Tips for Choosing a Social Media Monitoring Tool By Bill Freeman, Founder, FreemanGroup, December 2011

I’d say that you’d have to be living under a rock not to have had an ad, person, or website ask you to engage with social media and review sites; though I suspect that in this day and age, most of us would still be able to get Wi-Fi if we found ourselves under a rock. Without using an outdated collaquialism, I’ll simply stress that because of the inescapable presence of social media and review sites in our lives and the impact they have on business, managing these sites is no longer an option, but a necessity, particularly for those of us working in the hospitality industry.

It’s not enough to simply participate. Companies must leverage soical media monitoring technology that will not only gather online reviews from your own social media  pages, but also gather your data from every social media outlet, review sites of significances and allow you to compare it to the data of like companies. Click here to read more.

For My Dentist’s Front Desk Suggestions Box

As the assistant was checking me out at a recent dentist’s office visit, she informed me, in a rather loud voice, that I needed to follow up on this and that, and then said, as if it had just occurred to her that it might be prudent, “Let’s talk over here so that we have some privacy,” in an equally loud voice.

While I wasn’t particularly embarrassed, I didn’t relish the idea of an entire waiting room full of strangers knowing that I needed to schedule a cleaning and had a loose filling in my upper right quadrant.  (I realize that it’s somewhat ironic that I feel perfectly comfortable blogging about it.)  The assistant’s suggestion that we speak in private was my least favorite part of the interaction.  The statement made it seem as though I should have something about which to be embarrassed.

It occurred to me that dialog volume is an issue that pops up often in service situations.  Managers and supervisors need to take care not to make a spectacle of employees when they engage in corrective coaching by speaking too loudly or openly, and similarly, all employees need to pay attention to the manner in which they vocalize things that guests or customers may consider to be of a private or sensitive in nature.

No one wants their personal information on public display.  How do we train managers, supervisors, and employees to recognize those instances in which people or topics should be treated with greater sensitivity or dealt with in private?  In the service industry, in particular, new situations and problems pop up every day.  How do we help team members respond to every one of them in an appropriate way?

I think having well-established company values and an identifiable company culture based on service goals is probably the best way to reach everyone, from the heads of an organization to the front line, on so deep a level that they instinctively know the best way to respond to every unique interaction, including stressful or challenging interactions.  To reach people at a core level, you’ve simply got to give people more to hold on to throughout the workday than their routines.  You can see in the faces of true service professionals that they are operating from a higher place.  They’re good listeners.  They feel their way throughout customer or guest interactions, and make everyone around them feel more comfortable.  In short, they’re engaged.  They have a clear understanding of the reasons behind what they do, and this understanding informs the way they approach each and every situation.

I don’t know if I’ll go back to the same dentist’s office.  At first, I thought the office was great, but after my interaction with the loud assistant, I formed another, less favorable opinion.

On second thought, I think I will go back.  And maybe—just maybe—I’ll leave a copy of this blog post in the front desk suggestions box.

Brush your teeth!

- Batya

Lift Hotel Standards with Constant Reinforcement By Patrick O’Bryan, Chief Operating Officer, FreemanGroup, December 2011

 I’ve never forgotten something that a musician friend of mine out of Austin, Texas, once told me. He said that even concert pianists have to continue practicing the pieces they play in concert regularly. If they don’t, they would never be able to keep sophisticated piano concertos by Liszt, Rachmaninov or Prokofiev up to performance level, no matter how much talent, skill, technical ability or knowledge they might possess.

Constant practice, or ongoing training, is something those of us responsible for managing service industry personnel also have to engage in if we want to keep our team performing up to standard. We have to keep learning and relearning, and we have to have systems in place that require our staff members to do the same. Click here to read more.