Doug Kennedy’s Next Training Webcast: Understanding What Personalized Hospitality Is (and What It Isn’t!)

In this webcast, Doug will train your team on what it means to provide personalized service that truly impacts guest loyalty, along with easy ways that your staff can make hospitality happen consistently.

Sponsored By Travel Outlook and Track Hospitality Software 

Register your team and participate live, or view the recording, of Doug Kennedy’s next 40-minute training webcast scheduled for Friday, March 21^st, from Noon – 12:45pm EST. REGISTER HERE Whereas all webcasts in this series offer training tips for your staff, this one in particular will be a thought-provoking experience for all managers and leaders. 

“The phrase ‘personalized service’ is used an awful lot these days, most often to promote some nifty new AI-powered tech solution,” said KTN President Doug Kennedy. “Too many leaders think personalization means dropping guests’ names into welcome emails, displaying it on their TV, or using historical data to send them an upsell or return visit offer, all of which are nice gestures. But perhaps these concepts might be better named ‘contextualized marketing offers’ or ‘automated name-insertion systems,’” Kennedy added with a chuckle. “When it comes to creating memorable moments, it’s the micro-encounters that matter the most,” he said. In studying the etymology of the word “personalization,” it seems clear that personalized service is best done by a person! 

In this webcast, Doug will train your team on what it means to provide personalized service that truly impacts guest loyalty, along with easy ways that your staff can make hospitality happen consistently. He will compare and contrast the “is” and “isn’t” components of personalized guest experiences such as: 

– Receiving a welcome text that says, “Hello Douglas, I’m Vicky your Virtual Concierge,” which is a nice gesture, versus a front desk associate who looks up as you pass by, smiles, and uses a greeting that demonstrates they remember engaging with you upon arrival. 

– A generic welcome letter with your name inserted on the first line and, to no one’s amazement, says either “Welcome” or “Welcome back!” versus a housekeeper who sees all the children’s clothing and toys in the room and leaves you extra towels. Or one that notices you use all the decaf K-Cups and none of the others and leaves you extra. 

– Receiving a text a couple of hours before dinner with a link to an online menu, which may be interesting to some guests, versus any human staff member encountered who recommends in-house dining and suggests a specific entrée or dessert. 

– A QR code in the room or touch screen TV in the lobby offering local area information, which is possibly helpful to those who don’t own a cell phone, versus when any human staff member offers a “local insider’s tip” on something to eat, see, or do during your stay. 

Recordings of previous webcasts are available on KTN’s YouTube channel and are now also being distributed on your favorite podcast channel or on KTN’s Spotify channel. 

Everyone who registers for this and all KTN webcasts receives a link to the recording, even if they cannot attend. The 40-minute format is perfect for “lunch and learns” or excerpts can be shared at staff meetings. The target audience is anyone who is interested in upskilling themselves or others, and the topic areas are broad enough to be relevant for all sectors of the lodging industry. 

“We are grateful to the generosity of our sponsors who have allowed us to offer complimentary admission,” said Kennedy. “It takes a lot of time to design, promote, and deliver these events, and so we would normally charge at least $99 registration per person, but this series is now completely free to all.”  

Sponsors include: Travel Outlook, the only KTN Certified call center, and Track Hospitality Software, a TravelNet Solution, whose products include a PMS and CRM. 

Complimentary registration can be accessed at www.KTNwebcast.com. Here are the additional topics scheduled so far. 

Capturing More Catering and Event Sales Revenue

Friday, April 25 (Noon EDT)

REGISTER HERE 

Although the jobs of Catering & Event (Wedding) Sales Manager and Hotel Sales Manager are often thought of as being similar, the real-world skills needed are actually quite different. Often, the “need” behind a group sales booking is much more commodity-based, such as a coach or parent-volunteer who is booking a sports team block, an admin booking a small, routine meeting, or the increasingly automated process of bidding on negotiated corporate rates. On the other hand, the leads arriving daily in a catering sales manager’s inbox are much more likely to be coming directly from those who are personally planning emotionally important events such as weddings, retirement parties, annual awards banquets, holiday parties, Quinceañeras, and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs. 

Simply replying with generic templates, sending quotes back via in-app messaging, or emailing over pricing and menus creates a sense of “choice overload,” and planners often have difficulty deciding because the proposals are similar in content and presentation. 

In this webcast, Doug will cover training tips from KTN’s catering sales training workshops: 

– Overcoming lead fatigue resulting from participating in catering and event booking channels.

– Standing out in a sea of sameness; when your hotel has parity of product, price, and place.

– Obsessing on salesperson availability and back-up lead catchers.

– Creating client connections: Loop-it-Back Listening, Storified selling; using snappy taglines.

– Consultative selling to gain client confidence.

– Organizing and embracing “process” to enable follow-up that is both tenacious and personalized.

– “Out peopling” the competition. 

Train Your Team To Deliver E.P.I.C. Hospitality

Friday, May 16 (Noon EDT)

REGISTER HERE 

The word “epic” has found its place in the vernacular of our daily lives. It has become the name of so many Epic “things” such as an Orlando theme park, an International ski pass, a company that produces popular video games, and another company that provides kids with digital access to books. What’s more, it has arguably become one of the most popular descriptive words and is currently used as an adjective, adverb, and noun, especially by younger generations. 

In this workshop, Doug dives into an acronym he created from this word and will walk your guest-facing staff and leaders through how the concepts of empathy, patience, intuition, and compassion are foundational for creating truly memorable guest experiences while allowing for a lot more fun at work. And, for those wise enough to take these philosophies home at the end of the workday, they are also the key to having a more fulfilling and fun life. Here are a few of the concepts covered in this webcast. 

– What many leaders call “soft skills” are actually “heart skills,” and “heart failure” is the leading cause of lost business!

– Seeking the higher good without selfish motives brings us peace, joy, and happiness!

– Evolve your empathy through a better understanding of life across the desk, bar, phone call, or email exchange, as opposed to the bad habit of “deanonymizing” the humans we call our guests.

– Patience. Developing patience starts with admitting you have a problem called impatience, and then building your mental strength just as you would build muscles at the gym.

– Intuition. Traditional hospitality training always preaches anticipatory service, but intuition allows us to do more than hand over a cold water bottle on a hot day and to instead “read the guest.”

– Compassion. Many of those who are attracted to the hospitality industry have very high emotional intelligence to begin with, leaving us with empathy fatigue. Yet compassion, which refers to putting empathy into action, can be the most rewarding part of our work.  

For additional details, contact KTN at info@kennedytrainingnetwork.com or by phone (01) 954.533.9130 www.kennedytrainingnetwork.com