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Consistency is one of the most important (and undervalued) aspects of offering top-notch hotel guest services. A hotel’s brand is established in guests’ minds only through consistent levels of service and consistent experiential deliverables. Once the brand image is set in potential guests’ minds, hoteliers have even more work to do as they must ensure that they maintain their brand image and reputation over the long term; after all, a successful brand takes years to build, and only one bad experience to tarnish it – and with the popularity of social media and online reviews, one bad review can be enough to hurt your bottom line.

So, how can hoteliers ensure that they deliver a consistent guest experience every day to every single guest, especially across a large portfolio of properties?

The only way to do this is to create and implement a regimented set of brand standards, operational processes, and procedures to ensure consistency and quality across every aspect of your operations. It sounds simple, but historically, this has been one of the biggest challenges for hoteliers because of the lack of tools available to support the efficient implementation and standardization of these processes.

Until recently, hoteliers used pen and paper to keep their brand and service standards consistent across their portfolio. Employees were required to follow procedures down to the letter and religiously document their progress; unfortunately, when things got busy, employees often forgot to track and log their work against the brand standards. Slowly but surely, consistency and service standards started to decrease.

But it doesn’t have to be that way… technology is here to save the day (again)!

In today’s highly competitive travel market, hotels can’t afford to be held back by outdated offline processes. A hotelier’s ability to provide the best guest service (and pivot operationally as needed when service levels don’t live up to guests’ expectations) is key to standing out from the competition.

Today, digitizing your operational standards is an operational imperative, as it will streamline your property’s efficiency, make standards accessible to your entire team, provide better data capture and reporting, improve brand consistency, minimize costs, and enhance the overall guest experience.

Before we dive deeper into the benefits, what does it mean to digitize your operational standards? Is it as simple as turning your pen and paper documents into PDFs??

Quick answer: no.

Digitizing your operational standards solves two main pain points: it ensures consistent guest experiences and makes standards and compliance regulations more accessible to staff. To accomplish these two aims most effectively, hoteliers should implement a standards management platform that offers actionable insight by focusing on standards and observations rather than just forms or checklists. The platform must also track compliance metrics to make it easier and more efficient for hotels to comply with all critical standards.

Now that we understand a digitized standards management platform let’s examine some of the key benefits of implementing one at your property.

Improved Compliance

One of the most important reasons to implement a digitized standards management platform is to more effectively and accurately manage your property’s compliance—not only with brand standards but also with government agencies and local leadership—at a more granular level. Your standards management platform should also integrate specific standards from organizations such as Forbes, allowing properties to be audited against the organizations’ standards quickly and easily.

In addition to providing an easy way to audit your team and property’s compliance metrics, a digitized standards management platform supports efficient training for new employees on compliance-related topics, including local state requirements, food regulations, and fire department codes.

Real-Time Updates & Accountability

A significant outcome of digitizing your standards is being able to pull real-time accountability reports on your team’s adherence to critical standards metrics. Real-time is the keyword in that sentence because, without real-time functionality, you can’t correctly implement and track new standards. Using a digitized standards management platform, your property’s leadership team can issue new standards quickly and easily to be automatically implemented across all properties in your portfolio. Once the new standards are implemented, tasks can be assigned, completed and verified through automated tracking functionality, eliminating manual oversight and compliance tracking.

Data-Driven Decisions

Real-time access to your team’s performance through a digitized standards management platform makes it possible to make better, data-based decisions to support your property’s ongoing profitability and maintain high guest service levels. The platform collects, aggregates and analyzes data at a more granular level, making it possible to quickly spot operational areas of improvement, prompting proactive action to address non-compliance issues before they become problematic.

Cost & Sustainability

Today, sustainability is an important factor in attracting potential guests. Replacing and/or updating pen-and-paper standards binders is expensive and creates a significant amount of waste. By digitizing your standards, you will decrease your operational costs and reduce your property’s environmental footprint—a win/win in today’s competitive marketplace.

Brand Consistency

Using a digitized standards management platform, your property’s brand integrity is maintained through centralized management of guidelines that are easily followed property-wide. Your standards management platform can delve into your team’s performance at a more granular level, uncovering points of failure that can be remedied proactively rather than reactively.

While the hospitality industry is well-known for the high service standards and beautiful experiences that guests associate with their travels, these core values will be compromised without strong underlying standards and efficient operational processes. Using a digitised standards management platform is the only way to effectively manage your standards in today’s increasingly competitive online world. Trust me, your bottom line will thank you for it!