The Hospitality Assured journey to excellence involves applicants completing a ten step programme of assessment and improvement. These are ten benchmarks that Hospitality Assured accredited companies feel are most important to developing their business and improving customer performance.

By participating, you will gain the opportunity to measure your company's performance against each of these ten key areas. There's no time pressure on completing each of the ten Hospitality Assured steps. Progress through the tool at your own pace:

• First, you need to understand the standard and see how it can work for your organisation. If the information on these pages leaves you with unanswered questions, then we can arrange for someone to contact you to explain how it works and what is involved. 
  
• Complete the self assessment and score either on your own or with the help of a Hospitality Assured coach. If your score exceeds 60% you can apply for assessment straight away. We would strongly advise either speaking with the Institute of Hospitality before you do this or use the ‘Ask a coach’ facility on the site.
  
• If you score below 60% you will need to undertake development activities and use the HA suitcase and other resources to help raise your scores. Once you are successfully accredited keep using the standard, the suitcase and other resources to gain even greater business benefits.
  

The 10 Steps

What is Hospitality Assured?
“It’s a simple and organised framework to help you take your business to where you want to be in the future”

Here we outline the 10 steps and the associated business benefits:

Customer research
How to define who your customers are, what they need and what the competition are doing. Put quite simply you’ll get it right for the customer while maintaining a competitive advantage in your market.

Customer promise
A statement which makes clear what customers will experience from your organisation. When both staff and customers understand your service standards; staff get it right and customers appreciate it.

Business planning
The route map created to ensure a clear plan to take the business where you want it to go in the future. Having focus on where you want to go makes it easier to take control and have everyone in the organisation working to achieve your objectives.

Operational planning
How to make sure on a daily basis that everything that requires to be done to meet the promise is properly organised. Breaking down the aspirations and targets means that staff will find it easier to deliver.

Standards of performance
How to ensure that the detail of the things you do for customers is consistent at all times. When staff are clear about how things are done, customers can rely on them to get it right.

Resources
How to identify and plan to have the right resources in place. Getting the resources right allows you to get the delivery right.

Training and development
Making sure that  you and your team have the confidence and skills required to meet the service standards required to fulfil the customer promise. Equip people to deliver the outcomes that customers expect and customer satisfaction follows. A confident team is a happy and effective team.

Service delivery
How to make sure that when delivering the service promise to customers it is being done in a consistent and effective way. Consistency - it’s the holy grail of customer service.

Service recovery
How to deal with customer service problems. Ensuring that staff understand how to handle complaints will enable  negative experiences to be transformed into positive experiences for the customer.

Customer satisfaction improvement
How to prevent complacency in business and ensure continuous improvement. Staff are the ones who deliver the service while your customers experience it; using feedback from both will provide you with the ideas to develop your service.