※Translation in English of the column.

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Sales is the work to sell happiness ③

“Hospitality for all people around you”

by BRUSH chairman Eiko Akiyama

“Hospitality” is the necessary mindset for customers. Derived from the Latin word hospitalis, this word generally means sincere hospitality, thoughtfulness and respect for others. It is an essential mindset to provide quality service.
Although service is easily confused with hospitality, when they are compared, you can see the difference. Service refers to providing a certain standard of customer service to an unspecified number of customers, while hospitality refers to providing the best quality only to the customer in front. For example, serving food ordered at a restaurant is a service. To notice the customer’s sore shoes when guiding customer to the reserved seat and to prepare casually a shoe slip pad, this is a hospitality.
In other words, hospitality is to be proactive for thinking about whether this will make customers happy, or whether customers will be able to spend a comfortable time, and enter their personal area to take care of them. Do you know the story that “human always have a favor and become a fan of the person when they are treated with hospitality”? As a result, it is said to lead to an increase of long-term customers.

In addition to customers, it is also very important to have respect, kindness and thoughtfulness for the people working together. People who can’t show hospitality to colleagues can’t do it to customers.
In order to welcome customers comfortably as a store, it is important to “have hospitality to everyone concerned”. It’s only a good team and team working that can provide a comfortable space.

Jobs that require hospitality train workers to raise awareness and ability to read the atmosphere. This is because they will always think ahead of what they should do. Making others happy with this action will lead to great reward and become a driving force. Independence will be demonstrated generally in the work. It will create a virtuous cycle in the workplace and increase productivity. This is called a “spiral up”.

Customers, colleagues… “Have hospitality to everyone concerned”. It motivates the team and creates greater power than expected.