This is a continuation of the post I wrote yesterday.

This is special service related businesses. Since I mostly work with service related businesses this is a critical aspect which I want to highlight.

If you read yesterday’s post, I had written about how this hotel’s hostess and the F&B manager served us so well or rather delighted us,and then nudged us onto sharing our experiences on TripAdvisor.

In any service business, the front end staff are your brand ambassadors. You may stay in the best brand of a hotel, but if your experience with the staff is not good, you don’t go back to that brand. I have personally had this experience with one of the largest hotel brands. It was an aspirational brand for me and my family at one point because it was an American brand.

Indian hospitality is well known, so when I entered this hotel in one of their hotels in India and I was asked to wait in line by an uninterested person, I chose to no longer stay in that brand in the future. Now even when I travel to the US and Canada, I don’t stay with them

In the service business there’s one equation which has got imprinted in my mind. I don’t remember where I read this equation but its a good way to depict what happens in a customer scenario. The equation is

S (Satisfaction) = P (performance)- E (expectations)

In a service business its always critical that you manage the expectations of the customers rather than the performance. The higher the expectations, like I had with the US hotel brand in India, the bigger is the challenge for the personnel to satisfy me.

If you’re in the services business, its important that you remember this equation to ensure that you are clearly managing expectations, otherwise you will have disgruntled customers like I had become.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!