Customer Service in the Hotel Industry

This report evaluates the customer service practices and policies of The Ritz Carlton and Marriott in the hotel industry. It discusses the importance of customer service for the success of an organization and provides recommendations for improving customer service in the COVID-19 era.

Customer service

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
1. Comparison of customer service practices and policies..........................................................3
2. Customer Complain handling techniques at The Ritz Carlton and JW Marriott:....................5
3. Recommendations for Hotel customer service in the COVID-19 era.....................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
Customer service is the delivery of facility to the consumer formerly, later and throughout
the purchasing or servicing progression. This assistance is depending on the employees of any
establishment and a good customer service will determine the success of any organisation. This
following report will focus on the understandings of policies and service practices of guests.
Later this report will analyse the complaint handling procedures on comparative basis of two
major chains of hotels. Marriott is an expanded hospitality establishment. It was founded in 1927
by J. Willard Marriott. It is one of the largest chains of hotel in terms of highest room occupancy.
The Ritz Carlton chain of hotels was founded in 1983 by William. B. Johnson.
1. Comparison of customer service practices and policies
Providing customers, the best service quality is beneficial in order to excel in the competitive
market and to acquire best visitant satisfaction and earn brand image and goodwill in the hotel
industry market.
R Carlton follows a “Golden Standard” rule to serve their customers in best way possible.
“Three steps service” procedure for their customers, which includes warm and friendly greeting
to their guest, try to address the guest with their names and lastly when the customer is leaving
the hotel provide them a genuine farewell and remember their name.
The Credo: They represents that the comfort and care of customers is their prime objective. They
believe in providing personalised service and facilities to individuals staying in their property
(Milliman, Gatling and Kim, 2018). For example: If couple traveling with kids, staff will provide
them a nanny or cradle facility, so that they can leave their kids there and can enjoy their quality
time. They closely monitor their customers and try to identify their needs and wants and surprise
them with specialised services.
Motto: The complete staff from ground staff to managerial level or all the four operational
department (F&B, Front office, Housekeeping and Production). They all work together as a
family and they put combine efforts to make the stay pleasant and memorable for the consumer.
The whole employee of company acts accountable to each other.
Policies followed by Marriott:
Training of employees: Their main focus is in training and recruiting the best skilled staff,
because they act as a face of the organisation. Customer’s first encounter happens with staff

members. Their amount of trust and loyalty is built in guest mind is depend on the quality of
service they received from the employees. The company also focuses on trained their people in
multiple skills from handling the guest to handle guest grievances and luggage handling and
concierge activities.
Prioritise customers: They believe that customer is the boss and treat them as a king. They
prioritise their guest’s demands and requirement and are flexible enough to modify their services
as per their necessities. They aim at acquire highest customer satisfaction and maintain long term
relationship with them to retain the existing guest count (Shulga and Busser, 2020).
Service quality: In Marriott they have a strong customer service team on floors as well as in back
office they provide quick respond team who are dedicatedly designated to escort and handle the
guest as soon as they step in the property premises.
Excellence: They conduct ethical practices and give value to their customer instead of being
profit centric. They don’t keep any confidentiality from the guest they have all the policies,
regulations and guidelines communicated thoroughly with them. This is one of the main reason
people have strong trust towards this establishment (Mutiasari, 2020).
Customer feedbacks: They never get lenient in taking feedbacks. Whenever a walk-in or check-
in guest were leaving the property, it’s a mandatory function of the front office department and it
has to be followed strictly to take proper customer feedbacks through company portals or by
manually feedback forms. People can also provide feedback through various websites like
TripAdvisor, go Ibibio and triptote etc (Ye, Luy and He, 2019). Hotels have customer service
department in the back office to monitor all these websites. They collect feedbacks of visitors
and reply each one of the relevant feedbacks personally by emails and on calls if possible.
Ensure them to resolve the issues they have faced and never be repeated in the future and they
genuinely care for the grievances of the guests. That’s what makes them one of the best
multinational chains of B & B in the world.
2. Customer Complain handling techniques at Ritz Carlton and Marriott:
Whenever a company try to solve customer grievances, they always emphasize on how rather
than why. The questions with HOW always tends towards the problem-solving part and WHY
leads towards explanation and cause of the problem (Bergel and Brock, 2018). “How to reach
there?” is better than “Why this place is so far away?” also, follow these 5 steps while addressing
customer grievances.

