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Vanapa Ongvises

The success of a world-class hotel owes its achievement largely to excellent services and to this end, staff training plays a key and decisive role.

Le Meridien Cyberport has attached great importance to the staff training programme with a view to providing the best possible service.

The hotel's human resources manager, Michael Tam, said travellers nowadays were more sophisticated and the hotel would cater for individual needs.

This was driving the hotel to offer varied and personalised services to guests.

To this end, Le Meridien Cyberport has designed a set of innovative training programmes to bring out the best in staff.

The hotel launched its staff training programme more than two months before the opening.

The programme was designed to cultivate the staff's ability to  serve guests in accordance with their individual needs and tastes, Mr Tam said.

'As a hip hotel in town, guests are expecting from us a new kind of service that goes beyond fundamental attributes such as politeness and pleasant attitude,' he said.

'The factor of convenience stands out as a main ingredient setting a new standard for quality service today.

'An obvious change in strategy is that we have to eliminate the traditional 'transferring' practice. We don't want our guests to be passed around from one department to the other before they get what they want.

'Hotel guests can put forward their requests to any of our hotel staff and that person will be able to handle the request.'

Le Meridien Cyberport's programme focuses on training staff to learn from experience, to manage situations independently and to cater for different guests' individual needs to optimise their spending and ensure re-visits.

'We want our staff to experience through learning. Thus, we arrange for them to spend some time with stylish hairdressers, take private jets and hang around trendy places to get different experiences,' Mr Tam said.

'We make them aware that they themselves are also customers after work, making them more sensitive to the guests' needs from a customer's point of view.'

Recently, the hotel arranged a juggling exercise for staff to relax and to bring to their attention the importance of keeping balance and control.

'Learning how to manage the situation is an important skill too,' Mr Tam said. 'We encourage our staff to make their own decisions instead of seeking advice from supervisors. It is better to make a wrong decision than no decision.'

The hotel management understands that getting the right people is a pre-requisite to guaranteeing the quality of services.

'It is hard to change a person's attitude,' Mr Tam said. 'That's why we are scrupulous in choosing the right candidates from the very beginning of the recruitment process.

'For example, staff taking care of guest contact have to be open to new ideas,' he explained. 'We pay special attention to the personality and attitude of the candidates.

'We encourage our staff to combine their personality and hard skills when it comes to providing services.'



Quality service comes down to staff juggling personality and skills