Being the best
They will be an innovative leader in the hotel industry and will continually improve our products and services. They will seek from our suppliers the highest quality products and services at the best value.
Delivering shareholder value
They are committed to being a growing company. Their successes will result in investment returns which are consistently among the best in the hotel industry.
Playing by the rules
They will maintain integrity, fairness and honesty in both our internal and external relationships and will consistently live up to our commitments.
Acting with responsibility
They will actively participate in the improvement of the environment, just as they will be responsible members of our communities and industry organizations.
Strategic quality planning and leadership
The executive directors develop the Group’s strategic plans through a variety of different processes involving hotel general managers and our marketing and sales team. These processes involve analysis of results of surveys taken to measure our customer’s satisfaction, the satisfaction of our competitors’ customers and the industry standards as a means of identifying performance requirements and quality product initiatives. Our plans are then implemented at each hotel through redesignated capital projects, staff training, changes in purchasing requirements and through reevaluation of policy and procedure guidelines. We evaluate and improve our planning process by employing a number of well-recognized and respected outside facilitators from both the academic and consulting fields.
Quality goals and plans
Their quality management programmes and the processes which we developed in our efforts to provide total customer satisfaction have developed towards the goal of provision of service and focus on certain major concepts:
- All ranks of management and employees need the right tools, the appropriate training, a willing frame of mind, and support and inspiration from the organization;
- Substantial research is essential to know what new products and services customers need and expect; and
- Their quality service delivery systems and employee job satisfaction will be improved substantially through simplifying the communication process.
One of their strategies was to initiate “legendary people” in 1989 as the umbrella concept for their renewed commitment to quality service standards. Their Legendary People programme is their effort to continue the many quality service traditions for which the Group has achieved recognition and to successfully improve their quality service3 delivery systems.
Legendary People was conceived as a result of a series of discussions among the Group executive directors in search of quantifying “quality” and then creating a programme to maintain it. Their goal was to lead the hotels in developing more process-oriented systems which would help carry forward each hotel’s quality values and processes to future generations of management and staff. They also wanted to develop ways to transfer successful processes at one property into the systems and cultures in other Group hotels. Finally, they wanted an overt and ongoing programme focusing on quality service delivery in recognition of the improvement in the competition, the changing expectation of the customer and the evolving needs of our employees.
Their desire was not to introduce a programme that was designed by and outsider, packaged and served to the management and staff at each hotel in a patronizing way. They decided, therefore, to go slowly, to be experimental and to make sure we accommodated the different work ethic and cultures at each hotel. Thus, a period of several months was dedicated by the entire organization to develop and reach agreement on the following principles of their Legendary People programme.
“Legendary People”- Mandarin Oriental Hotels for the delivery of consistent, distinctive, personal service to customers must be maintained and even enhanced in the face of the coming competition in most of our markets. In doing so we must focus upon certain agreed policies and principles, and articulate specific methods for their implementation:
- Final responsibility for all aspects of the total performance of each Mandarin Oriental Hotel lies with the hotel’s general manager.
- The satisfaction of customer needs, through delivery of the services of the hotel, and its staff, must be the top priority of responsibility for each hotel’s senior management.
- The quality, as well as the style, of each hotel’s service delivery systems is best communicated to all levels of staff through senior management “modelling” of service behaviour in a proactive, highly visible and consistent manner.
- A positive, motivating management environment is essential in creaing the desire in front-line staff to deliver equally positive, warm, and sincere service. A “Wn/Win” discipline philosophy is at the core of Mandarin Oriental’s supervision technique.
- Daily senior management personal contact and communication with customer and rank and file staff are essential keys to maintenance of quality standards in the consistent delivery of customer services.
- Each senior manager’s team must be organized such that the hotel’s operations support departments and provide the essential customer services to maximize the time devoted to customer service delivery and staff supervision and motivation.
