Front Stage

The service industry booming lately and more and more entrepreneurs are taking up the business of providing service to the clients. Hotel is one of the most fertile businesses in the service industry and it is the largest growing business as well. In Australia the hospitality industry is the most booming. In a report it is suggested that “the country’s hotel scene would likely see a construction boom lasting for at least another two years as tourism spending, predicted to reach $167 billion by 2025, plays an ever-larger role in Australia’s economy.”

Hotel Hilton is one of the largest groups of hotel resort and holiday home chain all over the world. In the present days it is stated that the group of hotels is having presently more than 580 hotels resorts and restaurants under the brand of Hilton hotel in more than 85 countries (Hilton.com 2018).

The Hilton hotel has changed and transformed the way globally this business is operating. It has expanded its base to not only the tourists and the business executives but also the leisure seekers and the people looking for entertainment and relaxation in their daily life.

The company has an efficient system of front office and back office activities and these are internationally maintained. The front office system of a large hotel constitutes of the employees and interfaces that directly interact with the employees. The back office is the system and the employees who do not directly interact with the employees but take care of the management of the whole organization.

The front stage of a particular organization constitutes of all the constituents that interacts with the customers directly. The Front stage of an organization is where the service is directly in touch with the customers (Amin et al. 2013). These are the touch points where the business is directly in contact with the customers. In a particular service industry like the Hotel Hilton the service. The various encounters or touch points are the areas where the various non-management and non-technical like the process of communicating with the customers and giving more empowerment to the employees (Defibaugh 2018).

The various constituents of the front office are the front office managers, the receptionists, the guest service personnel, the bell staff and the guest staff (Leite and Vieira 2015). These employees are engaged in the service of the guests who are aiming to stay in the hotel and looking for accommodation. These customers are important for the hotels as the primary business of the hotel depends on these customers. Hotel Hilton aims at ensuring that these customers return to their hotel when they make return visits. Therefore it is very important for the hotel to maintain the perfect quality of service in the front stage. These are the people who interact with the customers in the first place therefore they are the face of the organization.

Back Stage

When a person first enters the doors of any of the hotels from Hilton group in Australia, the guest service personnel guides the guest to the reception while the Bell attendants carry the luggage of the customers. The receptionists are directly responsible for receiving the guests and then guiding them through the rest of the process. There are presently many other processes that are in place which makes the process of check in for the customers and guests who are arriving much easier and convenient. However there is also the system of manual employee supported check in in place for the customers who are unable to accommodate with the digital self check in process in the hotels.

There are various process of digitization in the check in process recently adopted in the front stage of the Hilton hotels. One of the main changes that is in process is the newly developed self check in process. The customers who have their rooms pre booked via the internet can now use the check in machines in the reception area for checking in and they do not have to wait in the queue. The front office receptionists are directly under the front office manager. The front office manager is connected to the back office by various means, one of which is the office of the floor manager or the general manager.

Another front stage area of the hotel is the various restaurants operating within the hotels. The waiters and the people providing service to the clients who have come for eating at the restaurants are part of the front stage of the Hotel.

Hilton Hotel takes special care that the employees in the front stage of the hotel are properly conversant about the various etiquettes to be used by the employees to deal with the customers. The employees are taken from the hotel management courses where they are already trained in the art of dealing with the consumers. There are further training programs in the work place which improve the skills of the employees.

The communication between the front stage and back stage of any service industry must be very strong (Mueller 2018). So that the service may go unhampered. For example often it happens that when a guest arrives in a hotel even after online registration, there is no room booking for that guest. This is a scenario which arises when the coordination between the front stage and the back stage is not strong and even after the online booking which should have been approved by the back stage operations and then forwarded to the front stage employees, the same did not happen. Often in such cases the guest is given accommodation in a substitute hotel of the same group or a free stay for a day in the future.

Service Blueprint

The whole planning of a particular business happens in the backstage of an organization. The strategy making of the whole organization takes place in the back stage of the organization (Mair and Hehenberger 2014). The various operations like the allotment of various resources of the business like people, process and props happens at the back stage level of an organization (Gilmore 2014). These allocations happen from the operations department of the organizations who take care of the process from the back end. As it is said that the front stage is the face of the organization the back stage is the brain of the organization. The back stage of the organization is the place where the needs of the organization are raised and these are projected in the front stage of the organization (Lu et al. 2017). It is said that the motivations are born and these are then converted into the promises of the front office.

