Keeping Your Brand Promise To Every Guest, Day In and Out
Digitising quality assurance and inspections to deliver consistent excellence
BRAND PROMISE
As a guest walking into a hotel property for the first time, there is always a rush of anticipation, and without a doubt, of expectation too. Whether entering a five-star property or checking into a rental property, it is likely your guests have already imagined what type of service and facilities they will encounter. Most of the time, the bar is set high, regardless of the budget or time invested in searching for a property that is just right for their needs. In addition to this, if a guest is a repeat customer, brand loyalty also comes into play, laying out further expectations in a guest's mind who is looking for a similar experience to a previous stay.
Today's travelers prefer hotels that have well-established, even renowned brand standards. Without having to conduct any background research, your visitors and potential clients should know exactly what to expect when they hear the name of your property.
DEFINING AND EVALUATING BRAND STANDARDS
With a strong brand comes the responsibility to deliver what you have promised. Service standards, room layouts, guest amenities and other design features all contribute to a hotel's brand standards, and they should all be maintained and monitored. Without having the right systems in place, a hotel could risk falling into the management of busy day to day operations without keeping an eye on maintaining and even improving these standards.
Traditional methods of measuring consistency and excellence include manual checklists and completion of information into time-consuming reports. However, a change to digital solutions is taking the hospitality industry by storm, simplifying ways to increase loyalty and maximize guest experience.
GOAUDITS - A PERFECT TOOL TO MEASURE STANDARDS AND DRIVE COMPLIANCE
A transition to digital technology can ensure that the process of measuring and training standards is more efficient and effective. Speaking to industry expert Kristin Ingram, who has spent the last 25 years managing brand standards in hotels such as Hilton and LaTour Hotels, the change to digital processes was a no-brainer. Responsible for Quality Assurance for 30+ resorts in the US, she was looking to make the process more efficient:
"I was on the road quite a bit, performing Quality Assurance audits. One of the challenges was all the manual work afterwards. I enjoyed my discussions with General Managers, housekeeping, maintenance or security teams, but at the end of the day you have to pull all that information together. At that time I was using a spreadsheet with 15 different tabs, lots of items and tasks on each tab. I was also taking photos, later having to remember where each photo was taken etc."
In her search to digitalize this lengthy QA process at Latour Hotels, she came across GOAUDITS. The all-in-one auditing platform is designed to simplify and streamline quality and brand standards in hospitality.
"My primary reason for reaching out to GoAudits was to identify a software that would be more efficient for calculating and documenting the 30 quality assurance audit inspections I performed each year in various parts of the U.S. and Caribbean. I needed something quick and easy, technology that was customizable and someone who would pick up the phone.That's why I chose GoAudits. And then taking a deeper dive, I was excited to discover the powerful reporting and dashboard analytics."
SAVINGS AND REAL-TIME INSIGHTS INTO OPERATIONS
As Kristin has experienced, scheduling regular site inspections to assess and evaluate each hotel's processes and operations was an important step in managing standards. Using an auditing solution like GOAUDITS most definitely made this process easier, but also allowed for more in-depth information gathered through the automatically generated reports that were shared with the management company.
"This digital process assisted our management company in becoming better at document retention, also saves on ink, paper, time. GoAudits provides us with digital trending reports that assist us in our annual budgeting processes - we now know at each property the top 5 issues and can reserve funds to correct these issues, as well as trends as a whole throughout our entire portfolio."
After initially using GoAudits for corporate QA, the app was rolled out to simplify operational checks in every property. This was particularly helpful to enforce updated Covid-19 procedures in each hotel. In addition to time savings and improved standards, Kristin mentioned improved scores and compelling financial benefits:
"We probably saved over $8000 in the first year by performing digital inspections, simply by not printing documentation etc. We then rolled it out to every property to be used by the operational teams. Overall we are seeing an upward trend during our resort audits, primarily because the general managers are performing self-inspections, practicing the standard operating procedures daily.
"While there may have been some initial resistance to change, once the GMs saw how much money they were saving in supplies and payroll, it caught on like wildfire! Last year over 20,000 audits were conducted."
Smart technology is changing everything from the homes we live in to how our cities are managed, and the hospitality industry is no exception.
GOAUDITS is an auditing and inspections platform specially designed for hospitality. It allows you to create and customize digital checklists. You can also ensure that any action items are taken care of in a timely manner, thanks to features like photo attachments, date stamps, and sending critical action points in real time to the correct staff member. Save time and costs, ensure compliance with brand standards and COVID guidelines and produce automatic reports that will help with quick decision making. Download today or request a free trial.
