Hospitality Through Systems: Making Care Consistent and Genuine

Adapted from The Heart of Hospitality by Micah Solomon

A low-key pitch from Micah Solomon, author of The Heart of Hospitality. I offer customer service and customer experience improvement consulting, customer service training, and eLearning creation. 484-343-5881 • micah@micahsolomon.com • micahsolomon.com

Hospitality Through Systems: Making Care Consistent and Genuine

The challenge with hospitality is making it consistent without making it feel scripted. You want every customer to experience genuine care, but you can't rely on random acts of kindness to build a sustainable business.

The solution is building hospitality into your systems—creating processes that enable and encourage genuine care while ensuring nothing important falls through the cracks.

At Starbucks, not only does the company have precise standards for the amount of the ingredient (syrup, sauce, or add-in) to be put into different beverages, the company also ensures that these precise standards are met, day in and day out, without requiring endless training or extraordinary feats of memory. Instead of requiring baristas to memorize a long list of formulas, Starbucks has created a set of color-coded pumps and spoons, each of which is paired with a particular ingredient to ensure that the correct amount can be easily and accurately dispensed. Three pumps of the ingredient go into a tall drink, four go into a grande, and five into a venti.

At LDV Hospitality, they use technology invisibly to enhance human service. If you're a regular at the Regent Cocktail Club in Miami, the drink will be ready for you upon arrival. LDV Hospitality employees are expected to be scrupulous about keeping such technological enhancements out of view of the customer, integrating them with human-delivered service as invisibly as possible, so that the resulting service flourishes seem magical rather than mechanical or rote.

The key insight: systematize the intention, not the execution. Create processes that remind people to care, provide time for care, and remove obstacles to care, but let individuals express that care authentically.

When you build hospitality into your systems correctly, extraordinary care becomes ordinary—happening consistently and authentically across your organization.

A low-key pitch from Micah Solomon, author of The Heart of Hospitality. Greetings! I offer customer service and customer experience improvement consulting, customer service training, and eLearning creation. 484-343-5881 • micah@micahsolomon.com • micahsolomon.com