In the restaurants the back office, pantries, kitchens, freezers and all other areas which are hidden from the view of the customers form the back stage and people and employees working in these regions are known as the back stage employees. Two areas of the back stage of a service firm includes the one area from where the demands of the customers are fulfilled and another from where the ability of the company to fulfill the desires of the clients are projected in various medium of public communication (Li, Ye and Law 2013). This is also known as the marketing department of the particular company.

Hilton Hotels have their well-developed back stage team with the general manager of the hotel at the top of the team. He is responsible for all the administrative decisions taken by the company at various levels.

The service blue print can be drawn as a diagram which shows the relationship among the various components of the organization. According to Akkermans and Voss (2013) “In service supply chains, disturbances amplify from one stage to another. When workloads in the front office become stressed, quality in back office processes suffers even more. Front office staff will make more errors under stress. Those extra errors lead to more back office rework, which further increases workloads. This then gets amplified in other stages, as quality issues and workloads cascade down the service supply chain. Workloads become especially stressed during the volume ramp-up phase for new services. We therefore look at some examples of unsuccessful new service introductions.” Therefore it can be understood that there is an integral relationship between the front office and the back office of the organization. The two has to remain in close contact with one another so that there is a smooth flow of service and the reputation of the organization remains.

Significance of Service Encounter

Hotel Hilton is one of the most famous international chain of hotels and it is well managed by an expert team both in back office and the front office. The management is well experienced and the top management constitutes of leaders and pioneers from the industry. The employees constitute of the most talented fresher’s and also experienced personnel who have detailed knowledge about the hospitality industry. The various managers such as the food and beverage manager, the infrastructure manager, the floor manager, the communication manager are all under the general managers and they are under the guidance of the general manager. Each of the managers have their own department and team of people working under them. The various team purposefully work together to achieve one single goal of increasing the revenues and goodwill of the hotel.

The Hilton group has various hotels, resorts and vacation homes that are working under the same umbrella. Therefore the company has various types of management in these various organizations as the genre of the organizations are different. The resorts have different kind of organizational structure therefore the administration of the back office and the front office is also different. The administration is designed according to the structure of the organization and the purpose it wishes to fulfill.

                                                                                Flowchart 1: Front Stage of Hilton

                                                                                   Source: Created by Author

                                                          Flowchart 2: Backstage of Hilton Hotel

Conclusion

The backstage and the front stage of an organization must work in tandem to give rise to a successful service experience to the visitors or the consumers. The Hilton hotel group is one of the largest hotels chains in the whole world. Therefore it can be safely said that the back stage and the front stage of the organization are very expertly designed and well organized. The success of the back stage and the front stage of Hotel Hilton depends on each other and whether or not a guest having a pleasant experience of staying in the hotel comes from a perfect synchronization of both the departments.

Reference:

Akkermans, H. and Voss, C., 2013. The service bullwhip effect. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 33(6), pp.765-788.

Amin, M., Yahya, Z., Ismayatim, W.F.A., Nasharuddin, S.Z. and Kassim, E., 2013. Service quality dimension and customer satisfaction: An empirical study in the Malaysian hotel industry. Services Marketing Quarterly, 34(2), pp.115-125.

Defibaugh, S., 2018. Frontstage/Backstage: Attending to Organizational Responsibilities. In Nurse Practitioners and the Performance of Professional Competency (pp. 27-52). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Gilmore, D.M., 2014. Goffman’s front stage and backstage behaviors in online education. Journal of Learning Analytics, 1(3), pp.187-190.

Hilton.com., 2018. Hilton Hotels and Resorts. [online] Available at: https://www3.hilton.com/en_US/hi/search/findhotels/results.htm?view=LIST [Accessed 15 Sep. 2018].

Leite, H.D.R. and Vieira, G.E., 2015. Lean philosophy and its applications in the service industry: a review of the current knowledge. Production, 25(3), pp.529-541.

Li, H., Ye, Q. and Law, R., 2013. Determinants of customer satisfaction in the hotel industry: An application of online review analysis. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 18(7), pp.784-802.

Lu, R., Chatman, J.A., Goldberg, A. and Srivastava, S.B., 2017. Lifting the Curtain: Backstage Cognition, Frontstage Behavior, and the Interpersonal Transmission of Culture (No. repec: ecl: stabus: 3603).

Mair, J. and Hehenberger, L., 2014. Front-stage and backstage convening: The transition from opposition to mutualistic coexistence in organizational philanthropy. Academy of Management Journal, 57(4), pp.1174-1200.

Mueller, F., 2018. Taking Goffman seriously: Developing strategy-as-practice. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 53, pp.16-30.