THE HOUSEKEEPING SERVICE, THE PERCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION OF THE ROOM IN THE GUEST'S BRAIN

THE HOUSEKEEPING SERVICE AND THE PERCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION OF THE ROOM IN THE CUSTOMER'S BRAIN

If there is a power outage in your house, it is easy for you to be able to move in the dark without tripping or colliding with any object because you already have the measure of where they are, right? Now, if you have had a meeting with friends and the furniture in your house has changed position and there is just a power outage before you have organized them, you will surely find yourself in a big problem.

For our brains, the primary objective is survival in the environment or context where it is located, for which it is constantly scanning all the stimuli that come to it from the objects and people in them.

The brain pays special attention not only to objects that may be in a certain context or environment, but mainly to their location in relation to other objects, which is known as egocentric coding. or in relation to himself, known as egocentric encoding and this information is stored in his memory as a spatial reference system.

When a client arrives at a hotel room, it is presented following the standards of the hotel category and the guest's brain begins to encode all the objects in it egocentrically and this encoding is often conditioned by their preferences and begins to vary the initial positions, for example, in my case I always place the scale near the shower box and take the board and iron out of the closet and leave it outside because I use it frequently.

Unfortunately, in many hotels when my room is cleaned these changes, understood from now on as “my personalized allo-egocentric coding”, are not respected and are returned to their original positions because, as they have explained to me, this is what says the service standard.

What happens in the brain of a guest who has experienced this same situation? Well, a spatial and predictive imbalance that implies an extra expenditure of energy to be able to return to the original preferred map and, as we already know, any extra expenditure of energy that does not have a pleasant emotional tinge will cause unpleasant emotions and aversive guest´s behaviors that are not functional for any company.

What could I suggest?

 This suggestion is based on my experience as a Hotel Butler, when I detected that a guest designed his own spatial coding in the room I respected it during his stay and communicated this preference to my team of housekeepers so that we were all aligned and the guest could feel recognized and important.

 On other occasions I contacted the guest to ask him if he wanted to keep the changes throughout the stay.

It should be noted that this is not necessarily related to the order in the room, since it is one thing to change a product's location and another thing to keep some elements in the room organized regardless of their location.

Customer experience is a brain construction, so we must know how the customer's brain works in order to offer products and services that stimulate their satisfactory experiential perception.

Osvaldo Torres.