Is Your Mystery Shop Program Working? By Jesse Boles, Executive Director of Operations, FreemanGroup, May 2012

To find out whether your hotel’s mystery shop program is enabling you to measure service levels in a way that is useful to your team and bringing about tangible results, ask yourself five questions.

1. Is it based on relevant logic?

You know your mystery shop program is working when results are revealing the things you don’t know rather than the things you do know.

Mystery shops should focus on the things that are hard to see or observe. How are your employees behaving in complex situations?

An outdated mystery shop model focuses on the obvious things that anyone walking through your hotel would notice. These things might include employees in poorly fitting uniforms, burned out light bulbs, damaged carpet—things you see every day on the job.

The logic behind truly modern mystery shop platforms allows you to measure complex behaviors. Rather than simply record whether the wait time at check-in exceeded five minutes, modern mystery shop programs require mystery shoppers to record real wait times and details such as whether or not the front desk agent apologized when wait time standards were not met, whether anyone was working the line, whether refreshments were offered, etc.

Click here to read more.

A Well-Trained Staff Leads to Greater ROI By Patrick O’Bryan, Chief Operating Officer, FreemanGroup, March 2012

Training staff members in all departments in a similar manner has a direct correlation with controlling costs. If your overall training program doesn’t stick to the same guidelines from department to department, the guest experience will vary widely from one situation to the next. Proportionally, the revenue you generate and costs you assess from department to department will vary widely, as well.

If your goal is to increase your hotel’s revenue through upselling and by providing high levels of service, for instance, you have to provide training that empowers your entire staff to meet these goals—not just the staff in those departments in which your return on investment seems inherent. These four tips will help you do just that.

Establish your training methodology

Imagine if you were in charge of training a choreographer to choreograph a dance for a complicated Broadway production. Do you think providing the choreographer with some diagrams and explanations regarding how the dance should be executed would result in the kind of performance you had in mind? Click here to read more.

Sequence of  Service Training By Jesse Boles, Executive Director of Operations, FreemanGroup, March 2012

Anyone who’s ever built their own home knows that if you make even a minor change to building plans after they’ve been finalized, additional costs are going to accrue. The builder has to make new assessments, the engineer has to be consulted—again, and before you know it, a domino effect occurs that results in countless unexpected headaches, bills, and paperwork.

When it comes to implementing your hotel’s service training program, it is not unlikely that you will face similar problems. When staff members aren’t trained to perform tasks in a logical order, significant messes, operational and financial, are bound to spill over and impact your ability to manage your hotel, your budget, and your time.

The best way to head off training mishaps before they occur is to develop individual work cycles for each position. Ask: What does each person in each position do? What are the effects of their actions and responsibilities on guests and other departments?  Click here to read more.