The Moat House

The Moat House, Acton Trussell is a multiple award-winning hotel, restaurant and conference facility in Staffordshire. Part of the Lewis Partnership, the organisation has grown from 30 employees in 1988 to 240 today. Through a series of acquisitions and strategic development the company has broadened their appeal and consistently re-launched their product offering, now offering customers a choice of two charismatic hotels with the development of The Swan Hotel in Stafford. The Lewis Partnership also have associate businesses in The Bear, a historic town centre bar, and Sponge Marketing Ltd. In a highly competitive sector, The Lewis Partnership has demonstrated how the pursuit of excellence can deliver outstanding business success. The business has considerable "hands-on" experience in communication, culture and style-change, EFQM and continuous improvement.

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Customer Focus

Without our customers we are nothing. We recognise that customer service needs to be genuine, value for money, professional and friendly. We have undertaken a major customer service programme called 'Think like a customer' and this continues to be offered to all new recruits. This year we are looking at effective energy boosts quarterly around the subject of customer service with an emphasis on developing product knoledge, cross and upselling by our team. One of the ways we will do this is to encourage our employees to experience our product by staying overnight, or having a meal and then gathering the feedback.
We continue to evaluate external customer service audits through our mystery guest program whilst benchmarking the external market so that we stay ahead in our sector. With new improved technology such as the internet hosted, restaurant diary and our desire to offer our customers the very best experience in all areas and in all our properties.

People Issues

As a service industry the right people, in the right place is essential to the success of our business. We encourage a culture of personal development and empowerment, offering training to all employees at all levels. About 18 months ago the majority of our teams went through the MAP (Management Assessment Programme). It identified to us that we were technically good but needed to improve our management skills. With this in mind we have worked on development programmes to assist us with becoming more proactive in our approach and analysing our business in terms of revenue and control. We have introduced supervisory, and assistant team leader, succesion planning to develop those coming up through the business.

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