Task B and C

The art of corporate entertainment would be my favourite workshop. This workshop taught and reminded us the basic manners that was supposed to be inculcated into us since young but over the time, we have forgotten them.

The lectures covered various types of etiquette, which consists of general, meeting, phone, toilet, umbrella and gifts etiquette. I have chosen this as my favourite workshop as I believe that impressions formed in the mind of guests would determine whether you would get your business deals. A person may be well dressed and have a perfect business proposal but with no manners and/or have no knowledge of basic etiquette while treating the guests, this would give the impression that this person is not sincere at all. The dressing is just a facade. Secondly, the client may be impressed with the excellent business proposal but unable to feel assured that this person will have the capability to carry out the task as stated or expected. this all boils down to the lack of knowledge on basic etiquette of treating his clients. This results in the loss of the initial advantage to other competitors. The client do not have the confidence that you can do well due to the bad etiquette shown. From the above example, I understand the importance business etiquette and will pay more emphasis on it.

Knowing and practicing good business etiquette's will help to portrait me as someone that has been brought up well and have a very good family or education background, which in return help me to gain my business client's trust.

In this workshop, we learnt the various types of etiquette. Many people have the misconception that a person only have to start to apply his/her etiquette when they meet another person face to face. However, this is not true, we should start practicing good business etiquette once we start communicating with the opposite party. This could even start when we converse through the phone, where we should already practice application of the learned etiquette. We have to greet and introduce ourselves to the opposite party before we move on to the main topic. This is an act of courtesy when starting a conversation with another on the phone.

I will be inculcating those newly learnt practices in this workshop into my daily life. I am sure that the application of these practices will be useful and essential for a successful career and a more sophisticated me.

Task A: Delighting Your Customers

In order to delight your customers, we have to organise our team. The first step would be creating and clearly communicate a clear vision and mission for our team as a goal to achieve. We have to let the team know what the company actually wants and how we want the guests to feel about this company before our staff knows where to head.

Next, we have to understand our team's problems and barriers. On our way to hit our goals, there are bound to be problems, we have to identify the problems and let the team towards the right direction. Basically, we would have standard procedures to follow to reduce errors made.

Follow by that would be we have to understand the importance of people management because conflicts are inevitable when people work together as they have different opinions. We also have to know their traits and behaviour to allocate them the work that suits them to be more effective and efficient while serving the guests. For example, it would be difficult for a server who is could not communicate clearly or very introvert talk to the guests thus it would be an impossible task to even delight our guests.

Next, we must understand your customers. We have to know what are the needs and wants of the customers before we can cater our services to delight them. We also have to do market research on the stereotype mentality that our customers have of us. We will also have to know whether if it is a positive image or not, in order to determine whether there would be a need for us to do promotions or win some awards to change the impression into a desired one.

The final step would be carrying out the service to our customers and it would be the time we can set a memorable experience for them. There are a few areas that we must take care of to set a good memory for our guests, some of it would be the ambience, grooming and service of the stuff, the quality of the product, the security of the location and the efficiency and quality of the service provided.

Thus, these areas would be the five essential components to set a good experience to the guests.

Task A: The Art of Corporate Entertainment

In the corporate world, entertaining guests and having business meals with them are common and critical for any company. In this chapter we will be learning dinning etiquette in business scenes. The proper and appropriate way to address, communicate with guests as well as the behaviour we should have around them. In general, it is the way of addressing the guests, seating the guests, engaging them in conversations and also the handling of food and utensils while dinning with them.

I believe that these small details add up and matter alot. Simple actions like eating in small mouthfuls instead of gobbling down the food like a barbarian would leave very different impressions ion our clients. These are always the minor things that we may forget when we get too comfortable. We might have overlooked it in important events because everything else seems more important than the way we eat. However, people always make judgement through these small actions because they would not be able to trust you to handle a big project if you do not have the basic manners in social business settings.

