Does your Organization Receive Feedback?

Working in the hospitality industry was quite eye-opening for me. This is an industry that constantly deals with daily interactions between the guests and the organization. The contact between the organization and the guest can make or break the business. When they say the customer is King, it isn’t a myth, especially in this day and age of social media and its ability to sabotage the image of your business. Listening and acting is important if your reputation is important to you.

This is where feedback comes in. If you run a hotel and/or restaurant and you have no feedback coming in, I don’t need to remind you that you are doing things wrong. It is not enough to think that your employees e.g. waiters and hosts will convey to you what the guests tell them. You have to create a system to collect feedback.

There are so many ways to do this: create a physical form, look at online booking sites reviews, and send online forms. These days we have sites like Survey Monkey and Google Forms that even compile data for you. We have two types of guests, especially for hotels, those that prefer a physical form while on the premises and they can fill them in, and those that prefer online forms that they can fill in at their convenience. Each still works depending on your guest. Remember that the forms need to capture every part of your business and every possible point of interaction, but they still need to be short and precise. Most guests don’t even flip over to the next page in a form.

So, you have these forms, what next? Create a feedback report template that captures the source of feedback, the feedback itself, the solutions and the comments of the people in charge. Make sure you also highlight the recurrent feedback, whether positive or negative. When done with the report, the next step is to create a feedback action plan. Sit down with the people in charge of the areas that received complaints, show them your solutions and get their input too. From this, formulate an action plan that will assign each person their role in solving those problems and the timelines needed to achieve those actions.

You can choose whether to compile this information every month or every two weeks. That way you have fresh information and continuous follow up of actions. If you do this, you will be assured of positive changes in your establishment. Repeat guests will vouch for your ability to listen and act, and your ratings will go up, thus attracting more guests.

Feedback is often seen as a way to discourage the organization if they constantly receive negative feedback, but if tapped into well, and with a paradigm shift, it might just be the thing that turns the organization around for the better.