Chronicle Editor
Phineas Chauke
IT goes without saying that tourism and hospitality service is an art that taps on inspiration. It is impossible to produce and deliver top quality without inspiration. Service employees are the magicians who enchant our visitors driving enterprise profitability and boosting destination attractiveness. It is critically important to ensure that the inspiration bank for the service employees never runs dry.
High levels of customer delight are what can set a company or destination apart especially in the highly competitive environment we find ourselves in following the Covid-19 pandemic. Customer delight entails an element of pleasant surprise on the customer. Some of the constructs of customer delight include deeply entrenched customer loyalty and arousal.
One has to be in the right frame of mind to be able to achieve such an effect on another person. It is the responsibility of the employer to ensure that the people who “work the magic” on the frontline are adequately inspired.
Human Capital Management implies treating employees as a critical resource that differs with others in the sense that it is grown rather than expended. In the tourism service the frontline staff draw on their creativity and a combination of hard and soft skills to render heart-warming service.
The people responsible for service innovation need to be well taken of and be kept in high morale. Training and development of employees is very important in order to create a distinctive service brand. It also follows naturally that after training people you don’t want to lose them to competition.
Employee retention requires strategies to make them loyal and attached to the brand. Continuously losing human capital and having to train new ones disrupts smooth flow of business as the “newbies” are still learning their roles and trying to fit in.
It is also very expensive to recruit and train people every now and then. Management should always endeavour to keep employees motivated so as to attain high levels of performance.
If employees are given room to innovate and contribute to the service design, they can certainly take the service offering of the organisation to very high levels. Tourism organisations should strive to always make their employees feel important.
They should be treated as crucial assets and they should see an opportunity for growth within the organisation.
When someone who was at the shop floor rises through the ranks to management, they have a clearer understanding of the business and they are likely to manage more effectively than someone who just lands a top post coming from elsewhere.
The tourism and hospitality sector is famed for rather short term closed contracts for lower levels of staff and I should say that has a negative impact on service quality. If employees do not have a sense of belonging to an organisation they will not have inspiration to give of themselves anything beyond the minimum acceptable.
The tourism and hospitality industry is about treating people well and it should begin with intern customers (employees) being treated well.
That makes it only natural for them to treat external customers well. If you cannot treat each other well within your family, it is not likely that you will know how to treat visitors well. It becomes even more difficult when it is the ill-treated ones who are expected to show utmost hospitality to visitors. When employees are happy, the happiness rubs off to the customers, it is not only diseases that are contagious!
Phineas Chauke is a Bulawayo-based tourism consultant, marketer and tour-guide. Contact him on +263776058523, [email protected]
Bongani Ndlovu
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