Through this chapter, I have noticed that actually there are quite a few basic manners that most of us have failed to practice in our daily life. I believe that we have to start to practice these etiquettes from now. It should be inculcated in us since young. It is also polite for us to know and practice these proper etiquettes in any meeting with anyone, regardless of whether they are your friends, relatives, acquaintances, clients or guests.

Not to forget, these are just basic manners. Things like talking softly but still audibly in restaurants, not to speak with our mouth full, cover our mouth when sneezing or notserving the guests first. We should not be treating our guests or clients with these etiquettes; moreover our friends or families because they are our loved ones. It is only right to treat them with proper etiquettes because if we can not even treat our loved ones properly, how can we treat our important guests well.

Our team had also visited a restaurant as part of the workshop requirements and we applied what we have learnt in this chapter on our visit. From there, we can see that some of things we failed to do would be to always serve our guests first. Generally, we managed to apply most of the etiquettes we learnt in this chapter. In this activity, we also have realised that we have to constantly remind ourselves of the small details that we have learnt. This shows that we are still not familiar with the etiquettes, thus, we have to apply it in all our everyday lives and start making it a habit.

Task A: Building a Service Culture

In the first part of this workshop, it focused on the management regarding on how they can form a good service culture. They started on leadership, finding the man with the essential leadership qualities to set the team going. Firstly, they would have to set service vision to tell their staff about what are the core contributions to customers and decide what we want to portrait the company. After setting the vision, we can change the visions into missions.

We also have learnt about the differences of managers and leaders. This would ensure that we can identify who to approach or follow at which point of time.

Then we learnt about our customers, about who they are, what they want, identify internal customers and determining the team’s position in the service chain. I believe that this would be the basics to satisfying our customers. It is essential to know about our customers, service standards that we want to set and provide for our customers before we can carry it out in actions.

Every company is unique and has its own culture. It is extremely important to develop a right culture which makes the staff feel belonged and unique. The service culture can be shaped by the management style and the characteristics of the staff. This would greatly affect the style of service provided to the guests. In the workshop, we were given an example on the “Lands End, Inc”, it shows us on the service culture of the company and shared with us how they treat their stuff like customers and having a 100% money get back policy to make their customers feel safe buying their products online. They treasure every customer and want to provide them the best.

Thus, I learnt that they best way to keep our customers is to provide them with what they want and to achieve that we have to motivate our staff first. One of the best way is to motivate our staff as only satisfied staff would be able to make customers satisfied.

Task A: Corporate Politics in Perspectives

In the corporate world, office politics are inevitable. Knowing how to handle these politics well would enable us to go a long way, especially in the hospitality industry. This is because we interact with a lot of people each day, in terms of colleagues, customers or clients. Thus, personal relation is an essential skill to have. The first thing we must learn would be how to not offend our superiors followed by the way to please them. The next group of people who we must know how to handle would be our colleagues as they are people that we face everyday.

Summerising this chapter, we must take note of important aspects such as behavior and attitude so as to not offend our superiors and also the things that will please them.

In addition, we also must learn how to defend ourselves against unfair politics because tolerating is not always the best solution, we should never allow ourselves to be taken advantage of or succumb to pressure. In many situations, we should retaliate in a way that will not put ourselves in a disadvantage stage.

Task A: International Business Etiquette

In this workshop, they introduced about New Delhi which is the second largest gateway cities in India. It is also a very populous city which has 12 million people living in that city. Generally, it gave us general information on transportation, accommodation, shopping, business etiquette and corporate dining etiquette, personal security, impression and advices.

This is a very useful workshop because it provides us precise yet sufficient information for any first time arrivals in New Delhi. We would know where to get a safe airport transfer, how to get a taxi, how to hire a taxi without being taken advantage of because we are foreigners. Most importantly, we were taught of the behaviours and likings or dislikes of the businessmen there as to avoid culture clashes and offending of our very important clients.

This would also enable us to learn about some of the behaviours that we should have so that we will please them and set a good impression for them.

