Radhika Chadha

Service providers tend to forget about the core experience that they promise and seem more concerned about superficialities.

A VARIETY of hotel experiences this month has made me ponder on the elements of service promise. Why did I feel frustrated and annoyed at some of the country's best-known hotels, but perfectly happy at a small guesthouse? Why do premium hotels with elaborate customer satisfaction programmes fail to deliver what a roadside Udipi can? How do you build `customer experience equity'?

It began with a trip to Kodaikanal, where we were seduced by a hotel's Web site displaying a stunning view of Coaker's Walk. We arrived at damp, leaking room facing a brick wall, with a road in the middle and a noisy genset on one side. Our protests were met with the comforting words, "Anyway you'll be out the whole day, and so you wont hear the noise." Of course, we stomped off somewhere else, but the best was yet to come — the hotel actually had the cheek to bill us for the room on the pretext of a `no-show'.

My run in with lousy hotels continued at a beach resort attached to an amusement park at Mahabalipuram. It began with trying to convince the front desk that since we had made reservations (and paid a whopping advance) five months earlier, we were entitled to a room. Anyway, with that over, we looked forward to the weekend of peace, quiet and romantic atmosphere promised in the hotel brochure. Only to get jolted out of our wits by an incredible racket. Apparently the hotel had also booked nine corporate parties for the weekend. Most of these were reasonably quiet and private events. But one succeeded in ruining the place for the rest of us. A huge shamiana on the beach, blaring disco music, and a bunch of drunken revellers, put paid to our hopes of a romantic stargazing beach experience. The only way we could escape the noise was to get away from the hotel, but after doing that for both lunch and dinner, we rebelled and complained.

The manager's response was incredible. To summarise, he informed us that we should know that all resorts are noisy on weekends, and that the noise was within the decibel limits set by the pollution control board. Since none of the other customers had complained, we should "understand" that the corporate party was important for the resort. Our argument that we were paying customers entitled to "peace and quiet" as promised, was rejected as irrelevant. A suggestion that if they wanted the reveller crowd, they should promise "fun and games" (like some of the other resorts) instead of "peace and quiet" was incomprehensible to him. He looked blankly at us when asked him why we should pay for the privilege of his resort having an "important" corporate party. Incidentally, his strategy wasn't so smart - there were quite a few of the other eight corporate customers who were also peeved, having planned workshops that were impossible to conduct in the racket. The only difference was that instead of saying so, they've probably voted with their feet.

My year ended with a stay at a five star hotel of a premium chain in a heritage building in central Kolkata. Surely here, I would have a great time. Hmm. I was checked into a room where the smell of fresh paint kicked off a headache. I complained and was quickly ushered into another room — the front desk apologised that maintenance had not informed them about the painting, as if such internal issues were of any interest to me. I needed to rush for a meeting. Alas, the hot water didn't work. I needed to sew a button, and searched unsuccessfully for the normally ubiquitous sewing kit. The guest manual helpfully told me, "sewing kit were emergency supplies and would be available with housekeeping." Housekeeping, informed me (another apologetic voice) that she had run out of these "emergency supplies," so could she send me a safety pin? My mood was not improved when I found out the next morning that they had charged me Rs 300 per minute for phone calls which I had to use because their rooms were constructed in a way that resulted in a lousy signal on my cell phone.

And now for the other side — a small guesthouse in another country (Bangladesh, not Singapore). The facilities were minimal compared to the hotels I've mentioned, the rooms nowhere near so lavish. Yet, the check-in was smooth, the front desk handled messages efficiently, the people were warm and attentive, and yes, the hot water worked without reminders.

So, coming back to the question: How do you define and ensure delivery of the experiential promise for a service? Is my Kodai hotel justified in saying that all they had to do was provide a room? Or am I entitled to also expect an ambience of peace when I go to a hill station? Is the beach hotel justified in discriminating between different sets of consumers — we were unhappy at the noise level, but the BPO-bash partygoers must've had their money's worth of fun. Should a top-notch five-star be skimping on sewing kits while profiteering (and obscenely at that) on telephone calls, where, mind you, it has done nothing to add value to the transaction?

The common factor here was how fairly I felt I had been treated: I just did not feel the hotels had lived up to their promise adequately. Which was why I was happier with the small guesthouse than with some of the fanciest places in the country.

The success of a service depends on how clearly it defines its experiential promise and how consistently it meets this for its chosen clientele. If an Udipi promises and consistently delivers on fluffy idlis served within five minutes of ordering, it will be rated high on service quality, never mind the ambience or the waiter's apparel. If a holiday resort promises a relaxed ambience for family getaways, then any disturbance of this (especially caused by the hotel itself) would be justifiably viewed with irritation, never mind that it had Internet access. And if five-star hotels fail to deliver the levels of service business travellers can reasonably expect at those prices, they shouldn't be surprised when low-end disruptions in the form of budget hotels take their business away.

Unfortunately, most service providers seem to confuse their brand image with their advertising, their décor, or the designer uniform of their front desk staff. Somewhere in all this, they forget about the core experience that they promise, and get sidetracked by superficialities. And when this hollow "brand equity" is not sufficiently supported by a genuine "customer experience equity", the resultant collision creates unhappy, frustrated customers.

This then, is the challenge faced by the service industry today. How does a service provider ensure that the zillions of permutations and combinations of service experience all fall within the band of acceptable outcomes? It's relatively easy for a product, which has a limited, standard set of parameters against which performance is judged — in a service, where the individual experience morphs into infinite transmutations depending on idiosyncratic customer interactions, the question becomes more tricky.

Is this possible at all? Something to ponder about, till next time.

(The author is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name for strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

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