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Staff is very important
An interview of Ralph Radtke, Cıragan Palace Kempinski Istanbul General Manager & Kempinski Area Director for Turkey & Bulgaria.
Each employee is an ambassador of his hotel and the promise of expected services. What actions do you put in place to involve your team in the success of the customer experience? How do you motivate them so that they give the best of themselves?
Happy employees create happy customers. Actually, only happy employees can create happy customers hence taking care of your staff is essential. In comparison to the industry average our hotel has a very low rate. Our employees are proud to be a part of this legendary hotel.
We have a very active people services philosophy; from annual staff parties held at our legendary Ballroom to continuous trainings we have a fully running program for our 700 –almost 900 in the summer – employees all year round. Training is one of the pillars of our group, Kempinski, which will carry us to 2020. We value training; we go out and look for talent, find it, bring it, polish it, keep it and grow it. This is vital. Our staff knows that they can move ahead with us if they are willing to do so.
Involving our staff in guest experience actively, apart from keeping them happy is also vital for us. When you look at hotel reviews or thank you letters you notice that it is the people, the extra mile that our staff went that guests remember. At our hotel we strive to send each and every guest happy back home.
It is a business that emotions and people are involved in the end; things might go wrong once a while but what matters is to talk to your guests, to listen to them. We anticipate their needs and try to think even before they think of what they want. We have a system that we call GET, Guest Experience Tracking. Every single employee can enter any comment or interaction they have with any guest. Everybody receives this information via mail at the same time and whoever needs to, takes an action right away. This could be finding out that a guest who is staying with us for the first time is allergic to sea shell or a guest who would like to be addressed by her middle name. We share any information that is vital to serve that particular guest, with the whole staff. We listen to them and make their wish come true while they are at the hotel; like Aladdin the Genie, “Their wish is our command”.
Sanitas Spa Hamam
Cıragan Palace
Laurent Delporte, an editor and conference speaker, is a strategic expert in the sector of hotels. A visionary, he brings his unique look on hotels in service to the decision-makers in the industry, whether to enhance the development of new projects or strategic visions.
Laurent has visited and audited over 350 hotels across the world and also participates in mystery visits to provide quality control for the world’s finest hotels.