After this workshop, I have also learnt that New Delhi is still a place with very rich culture even if it is a developed city. It did not move away from it rich culture but blends the rich culture into the business scenes. It is especially obvious when it comes to dining and entertainment. In New Delhi, security would be a point that we cannot neglect. This is because India is a country with large population and has a large income gap, thus, we may be an easy target if we are not careful enough.


Ashoka Pillar, New Delhi

Task A: Customer Perception

Customer perception is one of the most important things all service providers must know. Customers are the main key to hospitality business. We must know what they are thinking before we can serve them better and learn the ways to please them.

In this chapter we learn about how customer’s perception is formed, elements which are within company’s control and elements that are beyond company’s control. These are the elements that would affect a customer’s perception. In addition, this chapter also share with us about service recovery to teach us more about how to can handle customers in unforeseen circumstances.

We learnt about how a perception is formed and how to change the perception of customers to our advantage. In cases where we have offended the customer, we can always take many measures to alter the elements that are within company’s control. This is to help change the customer’s perception so as to make sure they are satisfied before they leave. if they are unsatisfied with complaints, they may spread the bad word of mouth. Thus, knowing customer’s perception is extremely important in service recovery.

Knowing the customer’s perception would also make customers return for the second time or more. This is because knowing the customer’s perception, we would know our customers' needs and wants and also the things that will attract them to return.

Task A: Building a professional essence

An overall review on this workshop would be that dressing is important. In any occasions, people would judge a person from the first 10 seconds they met. The first thing anyone sees would be how a person dresses, followed by the greetings. Thus, this makes dressing appropriately to the occasion important. In this workshop, we learnt about how to dress from head to toe for each occasions in detail. Thus, we would know if we had dressed appropriately and not to offend our host because we underdressed or overdressed.

In formal business meetings, we are to dress in full business suit, long-sleeved shirt with blazer, skirt and pantiehose for ladies. Skirts would be preferred compared to pants suit. As for the men, they should be neatly attired with long-sleeve shirt and blazers, slacks and polished shoes.

There are also many other business scenes that may require us to dress differently. However, in all situations, we always have to pick out clothes wisely, it cannot be oversized or undersized. It would be best if it is nicely fitted on us. The points that we must take into consideration when determining if we had dressed appropriately would be occasion, time, place, climate, culture and expectation of the people you will meet.

The commonly found dressings for business scenes would be casual, business casual, dressy casual, smart casual, formal, black tie, black tie optional, black tie invited, cocktail attire and white tie. Casual may be just T-shirts or polo t-shirts with slacks and blouse and pant suit for ladies , it also can be as eleborate as to man to be dressed in white tie, waistcoat(vest), shirt, cummerband, black tail coat and black pants and only long gowns for ladies.

This chapter also taught us things that we must not do in any business scenes as it would extremely impolite and disrepectful to the other party. Examples would be wearing mini skirts and low cut blouse for ladies. Things we should do to make ourselves look good in business scenes would be wearing matching pants with blazers, everything should be nicely fit, should have shoes to interchange every 2 weeks, in order to keep the shoes in shape.

In general, we should be appropriately dressed for all events or situations as first impression counts.

In Part 2 of building a professional essence, we were taught about the meeting and greetings when we first saw our client. After the first impression, the person continue to judge you through the way you talk and the things you said. It also moves on to tell us how to give a shake hand professionally and ways to handle namecards with flair. We also must constantly remember that body language speaks louder than words. If your body language say " you do not care", no matter how sincere you sound, you will appear insincere.

This chapter informs me about etiquette in communicating through verbal/body language as well as through phone calls and emails.

Introduction

Business Etiquette and Service Excellence (BESE) is an important aspect in our life, and especially in the hospitality and tourism industry. Therefore, I believe that this module will provide me with the proper introduction to BESE and teach me essential life long skills that will benefit me greatly. I hope to be able to be closer to my aim of being a sophisticated individual in this impressionist world.

I have started this blog as a mean to record my progress after each workshop. This will facilitate my understanding and comprehension of the topics that are covered. In addition, this blog will be prove of my understanding of the module at the end.