Guest Services Coordinator

Guest Services Coordinator

Department: Highlights Foundation

Reports To: Highlights Foundation Manager

FLSA Status: 40 hours/week

Revision Date: February 2024

Milanville, PA

The Highlights Foundation mission and activity is only as successful as the strength of its community. Our community of students, faculty, donors, partners, staff, and volunteers contribute to the culture and climate that make this organization unique and successful. In our ongoing quest for excellence, we recognize the need for a Guest Services Coordinator who can work across the organization to create cohesion within the Highlights Foundation community. This role focuses heavily on supporting our hospitality and on-campus teams to ensure guests and students are able to have the best success and experience possible.

Position Summary

The Guest Services Coordinator will ensure that all retreat guests’ needs, questions, or concerns are met, both ahead of their stay and while on campus. The Guest Services Coordinator will handle all guest inquiries that come in via phone, email, and online chat. They will also be responsible for day-to-day management of Retreat Guru, the current retreat management software that keeps track of guest stays, lodging, dietary needs, and billing. The Guest Services Coordinator will report directly to the Community Operations Manager and will work on campus at the Highlights Foundation Retreat Center.

Shifts are scheduled monthly, and can include all days of the week, Monday thru Sunday—40 hours per week. The schedule will depend on when workshops and large group retreats take place on our campus. Typically, shifts will be scheduled during the day, but some evening availability will be required depending on group arrivals.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Ensures delivery of excellent customer service through timely and accurate processing of reservations, communication, and coordinating with other departments to resolve inquires.
• Coordinating arrival and departure schedules with housekeeping, shuttle drivers, and kitchen team. Managing shuttle requests and itineraries from guests.
• Ensuring constituent data is accurate and updated across platforms.
  • Ensure dietary and accessibility needs are met.
  • Analyzing and reporting on constituent data.
• Attending weekly cross-team meetings to coordinate campus programming.
• Being available for after-hours emergency calls (a rotating on-call basis).
• Bookstore organization and inventory tracking (Big Commerce)
• Scanning and coding invoices for approval (Bill.com)
• Managing guest and donor mailings
• Develop, track, and report key Guest Services performance measurements.
• Ensure appropriate billing for all guests, including payment plans.
• Creating name tags and room signs for arriving guests.

What you should show up ready to teach anyone on your first day:

You’ll start familiarizing yourself with the various platforms our teams use for cross-team collaboration. You will start to familiarize yourself with campus culture—interacting with guests and being available for questions or concerns, and overall being a helpful presence to guests and students, especially at mealtimes.

Within the first month, you’ll:

Have a good understanding of the various software systems used by the organization, and an understanding of how campus operations function. Within 90 days, you’ll begin to take on tasks of your own and begin to have independent responsibility of tasks. You will understand the most common guest questions and how to respond accordingly.

Within the first year, you’ll:

Become the resident expert on all things Guest Services and feel very comfortable with all of the duties related to this exciting role.

Qualifications

• Ability to interact with guests
• Curiosity is helpful in this role, as there is so much to learn and do.
• Ability and interest in data management is also very important to this role.
• Flexibility and adaptability are crucial—if you thrive while multi-tasking and wearing different hats, then this role is for you.
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills for solving guest concerns
• Administrative and technical skills to use software related to the job
• Strong verbal and written communication for guest communications
• Organizational and time management skills

Software/hardware you’ll be expected to learn:

• Excel
• Retreat Guru (reservation booking system)
• Canva (design software)
• Canvas (online classroom)
• Slack (daily communication with team)
• Smartsheet (data entry and management, plus guest-facing communications and surveys)
• Asana (team project management tool)
• Bill.com (bill paying software)
• Zendesk (email support)
• Go To (VOIP phone system)
• Microsoft Teams & OneDrive
• Zoom
• Campus AV hardware: TV projection, connected sound system, webcams, etc.

Education and Experience:

Experience in general customer service, and more specifically in hotel or retreat Guest Services, is preferable. Other relevant experience, such as food service, retail, or telecommunications, could all easily translate for people looking to shift careers. If you are a people-person and willing to learn, we will train the right person.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to lift including up to 15 pounds at times.

Highlights for Children provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.