Ensure your path to success with a long-term Training Programme that works! Click To TweetYou’ve decided to train your staff. You understand the need to improve their skills and develop their efficiency for the return to your investment. But how do you evaluate what the staff have actually learnt?
How do you evaluate what the staff have retained – and will it impact your business to make your investment in their training worthwhile?
So how can you make a Hotel Customer Service Training Programme work most effectively?
Identify the Issue
You’ve identified the areas of concern within your hotel staff. This is great. Now you can take steps to eliminate and smooth out the areas of concern. Many establishments, ranging from well known hotels through to small boutique hotels look to undertake staff training as it can increase staff productivity and reduce turnover of the staff within the hotel.
Ultimately it’s the bottom line which is addressed. Efficient and effective staff will allow for happy guests and clients, and they will return and bring more business to the hotel.
Why is Evaluating Hotel Staff After Training Important?
You can implement many ways to collect this data. From feedback forms, spot inspections, comparative inspections, and staff reviews. However, sometimes these methods can prove to be less than effective. Your ROI is key to the evaluation. It is also important to remember that results are often not dependent on a single department, so although one area of the hotel might be improved, another area could be causing the entire brand to slide or be let down. The front of house, for example, will be taught good communication, how to give a guest a positive and welcoming experience and, how to deal with the issue which might have arisen. But in practice, after the training there are multiple scenarios and possibilities as to the reason for the issue, allowing the evaluation of the implemented procedure to become blurred.
Set Clear Goals
It is vital that during the evaluation process, the clear goals and targets are set by the trainer and in turn by the brand. These expectations and goals will allow the evaluation to be monitored. You can, for example, use three main aspects.
- Trainers feedback from course teaching
- Client and customer feedback
- Staff turnover
By using these three at the core of your evaluation, you are able to begin to define clear evaluation and training effectiveness.
Remember that feedback from the students themselves might not be completely truthful. They may give good feedback to hope to win praise form the trainer, they may give it for fear that it will have a negative impact on their position within the hotel or company. So although it is an excellent idea to ask for the student’s feedback, it is not always a clear tool to evaluate their training experience – nor to evaluate how much they have retained or learnt from the training.
Again, client and customer feedback might not show an entire picture of the effectiveness of staff training, and it would be important to record this data over a longer period of time, as short-term data could be mis-led if there was a particularly difficult group of guests one week.
Lastly, staff turnover can give a good indication of how effective your long-term approach is, and it can also open up other areas to explore. If the management and hierarchy is fragmented or struggling, this in turn will affect the staff turnover – the staff may have the skills but be struggling to put them into practice.
How Polo & Tweed Can Help You with Your Hotel Staff Evaluation?
Once the issues are evaluated and the staff has been trained, P&T offer highly experienced evaluation. We treat each hotel and client we work with, with the individual and personal touch they require. We have a number of various support systems and evaluation programmes in place, from working with senior management through to conducting evaluations using an independent trainer from Polo & Tweed. All have been proven to be effective and give a good, clear indication on any areas which still might need focus and development.
The bottom line and the ROI is key to a successful brand, and no matter how big or small the brand, the support and evaluation of the staff and any subsequent training can be a huge difference to the success. In a hugely competitive market, the evaluation of your hotel staff, and in turn your hotel customer service, will be the key difference between the path to financial success and failure to advance.
If you would like to know more about our hotel training programmes – why not get in touch with us here, we’d love to discuss your individual needs and how we can help you better. Your hotel customer service training programme is in good hands.