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MY FIRST JOB EXPERIENCE!

Mar 12th 2009

Ashwini Beri,
Vice President, Operations & Training (UK), 3

I ALWAYS WANTED TO WORK FOR A LARGE COMPANY, even if it meant being a small fish in a big pond. I wanted to be sure that I started my career on the right note. And ITC Hotels was high on my list of companies I was aspiring to work for. I was trained in hotel management and went in for a front desk job with the ITC Hotels’ flagship hotel at Delhi – The Maurya Sheraton Hotel and Towers. I walked in for the interview and got stressed out just looking at the interview panel that comprised of experts.

I GOT ASKED SOME VERY TOUGH QUESTIONS, many questions that three years of hotel education had not prepared me for! The questions were all based on real life scenarios. They were gauging my analytical skills and my sense of customer focus. I tried my best to crack it and got selected at a princely salary of Rs. 996/- per month.

MY NEXT CHALLENGE WAS TO FIND MY WAY TO THE FRONT OF THE DESK. The front office manager was not keen on “trainees” finding their way to the desk. Trainees needed to learn the ropes in the back office first and could only come to the front in the presence of “buddies”. But, the front desk is where all the action and excitement was. However, I did find the support coming in from my immediate supervisor who helped accelerate my learnings.

I ALSO TOOK IT UPON MYSELF TO EXCEL IN THE BACK OFFICE WORK. This meant that a lot of dirty jobs got passed on to me - one such job was to clean the stationary store. Another one was to put together the month-end statistics deck. This was a painful process as it was all done manually in those days (PCs came in much later!). It was this ability to work with data, coupled with my understanding of the business that caught the eye of the hotel’s rooms division manager who later helped me explore my skills.

MY JOB REQUIRED ME TO SPEND A LOT OF TIME INTERACTING WITH CUSTOMERS. One such interaction made me become a firm believer in the concept of “service recovery”. In my zeal to prevent revenue leakage, I ended up having a difficult conversation with a hotel customer. In my desire to have him improve the credit status of his hotel account, I ended up with a couple of bundles of currency thrown at my face. Yes, right in the middle of the hotel lobby! However, my efforts to recover that poor service resulted in this customer becoming not just a great friend, but also a loyal customer for the hotel. It sounds pretty easy, but winning back the trust of this customer was not easy. But the outcome made me a believer.