Complaint handling at Ritz:
Apologise: Take full responsibility & say I am sorry.
Urgent effort: Try to solve a problem as soon as possible. An unsolved customer complaint can
attract criticism for the company.
Empathy: Try to build a relationship with the customer. It shows the company is serious about
his problem.
Compensation: Be sympathetic, show that the company cares about their loss. Be liberal enough
to compliment them with some services (Kasemsap, 2017).
Follow-up: Get feedback from the customer.
Ritz-Carlton provides ample liberty to its employees on how to solve customer complaints. They
have the luxury to spend $2000 on grievances lodged by the customers of which they are
authorized informally. They have a set of 20 principles which every employee has to follow. One
of the principle states that a company should never lose a guest. They have to pacify the guest
instantly with full responsibility. Any employee can receive a complaint and can solve it with
full capacity (Kasiri and et. al., 2017). Every other firm should follow the footsteps of Ritz
Carlton and deliver excellent service to their customers.
Complaint handling at Marriott:
Offer a refund or discount: The grievance handling team of Marriott tend to provide discounts
and complimentary meal, accommodation, Laundry service, health and wellness services or
recreational activity vouchers or pay them back some percentage of their total bill or in some
crucial condition they even return the whole amount paid by the guest, in order to maintain good
customer relationship and good will of the hotel (Law and et. al., 2018).
Providing justification: In this case the employees or the staffs provide justification or
clarification for the mishappening or in some case if any misunderstanding or misinterpretation
of information is taken place. The administration makes an apology or gives explanation instead
of providing any compensation. This strategy is followed when the issue is not that complex.
Internal responsibility: If the problem occurs in any operational functions or services of the
customer the manager of that particular department is accountable for that mistake. No matter
who have committed the blunder it’s the sole responsibility of the manager to apologise on
behalf of their staff.

External issues: The cases such as if any guest complain about the room temperature or the
noise pollution outside the hotel premises causing irritation to the people staying in that room. In
such cases the manager or the administrator can feel sorry or empathise for the inconvenient
cause or try the best on their side to either provide them another room with different location if
available or can provide additional heater if they are feeling cold (Wahyuni and et. al., 2020).
They will try to help the customer to make their stay pleasant instead of denying or saying
phrases like “they can’t do anything about that”.
Act responsibly as “we’ not “I”: The management follow a common practice to use we or I
instead of blaming on each other. If any of the staff member does mistake or the consumer
having complaint from the housekeeping department and they approach the operative who
belongs to F&B department, so it becomes their duty to resolve and apologise to them, instead of
refusing and stating that it’s not theirs matter (Milliman, Gatling and Kim, 2018). People work as
a family so everyone is accountable for their co-workers or interdepartmental mistakes.
Agree with guest and offer explanation: If guest is complaining about any product or service its
avoidable to argue or interrupt them when explaining what cause them inconvenience. Act as a
good listener, as listening will resolve half of the issue and also helps to calm down the person.
Always agree with the guest and ensure them that will look after the problem and will make sure
that this will never happen in the future. The staff should also provide them a polite explanation
about the matter. That way it will help to build and regain the faith of the customer in the hotel.
Fulfil customer expectations: They always emphasise to provide wow factor to guests and
always maintain competitive advantage to improve standards in terms of services. They
continuously work on increasing their quality standard and bring out new innovative and creative
ideas to serve and handle their clients.
3. Recommendations for Hotel customer service in the COVID-19 era
There’s no suspicion that COVID-19 changed customer service. The way hospitality industries
operate and deliver experiences will undergo a number of variations to form a new standard.
Every company have to make changes and start functioning now, otherwise they have to face
drastic failure if organisation is not operating at all. Industries will need to look closely at what
customers looking for, and what all are the services can be provided to them. As the guest
relations Manager, proposed some recommendations on the expansion intended at client
intensive amenities to improve guest completion for the hotel.

