Historic Innovations in Hospitality Industry: Addressing Guest Frustration

Assessment One

Context:
As a hospitality leader your role will be to identify situations which are causing frustrations with your staff and/or your guests or patrons. You will also address these issues using your own knowledge of design thinking, experience, and intrapreneurial skills.

It is broken into two key parts. The first part addresses a broad research and analysis of historic innovation to address a guest problem. The second part is to prepare you for the second and third assessment tasks in this subject.

This assessment requires you to use your research skills, analytical and critical thinking skills to identify an historic case study where a guest frustration or service improvement was identified and a disruptive (technology) innovation was developed as the solution to that issue. You are then required to conduct your own research into a problem affecting quests or staff following the Design Thinking approach explored in class.

Instructions:
Assessment One:
Individual Report – Part A
1. Research, analyse and describe one historic guest problem (or customer-service experience) that was common in the hospitality industry.

2. Examine the traditional approaches of how that problem was resolved.

3. Describe the disruptive technology which was introduced and then became a new industry standard for addressing that problem.

4. You are also to briefly outline the advantages and disadvantages of that disruptive technology to both the guest and the hospitality industry.

For example, guests were frustrated by the delays during check-in and check-out. Front desk staff numbers used to be increased to try and address these peak demand times until digital kiosks were introduced.

You must use at least three (3) academic sources to support your work. Correctly formatted (APA) in-text citations and a reference list are expected.

The word count allowance for this section of your report should be approximately 1200 words. 

Individual Report – Part B
This part of the assessment is based on the in-class learning of the Design Thinking approach to Customer Profiling BEFORE the second stage of Value Proposition (which will be addressed in Assessment Task 2).

For the purpose of this part, you are to consider the period prior to the current pandemic and select a period, for example Spring 2019 or December 2019.

• Select a particular type of guest attracted to your hotel or restaurant and create a brief profile. Describe them in terms of demographic, psychographic and behavioural attributes. 

• Research, analyse and create a table describing the ‘Jobs’ being attempted by your guest. Add the ‘Gains’, and ‘Pains’ associated with these jobs. Assume that these Jobs have occurred during your selected time period and which will still be an issue when tourism, hotel stays and restaurant visitation are re-introduced.

Individual Report – Part A

• Describe two (2) Jobs and two related Gains and two Pains for each of these Job.

• Reference everything that is not your own work.

The Research Report should include, in this order;
Blue Mountains Individual Cover Sheet
Table of Contents
Introduction-Definitions/Background of the topic, purpose of the report, steps taken to address this, and line of research.
Findings and Discussion – Part A and Part B
Conclusion
Reference list
Appendices

Submission Instructions:
Pronoun: Please use third person throughout the report Style: Research Report and ensure all writing is grammatically correct

Submission Guidelines:
1. The assessment is due the end of week 4 (check the Turnitin date)
2. Typed and formatted following the Assessment Structure Style Guide in a Word document and uploaded to Turn-it-in at the time of the due date.
3. To be submitted in electronic form as a word-processed file to http://www.turnitin.com
4. Students must refer, to a minimum of 3 academic texts in their work and provide details of these in their reference list
5. All referencing must be in accordance with APA Referencing and Academic Writing Guide
7. Refer to marking rubric on of this document.

Use the following trigger questions to help you think of different potential customer/guest jobs:
1. What is the one thing that your guest really wants to accomplish during their stay/visit?
2. What are the stepping stones that could help your guest achieve this key job?
3. What are the different contexts that your customers might be in?
4. How do their activities and goals change depending on these different contexts?
5. What does your guest need to accomplish that involves interaction with others?
6. What tasks is your guest trying to perform in their work or personal life?
7. What functional problems is your guest trying to solve?
8. Are there problems that you think guests have that they may not even be aware of?
9. What emotional needs is your guest trying to satisfy?
10. What jobs, if completed, would give the guest a sense of self-satisfaction?
11. How does your guest want to be perceived by others?
12. What can your guest do to help themselves be perceived this way?
13. How does your guest want to feel?
14. What does your guest need to do to feel this way?
15. Track your guest’s interaction with a product or service throughout its lifespan.
16. What supporting jobs surface throughout this life cycle?
17. Does the guest switch roles throughout this process?

Customer/Guest Gains
Trigger Questions
Gains describe the outcomes and benefits your guests want. Some gains are required, expected, or desired by guests, and some would surprise them. Gains include functional utility, social gains, positive emotions, and cost savings.

Individual Report – Part B

Use the following trigger questions to help you think of different potential customer gains:
1. Which savings would make your guest happy?
2. Which savings in terms of time, money, and effort would they value?
3. What quality levels do they expect, and what would they wish for more or less of? How do
current value propositions delight your guest?
4. Which specific features do they enjoy?
5. What performance and quality do they expect?
6. What would make your guest’s jobs or lives easier?
7. Could there be a flatter learning curve, more services, or lower costs of ownership?
8. What positive social consequences does your guest desire?
9. What makes them look good? What increases their power or their status?
10. What are guests looking for most?
11. Are they searching for good design, guarantees, specific or more features?
12. What do guests dream about?
13. What do they aspire to achieve, or what would be a big relief to them?
14. How does your guest measure success and failure?
15. How do they gauge performance or cost?
16. Do they desire lower cost, less investment, lower risk, or better quality?

Customer Pains
Trigger Questions
‘Pains’ describe anything that annoys your guest before, during, and after trying to get a job done or simply prevents them from getting a job done. Pains also describe risks, that is, potential bad outcomes, related to getting a job done badly or not at all.

Use the following trigger questions to help you think of different potential customer pains:
1. How does your guest define too costly?
2. Takes a lot of time, costs too much money, or requires substantial efforts?
3. What makes your guest feel bad?
4. What are their frustrations, annoyances, or things that give them a headache?
5. How are current services or facilities under performing for your guest?
6. Which features are they missing? Are there performance issues that annoy them or malfunctions they complain about? What are the main difficulties and challenges your guest encounters?
7. Do they understand how things work, have difficulties getting certain things done, or resist particular jobs for specific reasons?
8. What negative social consequences does your guest encounter or fear?
9. Are they afraid of a loss of face, power, trust, or status?
10. What risks do your guests fear?
11. Are they afraid of financial, social, or technical risks, or are they asking themselves what could go wrong? What’s keeping your guest awake at night?
12. What are their big issues, concerns, and worries?
13. What common mistakes does your guest make?
14. Are they using a solution the wrong way?
15. What barriers are keeping your guest from adopting a potential solution?
16. Are there upfront investment costs, a steep learning curve, or other obstacles preventing adoption?