By definition, service excellence refers to the ability of service providers to meet and even exceed customers' expectations consistently. Today, service excellence is expected by the customer and can come in the form of a spontaneous extra feature, an experience, or a delight. A spa treatment is usually highly personalized as every customer seeks wellness journeys with carefully curated programs for health and wellness. Therefore, listening closely to your customer's needs with a view to developing their loyalty is the first step in understanding why service excellence is important in a spa.

"At Valmont we offer the customer a getaway from their routine and try to calm them down from the daily stress they face. Once you are able to do this the rest of the spa will flow."

Spa best practices: How to achieve service excellence in a spa

  • Personalization

A spa needs to listen to customer needs when aiming to achieve high service excellence. It is essential to create unique, personalized, immersive experiences throughout a customer's journey at a spa. Constantly reinventing and finding new ways of implementing tailored services bring added value.

For this, you need to get to know your customer, and one way of doing this can be through digital elements. For example, quiz-type diagnostics is a great way to engage customers and personalize their spa treatment. The whole spa should be about curation and personalization rather than a simple transaction.

"I spent an incredible time at the Valmont Spa. I didn’t feel like a number, they listened to me and gave me an amazing experience."

  • Experiential journey

There is a shift from creating a customer journey to an experiential journey which focuses on value creation, engagement, and managing experiences within the journey as a whole. To create service excellence, a spa should consider the four aspects of entertainment, education, esthetics and escapism. If they can respect all four realms, a spa can create a flawless service experience, which means the customer is actively involved but also absorbed and immersed while also having passive participation.

Today, taking care of your skin is an expression of self-care. Consumers actively educate themselves about various skin care products, exploring sub-categories and expanding their regimes. If a spa can implement this procedure and provide a customer's ritual of routine in their facilities can genuinely gain some added value.

  • SPA Team Hiring Process

"The cosmeticians at Valmont need to have the characteristics of a good salesperson and listener. Also, in the luxury segment, it is important to be able to present yourself well."

To create a world-class level spa, it is crucial to ensure a strict hiring process to only select the best available specialists with the relevant experience to elevate your spa journey. By selecting the best team possible to look after all of your clients' needs, and even exceed some of their expectations, you will, in fact, be able to achieve the core aim behind any exceptional spa. Of course, luxury spas where Valmont products are stocked require experience and qualifications to work there.

Advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) have allowed spas to screen for the best available candidates and save businesses from spending valuable funds on what is often the most time-consuming and, therefore, costly process that spas face. Nowadays, the HR department spa managers will be looking for exceptional soft skills alongside their qualifications. This will ensure that employees are more likely to make customers feel at home through their body language, communication and people skills.

Hence, spa managers should set up attribute-based interview questions that focus on these soft skills to hire the best-suited spa employees, who often have a background in hospitality.

  • Latest Spa Technology

Customer comfort can now be elevated to levels never seen before due to advances in technology. Including a booking system in your spa will improve guest experience, boost efficiency and ultimately attract new customers.

The primary way that AI will increase efficiency is by solving issues that spa owners do not even know they have. The booking process will now not only be more intelligent but also allow for maximum personalization. No longer will spa therapists be chosen based only on availability or loyalty; clients will finally be paired with the best-suited therapist for their needs. An intelligent booking system will also be able to remember and deal with more information than any human. This allows spas to recognize clients' special health conditions or information such as preferred pressure levels in treatments without having to rely on a staff member's memory, even if it works well.

Profitability for companies such as Valmont will also be improved directly due to more efficient time management, allowing employees to work on direct sales. Direct sales, an area where many spas fall short, is likely to improve drastically. Now, employees will be able to directly recommend products to customers' needs stored on file, based on their genetics, product ingredients and their current health condition, ultimately leading to a much higher sales conversion rate.

Valmont Cosmetics is a leader in service excellence

Valmont was built on the premise of delivering excellence through providing world-class beauty products to keep their clients healthy, happy and fulfilled. Valmont has been achieving this since 1985 by using the latest technology to develop natural, top-of-the-range products. Their range of cosmetics is consistently regarded as the industry's finest by their competitors with good reason.

Product ranges stretch across several different sectors of the skincare industry, allowing Valmont to cater to the whole skincare market. Valmont will combine their award-winning top-of-the-range products with experts in the field to deliver service excellence to all their customers when they launch in Germany at their first spa location.

The combination of providing customers with a highly personalized range of Valmont products at their spa, delivered by specially selected soft-skilled employees, will ensure that customers are taken on a blissful journey. Lastly, Valmont promises that they will use the most technologically advanced software to ensure that employees can advise clients correctly about what products to use to best compliment their needs. This will set Valmont aside from its competition and allow them to consistently reach and deliver beyond clients' needs, a rare feat in the beauty and wellness industry.

About EHL Group

EHL Group is the global reference in education, innovation and consulting for the hospitality and service sector.
With expertise dating back to 1893, EHL Group now offers a wide range of leading educational programs from apprenticeships to master's degrees, as well as professional and executive education, on three campuses in Switzerland and Singapore. EHL Group also offers consulting and certification services to companies and learning centers around the world. True to its values and committed to building a sustainable world, EHL Group's purpose is to provide education, services and working environments that are people-centered and open to the world. www.ehlgroup.com

EHL Hospitality Business School
Communications Department
+41 21 785 1354
EHL

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