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Critical Metrics for Big Business: Case Study 1

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Assessing the Impact of Brand-Related Training in the Hospitality Industry
 

Situation

A global hospitality company has invested heavily in brand-related training, rolling it out across its enterprise in an effort to boost guest loyalty. Now senior leadership is losing sleep, wondering if the effort has made any difference. How does this company figure out how effective a move it’s been? Having deployed training to over 1600 locations, the organization was left with two questions:

• Was the training being used and understood at each location?

• If so, was the training impacting customer satisfaction and quality standards?

The project had some pretty sizable roadblocks in place: the trainees were not direct employees of the hospitality brand itself (instead employed by local franchisees and management companies), and the employees were hard to reach due to the scheduling demands of the 24-hour hospitality world.

Given the overwhelming scope of the project, the hospitality brand hired Critical Metrics to help answer these questions.

Solution

After familiarizing themselves with the hospitality brand’s culture and training tools, the team of Critical Metrics researchers visited 75 of the hospitality brand’s locations. Over a five-week period, the team of more than a dozen researchers conducted 121 focus groups with 750+ employees and 90 managers, gathering the quantitative and qualitative data needed to get a handle on the effectiveness and impact of the training program.

The metrics collected by the researchers included:
 

• Observations of customer-service behaviors,compiled by researchers spending time at each location as a guest and completing behavioral checklists
• Self-reported customer-service behaviors, which were measured during focus groups using questionnaires completed by employees
• Usage details on various training tools and resources, attained from managers through interviews and observations, and from employees via questionnaires
• Employee feedback on training tools and resources, compiled via questionnaires and focus groups administered to management and employees
• Data on employee customer-service knowledge, assessed through the administration of actual knowledge tests
• Additional contextual factors related to training, including managerial encouragement, communication, managerial and employee understanding of training available, future training needs, etc.

The results from these interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and tests were then cross-referenced against customer satisfaction data and data from internal quality audits conducted at each location.


 
Results

Based on the researchers’ work, Critical Metrics established the following:

• There was a direct connection between greater training usage and greater customer service related knowledge, along with an increase in customer service related behaviors (see Figure 1) and higher quality standard ratings (see Figure 2).
• In turn, these increased customer service-related behaviors were shown to result in higher guest satisfaction and loyalty ratings (see Figure 3)
• Overall, the use of customer service-related training was associated with a more positive guest experience and higher overall service quality

Critical Metrics for Big Business: Case Study 2

A large organization conducted a training evaluation survey and needed to quickly make sense of the key themes in the open-ended responses to several questions. By using a combination of advanced coding software and trained live-coders, Critical Metrics was able to code thousands of comments in a relatively short amount of time.

The survey had been administered both before and after the administration of training, which allowed for a comparison of comment themes over time. Analysis of the comments brought to light improvements in training that had been made, underscored problem areas that still needed to be addressed, and revealed new themes.

Critical Metrics reported findings for the overall organization, and provided a breakdown by organizational division and as well as employee position. This gave the organization insight into the themes for the overall organization as well as by key positions and divisions, thus facilitating potential interventions to future training efforts at global and local level.

Armed with the new information and insight, the company was better prepared to organize an improved training program for employees for the coming year.