Hospitality is an imperfect business and while you can plan to deliver the highest levels of product and service consistently, even the world’s best service providers have breakdowns.

Planning for inevitable mistakes separates the best businesses from the average ones. Making every effort to win the customer back after an incident transcends the negative event, elevates the experience and solidifies member loyalty. This is a goal hospitality professionals strive to achieve.

Producing flawless hospitality experiences consistently is complex. Take serving a steak, for example. While a club can have the highest standards for meat quality, selection, preparation and service, numerous factors come into play, each of which can dramatically alter the outcome:

• What did the cow eat?
• How was the meat processed/packaged?
• How was it stored and aged?
• Who prepared the meat?
• Who cooked it?
• Who ordered it and what is their version of medium rare?
• How long did it sit in the kitchen window waiting to be delivered to the table?
• Who prepared the sauce and sides that accompanied the steak?

Even if all of the above are impeccably answered and the steak is perfection on a plate headed out of the kitchen for delivery to the table, the server could slip and send the dish flying into the air. The steak in all its glory ends up a monstrosity on the dining room floor. Now the 18-minute ticket time has turned into a 36-minute ticket time, and the member is furious.

You can do everything right: hire the right people, train them well, have the highest standards for quality and preparation, develop your people with ongoing education, evaluate your service standards regularly, and yet things still happen. It’s a human business with endless variables that result in an experience that tends to be entirely subjective.

We all want to surprise and delight our members on the front end, but service recovery is how to win loyalty. Recognize that no matter how good you may be, mistakes will happen. That’s why developing and implementing a service recovery plan is critical. Have the standard to reconcile the situation, plus one. This means you fix the problem and more.

For example, The Club at Mediterra designates an “Oops Plate” every shift. The chef identifies one or two small dishes, such as a salad, appetizer or intermezzo, and lists them on the whiteboard in the kitchen. Should an incident happen where a meal was cooked improperly or ordered incorrectly, the server can request and deliver the most appropriate “Oops Plate” to the guest.

The server explains that the item is for the guest to enjoy while the meal is being corrected and apologizes for the inconvenience. Once the meal has been rectified and enjoyed, the server brings a complimentary plate of small indulgence desserts to the table before offering dessert (the plus one). When a problem occurs, the staff person notifies the manager on duty and records what happened, with the member’s name, the date and time on the Winning Them Back List.

The Winning Them Back List lives on the POS, making it visible and accessible to employees across all departments. The list communicates incidents that occur so employees are empowered to extend extra time and effort to ensure a positive experience when that member returns to the club. The Winning Them Back List exists for all club areas, not just food and beverage, and is an exceptional resource for continuing service recovery for weeks after an incident.

As the service industry struggles to find its footing today with a shortage of applicants, increased turnover and an ongoing need for training and development, hiring the right people becomes increasingly more important. Solution-oriented, innovative thinkers who can adapt to problems in real time have ideal qualities that should be drawn out of candidates during the hiring process. These soft skills can be developed and enhanced in those who have them but are harder to train and instill in those who don’t.

Service recovery also requires learning from mistakes. Analyzing what happened and why is a powerful approach to ensuring the incident doesn’t happen again. Having an internal process to eliminate recurring mistakes and update training and development to eradicate the likelihood of future occurrences is a necessary tactic.

Communication may be the most essential ingredient in service recovery. The best-intended processes can fall flat when the communication loop isn’t closed completely. When something goes wrong, the manager(s) should be notified about what happened and why, and the member should be informed that the mistake is being addressed immediately.

Empowering employees to take ownership of a problem can be a game-changer in service recovery. Members who are upset do not want to hear, “My manager or someone else will get back to you soon.” They want the situation solved immediately. Ensuring employees know the importance of following up with members, sometimes more than once, instills confidence in members that they are important and a solution is being worked on.

While you can prepare, plan and predict as much as possible to eliminate mistakes, they are inevitable. When organizations transition from sweeping mistakes under the rug to looking at every glitch as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, build trust and instill loyalty, magic happens. That is when we achieve a powerful recovery that surprises and delights our members.

THE BOARDROOM MAGAZINE – July/August 2024