BUSINESS OF HILTON HOTEL Business of Hilton Hotel

Business of Hilton Hotel

Introduction

Hilton Hotels Corporation is renowned around the world. As a preeminent lodging, hospitality company, offering guests and customers the finest accommodations, services, amenities and value for business or leisure, Hilton offers the amenities and quality its name has inspired since 1919. Hilton owns such unique and well known locations such as the Waldorf: Astoria in New York, The Hilton Hawaiian Village® on Waikiki Beach, Chicago's Palmer House Hilton and the Hilton San Francisco on Union Square. The company is a prominent franchisor of hotels. The company will have opened approximately 430 hotels and 63,000 rooms in 2000-01. Today the Hilton is viewed one of the service industry's top competitors (Aaker, 2007, 347).

Problems

Hilton's continuing problem is its lack of expansion outside of the United States. While Hilton's continuing philosophy of customer service has increased its name and worldwide acclaim, expanding outside of the United States may be its saving grace for continued growth. According to some surveys the other notable weakness is its lack of trained employees in some positions (Aaker, 2007, 347). While Hilton's philosophy is quality and all employees are trained to accommodate the guests, some of these employees are not fully trained in their everyday functions.

Formulate Strategies

The competencies required to complete customer service interactions successfully are many and varied. There is, however, general consensus in the service literature that the following competencies are important: neat appearance, promptness; timeliness; willingness to help; friendliness; courteousness; empathy; process knowledge; adaptability; self-efficacy and internal locus of control; communication; conscientiousness; resilience; social ability, interpersonal skills. Furthermore, the importance of right personality and right appearance while customer service employees are required to be positive, joyful and even playful. Given the complex and sophisticated nature of customer service it is not surprising variety of terms used to identify customer service competencies is extensive (Anderson, 2008, 76). Many of these competencies and skills are also captured in the organisational psychology literature describing personality traits, social skills and interpersonal competencies (IpC).

Personality

Personality is of importance to customer service as an employee's affective functioning is closely related to job performance. Personality encompasses an individual's natural and developed behaviours, beliefs, thoughts and emotional impulses that are displayed moreover, they are reasonably stable and enduring characteristics that enable employers to predict future employee behaviour, the personality dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability as being strongly associated with successful customer service interaction. However, the dimension of conscientiousness is also significant as it is one of the most important personality dimensions related to predicting job performance (Burns, 2008, 239).

Individuals who have a strong extraversion characteristic are seen as people-oriented and outgoing with friendly, sociable, and common traits. Agreeableness refers to a propensity toward helping others and is positively related to cooperation and sociability, whereas, individuals who are emotionally stable tend to be composed, self-confident and energetic. It is widely believed that people who display high levels of these traits are suited to jobs that involve a greater quality and quantity ...