Data to get your teeth into whets appetite of customer-hungry business operators at 2009 Hospitality Assured service and business excellence forum
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer; or rather, to be better than the competition, you’ve first got to analyse and understand it. That was the straight-talking logic dominating discussions at the Hospitality Assured (HA) business excellence forum held on 20 November 2009, which brought together a medley of passionate, customer-facing business owners and operators. All were eager to seize the opportunity to absorb benchmarking tips and share recommended tricks for improvement with fellow HA-accredited companies.
Six years on from the roll-out of the new Hospitality Assured Standard for service and business excellence, the increasing volumes of historic data now available to companies who have stuck with HA’s annual 10-step assessment framework during this time, begin to build up a valuable year-on-year picture of the operational changes influencing score fluctuations.
“In order to achieve excellence, we must first define excellence and establish what is considered “normal”,” explained Professor Andrew Lockwood FIH, Forte Professor of Management at the University of Surrey and Chairman of the Institute of Hospitality, which owns the Hospitality Assured service model.
“We now know that the average total HA score, across all sectors, has climbed from 67.9% in 2006, to a promising 69.7% in 2009. This boost in scores that we’re able to see in the benchmarking data is testament to the way HA facilitates experience and knowledge sharing between businesses. It is only during assessment that you can measure. The more businesses that undertake HA, the more results we have to enable highly effective benchmarking and operational progression within specific industry sectors in the future.”
The hotel sector makes up the largest percentage of HA clients (28%), but the highest overall assessment scores come from the Conference and Meeting sector (72.2%), closely followed by Foodservice (69.9%).
Although the differences between sectors are not statistically significant, it is interesting to observe that the highest average scores come in ‘Step 4: Operational Planning’ (70.8%), followed by ‘Step 6: Resources’ (69.7%). The lowest average scores fall in ‘Step 5: Standards of Performance’ (68%) and ‘Step 10: Customer Satisfaction Improvement’ (67.8%), in addition to ‘Step 8: Service Delivery’ (66.9%) and ‘Step 9: Service Recovery’(67.6%) which are evidently areas in need of drastic improvement given the service-driven nature of the hospitality industry.
Significantly, the largest score leap can be seen at ‘Step 7: Training and Development’ – some 2.4% in four years – indicating an increased grasp of the value of instilling a high level of professional competence in staff. Employee turnover and engagement, said hospitality lecturer Barbara Rousaki, were identified as the single most daunting challenges encountered when working to achieve HA accreditation. This is perhaps reflective of a time when hospitality, leisure and tourism industry operators battle to counteract wide-spread unrest at reported skills shortages in the sector.
“Managers need to drive the Standard from the top down,” Rousaki told forum delegates. “HA has clear benefits – organisational interaction, continuous improvement, structured Key Performance Indicators, teamed with proactive behavioural change.” It’s about institutionalising new approaches to business in the corporate culture and empowering a broad base of people to take action, while finding ways to develop and communicate a clear vision and strategy that will overcome the stigma attached to “change”, she said.
“The HA Standard enables businesses to un-learn and re-learn, thus improving their working culture and making it an attractive environment for employees.”
Speaking with 10 years’ experience of Hospitality Assured’s stringent assessment criteria, Wyboston Lakes’ Operations Director Barry Stonham OBE FIH echoed Rousaki’s emphasis on communicating strategy and vision amongst his colleagues at the “world class” residential conference and training centre which straddles the Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire border.
“Flexibility and consistency are the key messages for this year,” said Stonham, who spoke of finding ways to entice spend at a time when the conferencing sector was being hard hit by reduced corporate investment due to the recession.
“We use HA as a discipline, encouraging us, on a regular basis, to sit back and take a long look at whether we’re still doing it right. It’s all about repeat business for us. It’s vital. This year we launched the ALWAYS Campaign, with the aim of achieving consistency in service. Our staff are always encouraged to put themselves in the customer’s shoes.”
Similarly aware of the value of repeat visitors, striving for the “one-team approach” has been central to Heiko Figge’s decision to pursue and achieve Hospitality Assured accreditation across the entire 31-strong UK Thistle Hotels portfolio by 2010, including its 11 London properties.
Thistle, which is currently undergoing a £100million rebranding programme including a full overhaul of all its properties, is already leading the way with this dedication to excellence, with four of its hotels now marked with the Hospitality Assured stamp of distinction: Thistle Inverness, Thistle Aberdeen Caledonian, Thistle Aberdeen Alterns and Thistle Aberdeen Airport. Chief Operating Officer, Figge, spoke of his desire to transform Thistle culture: “We are a fragmented business, but we have to think and work as one team. It is a continuous process for us and one we feel is very important.”
The importance of tourism to the economy cannot be underestimated, stressed Riddell Graham, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Scotland’s National Tourism Organisation, VisitScotland, which employs 800 people within its two head offices, eight regional offices and 100 visitor information centres. Supporting an industry which injects £52 billion into Britain’s economy and employs 200,000 people in Scotland alone, VisitScotland has a 2009/10 budget of £72.2million to spend on positioning Scotland as one of the world’s foremost tourist destinations. Riddell religiously monitors traveller trends and consumer feedback and so, when he analysed data revealing the key reasons customers make complaints in the hospitality industry, he was alarmed to see they were all people related.
Speaking of his first ever HA service and business excellence assessment experience last year, for which VisitScotland won the 2008 Award for ‘Most Innovative Use of the Hospitality Assured Standard’, Riddell said: “Hospitality Assured helped to dramatically increase the emphasis on our core customers – indeed HA was instrumental in defining our core customers, right at a time when we were reorganising the structure of our business. The plaque and the certificate are much less important than the fact that we are now an organisation that is focused on our customers and on continuous improvement. It presents a massive opportunity to share best practice. I can’t understand why there are not more businesses involved.”
Answering calls for strong PR support to promote the value of the HA Standard and HA accredited companies externally, Hospitality Assured Managing Director Ann Corrigan FIH, spoke excitedly about a radical communications overhaul underway, including the recent launch of an informative electronic news bulletin – featuring advice articles and links to useful customer service and business resources.
A new, easy-to-navigate Hospitality Assured microsite is being integrated into the existing Institute of Hospitality website and is due for launch in January 2010, while an interactive Business Excellence in Hospitality forum on business networking website LinkedIn is revolutionising the way HA clients and potential clients can talk to each other, share best practice and increase the competitive spirit amongst their rival brands.
“The Institute of Hospitality is investing in the growth of HA and we are spreading the word,” enthused Ann Corrigan. “It’s vital that both we and you, the HA clients, promote the Standard at every opportunity so its value to business is fully understood in the marketplace.”
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