3 Ways to Incorporate Hospitality into Your Business

Let’s face it: many businesses nowadays fall short when it comes to hospitality. It may seem like just semantics, but we tend to think of hospitality as something that lives in restaurants and hotels, and every other interaction with customers is just customer service.  But being hospitable, by definition, is making strangers or guests feel welcome, making them feel comfortable and at home.

Hospitality in business, in part, has given way to the era of speed and efficiency wherein experiences have become more and more automated. As much as we would like to believe that technology alone is the answer to everything, technology can’t replace the emotion of human interaction. We might think “There’s no need to worry about x, y, z because technology will take care of it.”  But the latest tech should be used as a tool to streamline your business and add contemporary flair, elevating the customer experience. Technology isn’t the customer experience. Because experience isn’t about just one, singular thing. Experience is holistic.

What, then, are its parts? Experience is how we go about understanding and engaging with the world around us. It’s input and output. It’s cause and effect. It’s discourse. It’s relationships. It’s everything we are and everything we do. Our aim with technology should not be to usurp human experience but to reinforce it.

Just show you care

Building a loyal consumer base starts with showing up for them. For our restaurant and retail customers, investing in point of sale systems, sound systems, and digital signage is an enormous benefit for them when it comes to ensuring comfort and efficiency for employees and consumers alike, but all of these technology pieces would still not replace the hospitality. The technology doesn’t replace the hostess or sales associate greeting you with a smile and asking if there is anything else they can do to make your experience the best.

Ti Adelaide Martin in her Nation's Restaurant News blog  discusses the subject at length and defines it as follows: “Hospitality is everything that any person, business, or organization does to affect how our guests, clients, customers or users feel. Everything.” she says, further adding “We are all in the hospitality business.”

If hospitality is a skill that is lacking in your shop or restaurant, take due diligence to hone it. People are naturally drawn to connection, so emphasize its importance to your employees. Take care to be mindful of how things can be perceived on your guests’ end and make an effort to create a positive experience for them. ( Likewise, keep in mind that people tend to remember negative events more strongly and in more vivid detail.) There’s no need to force or overthink it. If you operate through the lens of empathy, the rest will follow suit. The common denominator of good customer experience is simply whether or not someone demonstrated that they care.

Connection is key

Bob Phibbs (Retailwire) found in a survey conducted from a pool of over 1,000 consumers that nearly 80% do not feel they are provided with a personalized shopping experience. Further, more than half reported feelings of anxiety, stress, and aloneness. In short, people are feeling disconnected. The answer to resolving this disconnect is to, well, connect. It sounds obvious, but if the statistics are anything to go by, it’s vastly overlooked and underestimated. Talk to your customers. Ask about their experience. Investigate how you can be of better service. Be curious.  Assure them that you can be a safety net when technology has reached its limits, and your business will go far.

Use Technology as a Tool, not a Crutch

Our help desk at Newgentek supports hundreds of restaurants, retailers, and corporate offices across the country.  We use several technology tools to streamline and help our customers. For example, we have a customer portal where our customers can log in and create a service ticket, check on the status of an existing ticket, and interact via messaging with our support team.  This is a great tool for our customers to have visibility, but most of our highly rated customer service surveys are from phone conversations they’ve had with our support team, like the one below:

“EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! This guy is always able to help me out and always with the most positive attitude!! Thanks, Newgentek!!!”

The idea is to use your technology tools to enhance the customer experience and streamline your business for efficiency.  Even the best technology can’t replace a positive attitude!

Let Newgentek help you use your technology tools to better the customer experience! Click below to contact us!

Don't Cut Corners with your Office Technology

Setting up a functional and effective office space takes a lot of hard work. Not only do you have to find the right space in the right location, but a lot of planning and execution is necessary to set it up in the right way.  From conference room and huddle space technology to room scheduling and sound masking, there are many ways to make your office space work for you.  Taking the time during the planning stages of your new office to plan for your AV and IT needs is key.

How important is technology in the workplace?

Microsoft created a report this year on technology in the workplace, Digital culture: Your competitive advantage, which canvassed opinions from 20,476 workers in large and small businesses.  Microsoft sought information on the technology in use in these businesses, and workers' attitudes to their jobs and their performance. They concluded that the stronger the digital culture, the lower the percentage of employees who feel unproductive, lacking innovativeness and short on empowerment.  Technology is important in the workplace, and the culture around that technology is even more important.

It can be difficult for business owners to spend enough time planning for the digital part of their workspace. We are a technology company, and when we first moved into our office, our first priority wasn’t exactly getting our office technology perfect.  Our first priority was to serve our customers without causing downtime. We were the shoemaker without shoes! (Our office technology is pretty awesome now by the way)!  But a lot of the time technology is an afterthought. Displays, speakers, and video conferencing software are added to meeting rooms, only to realize the software and hardware solutions don’t integrate seamlessly with the IT infrastructure.

Hire an AV company like you would hire a general contractor

When you plan to move into a new office space, you hire a general contractor to help manage the project and all of its moving parts.  They are with you from conception to completion, and make life easier for you. The same is true for hiring an established AV company that knows how to not only design a properly engineered solution, but also knows how to integrate AV hardware with your IT infrastructure. We work with our corporate customers to improve their office space functionality from the design phase, to installation, to supporting that solution after-the-fact. There is a lot of crossover between networking, telecom, video conferencing, AV hardware, cabling, etc.  All of these pieces need to talk to each other in order to have a seamless AV solution.

Many times we meet with customers because they’re office technology isn’t functional or efficient. How much time have you wasted during a presentation with remote clients or colleagues because of a shotty network connection or poor quality audio?  We usually find out that the AV technology was piecemealed together without taking into consideration how it would talk to the rest of the technology in the office.

Conference Rooms & Huddle Spaces

As more millennials enter the workforce, employers are faced with creating a technology-heavy environment that supports a growing desire to work remotely.  Randstad US, a global staffing company, recently released results from its quarterly Randstad Workmonitor survey that showed:

• Sixty-six percent of workers say they like the option of occasionally working from home or another location.

• A third of employees disagree that their employers provide the necessary technical equipment to enable them to work from home.

• Thirty percent of workers say they regularly have online or virtual team meetings via video conferencing

This just goes to show that video conferencing solutions and investments in unified communications in the office are becoming extremely important.  A good unified communications platform (this is everything from internal chat platforms, telecom, video conferencing, etc.) should allow you to:

1. Attract top talent to work for you

2. Create an environment where communications amongst your team members is easy and functional

3. Facilitate project management

4. Create an easy way to share content with your team and clients

5. Help you close more business

Whether discussing a project with a prospective client or having a virtual meeting between teams in different remote locations, the systems that are supporting these communications need to be functional.

Plan for the office of the future

We help our customers anticipate their future technology needs, whether that is estimating their employee growth (hiring more people, opening more locations) or growing their business to a national or global scale.  Your office technology is important. Let us help you plan, design, and integrate your systems so that your team can be more productive and communicate easily!