience to new heights.

Create an Optimum Employee Experience with Harri

Harri’s tech tools are changing the employee and guest experiences. Our mobile workforce management app is a convenient communication hub that improves the guest experience.

Request a demo today to try Harri’s technology at your business.

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