Jason S. Cho
Deputy General Manager
Lotte Hotel Moscow
We can spend hours talking about service. What is service for each for us? Thinking about it, each of us has different perceptions. For some people it is something really specially focused on individual needs, sometimes very unusual, sometimes almost impossible to provide. For others it is just a warm and careful atmosphere, sincere smile and anticipation of everyone's needs.
Our aim is to achieve the top quality of service. To get this, we focus on three key points: training, our team of trainers and achieving goals. We are very lucky to have a great product — a hotel with excellent facilities, world-renowned restaurants and a spa. However, we understand that a great product is not enough to be the best on the market. Our aim is to be the hotel of choice. We should be different, and service is what makes us different from the others.
From very ancient times, one of the most important parts of the Asian and especially Korean culture was greeting. Smiling and warm greeting became the basis and philosophy of our hotels. There are a few simple secrets of our hotel success in terms of quality of service, which proves our first position on TripAdvisor for already more than three months. We are the only hotel that is getting internal complaints about the number of training courses from the department heads. And it is very good.
Before the grand opening, we had 40 people coming from Korea just to train the staff, nine hours a day for smiling sessions and nothing else, and it was continuing for six months, six days a week. Nowadays we are still trying to give people in terms of training as much as we can. I would even say that the general manager is not the busiest person in our hotel. The busiest one, without a doubt, is our training manager. Our main engine or, I would even say, a secret weapon is not the spacious rooms, excellent banquet facilities or famous world-renowned brand; it is our smiling people, our employees. If guests arrive early morning or late at night, they will be greeted and served with warm and natural smile. Even our security staff is smiling. For that, we have prepared special training programs for each level, such as three-day orientation for newcomers, special training for managers, for all supervisors, for waiters, porters, housekeeping and our department heads.
Moreover we have our LMT team (Lotte Hotel Moscow Trainers), it is a tool of special management. They are those employees who help maintain and develop our level of service. In the team, we have a representative from each operational department. Aside from their job, they are performing special duties such as department quality check, internal training. This August, they visited Korea for two weeks to participate in a training program. In Lotte, it is an honorary job. These people are even more important than department heads or managers. It is our hidden power and strength.
One more word for philosophy, the major point of it is that we motivate people to achieve goals. The concept is very simple, every our employee knows he or she can become a general manager one day. We always keep opportunities open for everyone. We always share news and plans about our future projects in Moscow and in Russia, each of our employees knows that soon there will be more Lotte Hotels in Russia and they will always have a chance to try to become general manager there. That is why our people regardless of how they feel continue to work hard and, most importantly, still smile.
We have a vision to be a missionary in a service providing industry. And actually many of our former employees still remember and promote our "smiling philosophy."