- All systems, structures, and policies, both within each hotel and throughout the Group, are designed to strengthen Mandarin Oriental ‘s commitment to these policies and principles.
They are developing Quality Standards under our Legendary People programme as well as their Total Training Concept, an umbrella training programme to organize our training efforts to ensure that staff undertake to delight our guests, with or without supervision.
Customer satisfaction determination
Their market segments are identified through information collected at the time of purchase which is then tracked and compared on a month-to-date and year-to-date basis within each hotel, one Mandarin Oriental Hotel to another Mandarin Oriental Hotel and each hotel to its own specific competitors.
Market segment information is compared weekly. Information tracked includes geographic source of business, country of residence and breaddowns of the source of booking by industry. This information is then further analysed into more specific segments at the hotel level. Separate corporate accounts are classified into industries and the needs specific to key customer industries are determined by interviewing or surveying our customers in that industry.
Our key customer satisfaction measurement is a guest satisfaction survey taken by Asian Market Intelligence (AMI). This annual survey, printed in English, Chinese and Japanese, gathers information from a minimum of 500 customers from each hotel and seeks the customer’s importance rating and satisfaction rating of a broad range of products and services offered. In addition, it obtains certain psychographic and demographic information which they can use together with other research to determine market trends. Through this survey they also seek the customers’ views on certain proposed products or services which they are considering introducing.
At the hotel level they track customer complaints through “Comment Cards”. The format of the cards is such that suggestions can be tracked, as well as comments on existing facilities and services. These are reviewed and acted upon at hotel level daily, compiled into monthly summaries and then tracked against previous months and the previous year.
Surveys and polls taken by the travel trade, as well as various publications’ reader opinion surveys soliciting feedback from their customers, have been informal ways of keeping track of the general market opinion on our hotels. They know that the reasons behind the opinions are neither specified nor measured and we do not consider these extremely valid in measuring key customer satisfaction requirements. They are, however, an objective evaluation of customer satisfaction when they are directly compared to their competitors or ranked as a world-class organization.
Information and analysis
The data and information they select to build their information base is that which measures customers’ perceived value for money; customer satisfaction; level of service; the hotels themselves; market information.
The criteria for selecting data to be included in the customer information base includes every aspect of the use of our hotel from the time of arrival at the airport to the moment of departure. They measure each contact with personnel for efficiency, product knowledge and courtesy. They measure all facilities and the range of services offered. They also ask their customers to provide information regarding their potential use of new and alternative products and services. They ask them to rank these items in order of preference to facilitate our prioritizing for future decisions. They also track demographic and market information which we can compare from interpretation of variances from the group norm.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction and results
Their current level for key measures of product and service quality is high. In addition their surveys are providing us with information that indicates in which areas our high quality trends continue and alerts them to specific areas where additional work is necessary. Finally, their comments from their customers have both reflected a positive trend in certain process improvements and alerted them to areas needing improvement.
Customer relationship management
They have determined that the key factors in maintaining and building their relationships with customers are to provide a problem free experience at their hotels and reaturants and to give each customer personal recognition. Their strategies to build these relationships are the same as those employed to build their business, they are tied to each other.
They are currently developing a Group-wide Guest History network whereby the “history” of a customer of any one hotel can be accessed by any other hotel so that preferences are immediately responded to even if it is the customer’s first use of a new hotel. When this is in place, a customer of Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong who prefers a particular type of beverage will find it waiting for him upon arrival at The Oriental, Bangkok.
They follow up their customers with a personalized written response to every comment card or letter received and recently have begun telephoning customers for follow up. In every case they strive to let the customers know that they appreciate their comments; that their experiences are important to them; that they want to address the specific instance generating the comment; that they want them to be satisfied and, finally, if appropriate, they explain the change that will be made in their processes to assure achievement of better customer satisfaction in the future.
(Go, F.M and Pine, R.(1995). Globalization Strategy in the Hotel Industry. Routledge)
