GUEST SERVICE _>>
and empowered to understand how to handle different scenar- ios with the goal of righting wrongs. To accomplish this, your ski area should develop a failure recovery framework, which lays out a variety of steps to follow—and train to—in the event of different customer complaints. When creating a failure recovery framework, there are five key areas to focus on: 1. Proactive Recovery: In your business unit, what can go wrong, and how can it be addressed if experienced by a guest? With your team, brainstorm potential issues for your department. Once you have those, identify a fair recovery. For example: Complaint: A chairlift drips oil on a guest’s new coat. Recovery: Offer to pay for dry cleaning or offer a discount to use at the retail store. 2. Personalized Recovery: Invest in the guest relationship and understand the guest and their frustration. Through active listening, you can tailor the recovery efforts to indi- vidual guests. For example: A family with small children is due to check-in at your hotel. Unfortunately, the room is not ready when they arrive. Knowing they have kids, you order cookies for the room and provide coloring sheets for the kids to play with while they wait.
3. Timely Recovery: Timeliness is crucial for service recov- ery. The quicker you connect with the guest, the easier the recovery will be. All guests are people, and all people like to be heard. 4. Empathetic Recovery: Adopt the platinum rule when responding to guests, i.e., treat your guests how they want to be treated. Listen, seek to understand, show respect, apol- ogize sincerely, and be accountable. 5. Follow-up Recovery: After an on-mountain issue and sub- sequent resolution, follow-up with the guest. If they shared their contact information with you, send them an email or give them a call to check-in and see how they are feeling. A great example is a post-incident follow-up from ski patrol. SERVICE RECOVERY CHECKLIST Turning would-be detractors into enthusiastic promoters doesn’t happen overnight. Even after the framework is in place and staff are trained and empowered to rectify guest issues, ser- vice recovery is an ongoing process that your resort can benefit from in several ways.
• Invest In Recovery Processes: In the ski world, we’re all familiar with Murphy’s Law—anything that can go wrong,
RESORT MANAGEMENT REDEFINED From lifts to snowmaking, fleet to maintenance, ski to bike flow, task management to other software and hardware integration, Skadii is a unified platform for seamless operations. Backed by industry leaders, Skadii is your easy to use key to cost-saving and efficiency.
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator