It’s no surprise that for a whopping 78% of hotel guests, cleanliness is the most critical factor affecting their stay choice. What may come as a surprise is that guest feedback is a fantastic tool for creating a bulletproof housekeeping team. It helps you identify challenges in your housekeeping team that require the most attention.
Let’s explore three ways to improve your housekeeping game.
Get Quicker Check-Ins With Organized Staff
The front office relies on housekeeping for regular updates on the status of hotel rooms. Check-in time is affected by how quickly the housekeepers clean the room. Maintaining the guest’s expectations is impossible without an efficient system. It leads to prolonged check-in times and queues – not a great start to a holiday.
So, look into guest feedback regarding check-in and check-out times. If it turns out they are not happy with the process, it’s time to reorganize your housekeeping department.
Real-time communication is crucial for getting guests into clean rooms as soon as possible. Exchanging pen and paper with digital software ensures nothing gets overlooked and that every single room is cleaned promptly and thoroughly.
Case studies have shown that implementing housekeeping software saves at least 1h per room each month for housekeepers. So if your hotel has 200 rooms, you could be checking in your guests 200 hours faster. And that’s what exceeding guest expectations means.
Treat Cleaning Mistakes As Training Opportunities
Before hotels adopted modern digital tools, feedback entailed guests usually expressing a complaint like: “My room was dirty. ”
In the best-case scenario, the guest would say it to the Front Office team, but more often than not, the complaint would end up in an online review. Your goal is to prevent a cleaning mistake before it becomes a veritable PR disaster.
Giving guests the option to deliver feedback via the app opens many doors. The first of them is a faster issue resolution. Digital software allows you to collect more specific data and pay attention to quality patterns.
Get thorough: look for feedback about the specific room area, not just an overall critique. If guests frequently complain about the same problem, such as shower cleanliness, you must look into that particular issue. Housekeeping software connects mistakes to a specific housekeeper, showing you exactly who is responsible for what.
Despite their hard work, it might be time to retrain housekeepers who have difficulty keeping the showers clean to meet quality standards. Find patterns in guest feedback, and you will determine when an issue needs addressing with staff. Housekeeping analytics is an untapped wealth of information – it will save you time, money, and grey hair when used correctly.
Be mindful of not penalizing housekeepers who make occasional cleaning mistakes. Treat it as a teaching opportunity where you can encourage and train your staff to do better, not shame them. Also, remember to recognize and reward housekeepers who consistently uphold a high standard of quality and efficiency in their tasks.
Prevent Inefficiency By Looking Into Maintenance Complaints
Housekeepers are the most important messengers of maintenance issues in a hotel. When hotel guests face a maintenance issue in their rooms, it’s usually because housekeepers did not promptly report the problem to the maintenance department or the information did not reach them before guest check-in. This happens when two departments have no fast and effective way to communicate with each other.
Housekeeping software helps you avoid this scenario as your team can log hotel maintenance issues quickly and efficiently. That way, the whole team is instantly informed of the problem and its urgency level. You can further optimize the reporting process by enabling guests to log the issues directly through the app. Seeing that problems can be reported and resolved more swiftly, guests are less likely to be affected by them.
Again, look for patterns. If guests keep reporting the same issue, you should resolve the root cause. For example, if an old air conditioner gets reported as requiring maintenance every other week, it is probably time to upgrade an outdated model.
Streamlining housekeepers’ daily operations by removing minor recurring tasks can, over time, save you a lot of time and money. More specifically, the number of reported maintenance issues tripled in hotels that use housekeeping software. Faster and more efficient communication helps to identify and resolve issues more quickly, leaving housekeepers more energy to focus on their primary tasks.
How To Gather Guest Feedback
Hotel guests often refrain from comments or are hesitant to inform staff, which makes it hard to identify if anything is less than perfect.
The solution? It starts with adopting a digital tool that can streamline the feedback process. Instead of capturing feedback with paper and pen, use modern tools that help you manage guest feedback more efficiently.
For example, with Flexkeeping and Benbria’s Loop Experience Platform, you can collect customer feedback and improve backend operations in real-time. With these two platforms working together, you will have best-in-class technology on your side.
Once the hotel guest complaints are registered in the system, the necessary parties can monitor, comment, and solve the issue while ensuring that all departments coordinate to improve overall guest satisfaction.
Hotel housekeeping is one of the most interconnected departments that interacts with the highest number of variables. Use guest feedback to expedite its automation and transform hotel housekeeping into your secret weapon for success.
This is a Guest Blog written by our partner Flexkeeping
