10 Hospitality Skills that Every Employee Needs
There are certain Hospitality skills that every employee must master if they are facing customers. Without them, we run the risk of finding our business in an embarrassing situation, or you will simply lose customers as your service continues to let people down. Luckily, there are a few universal skills that every staff member can master that will dramatically improve their conversations with customers.
Below are covered the 10 most-needed skills to master this incredibly important position.
1. Patience
Patience is at the top of Hospitality skills list. Not only is patience important to customers, who often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated, but it's also important to the business at large. Great service beats fast service every single time. Yet patience shouldn't be used as an excuse for sloppy service.
2. Attentiveness
The ability to really listen to customers is so crucial for providing great service for a number of reasons. Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions (watching the language/terms that they use to describe their problems), but it's also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive.
3. Clear Communication Skills
Make sure you're getting to the problem quickly; customers don't need our life story or to hear about how our day is going. More importantly, we need to be cautious about how some of our communication habits translate to customers, and it's best not to make a mistake whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.
4. Knowledge of the Product
The best employees will work on having a deep knowledge of product offered. This will enable him to be a good sales person. Without knowing the product from front-to-back, we won't know how to help customers when they run into problems.
5. Ability to Use "Positive Language"
Our ability to make minor changes in conversational patterns can truly go a long way in creating happy customers. Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use.
7. Time Management Skills
We should be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner. The idea here is that this should also be applied when realizing when we simply cannot help a customer. If you don't know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support member will get a customer over to someone who does.
8. Ability to "Read" Customers
We don’t always see customers face-to-face, and in many instances we don’t even hear a customer's voice. Look and listen for clear clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and we can go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.
9. A Calming Presence
There's a lot of importance for this type of personality. It’s the ability to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic. The best customer service reps know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to lose their cool.
10. Persuasion Skills
To truly take our customer service skills to the next level, we need to have some mastery of persuasion so that you we convince interested customers that our product is right for them. It is about not letting potential customers slip away because we couldn't create a strong message that our company's product is worth purchasing.