Flexible booking policies: The guests will feel insecure to make advance booking and they also
have a doubt that maybe they were required to cancel reservations at rapid notice. In such case
companies should offer relaxation in withdrawal fees. It will help to guarantee guest satisfaction
and imminent trustworthiness by present empathy and flexibility.
Cleanliness and hygiene: Travellers will be more health conscious after this COVID situation
so hotels need to make assure that their hotel is following all the safety measures and also
identify the areas which need be improved and take high precautionary actions.
Shared spaces: Overcrowding should be avoided as guests will feel anxious about their health
and safety. A declaration is essential to present that the property have taken all the precautions
and cleaning procedures specially in shared spaces areas.
Contactless check-in: Hotels should use or develop specific applications or software which will
enable customers and front office officials to upload and check guest documents and billing and
customer also can book and complete the whole check-in procedure through that app.
Surge in adventure/active holidays: Staying locked in homes for a really long period will
develop craving to do something adventures and exploring activities. Hotels should plan that
what type of interesting packages they can offer. It is the most beneficial period for industries to
join with resident corporations to extend their offerings.
Local health facilities: People will be scared and anxious about the availability of medical
services near the property they are staying at. To attain guests, trust establishments must update
their websites, with proper room imageries and guest texting apps to make communication easier
and also provide information like nearest drug store, clinics, shopping malls etc.
CONCLUSION
The above report evaluated the policies followed by Ritz and Marriott in term of
customer services and represents the best practices to enhance customer engagement. This report
also discussed the reason why a company invest in enhancing their guest services and it leads to
forthcoming accomplishment of the establishment. It is analysed that amenity excellence is
turned out to be most important components in term of growth of hotel industry. It is also
concluded that the interdependency of guest, employees and hotel regulations is necessary to
maintain a balance and follow a long-term approach. Lastly the report come to its final

conclusion after the understanding of the complaint handling procedures carrying forwards
contrarily in both R. Carlton and Marriott.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Bergel, M. and Brock, C., 2018. The impact of switching costs on customer complaint behavior
and service recovery evaluation. Journal of Service Theory and Practice.
Kasemsap, K., 2017. Mastering customer service, customer experience, and customer orientation
in the hospitality and tourism industry. In Handbook of research on holistic
optimization techniques in the hospitality, tourism, and travel industry (pp. 115-
140). IGI Global.
Kasiri, L.A., and et. al., 2017. Integration of standardization and customization: Impact on
service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Journal of Retailing and
Consumer Services. 35. pp.91-97.
Law, R., and et. al., 2018. Systematic review of hospitality CRM research. International Journal
of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Milliman, J., Gatling, A. and Kim, J.S., 2018. The effect of workplace spirituality on hospitality
employee engagement, intention to stay, and service delivery. Journal of
Hospitality and Tourism Management. 35. pp.56-65.
Mutiasari, D.E., 2020. Strategies to Promote Hotel Products and Handle Guest Complaints in
Aruna Senggigi Resort and Convention (Doctoral dissertation, UNIVERSITAS
AIRLANGGA).
Shulga, L.V. and Busser, J.A., 2020. Hospitality employee and customer role in value co-
creation: Personal, organizational and collaborative outcomes. International
Journal of Hospitality Management. 91. p.102648.
Wahyuni, N., and et. al., 2020. The effect of culture dimension in digitalization era on the
complaint behavior in hotel industry. International Journal of Data and Network
Science. 4(4). pp.347-356.
Ye, Y., Lyu, Y. and He, Y., 2019. Servant leadership and proactive customer service
performance. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
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