How To Use Customer Complaints toYour Advantage - By Andrew D. Schmidt - HSMAI Marketing Review
Customer complaints are the most underutilized resource in the hospitality industry today. Every day in hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality venues, valid customer complaints are conveyed through a variety of methods to front line employees and management only to be ignored or dismissed. Each time customers take the time to complain, they are trying to provide that business with an opportunity to keep them as customers.
No one is perfect. There always will be days in hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality entities when things do not go according to plan. Employees may have an off day or maybe the hotel is short staffed due to illness. Even when things run perfectly, the hospitality service is being delivered as it was intended, and service encounters are good, there will be that occasional person who finds fault. In fact, people in today's world seem to expect service to be substandard. In a recent survey, only 23 percent of meeting planners said that the quality of services that they received throughout the year was adequate.