Customer Service: Expert Ideas to Elevate Hospitality

Elevating hospitality starts with expert ideas about what customers actually feel, not just what they are charged for. Menus, fit-out and pricing all matter, but the moment a guest retells to someone else is almost always a person doing something thoughtful. That is why hospitality speakers land so well with audiences far outside hospitality: the mechanics of noticing a guest, acting on it, and building a team that does the same are the mechanics of good service anywhere.

The speakers below work on both halves of the problem. They cover what excellent service looks like to a customer, and the training, culture and leadership that gets a frontline team delivering it on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody is watching, turning every employee into a proactive brand ambassador for the business. Each one is bookable through PepTalk, and all of them speak to customer experience and customer loyalty as operational subjects with budgets and rotas attached.

Speakers who build service cultures

Will Guidara

Book Will for

Making hospitality the operating principle the whole business runs on.

Will Guidara led the team behind the restaurant named the world's best, and his New York Times bestseller turned the philosophy behind it into something other industries could copy. His argument is that hospitality is a leadership discipline: you decide what your team is allowed to do for a customer, you give them room to act, and you celebrate it loudly enough that it spreads.

For an audience of operators, the value is in how specific he gets. He talks through how service decisions were made, who had the authority to make them, and what it cost. His sessions include Exceed Expectations: How Unreasonable Hospitality Leads to Success and Why Hospitality Is Today's #1 Leadership Skill, and both work as a keynote for a mixed corporate audience, well beyond a hospitality-only room.

Learn more and book Will Guidara →

Louie Gravance

Book Louie for

Getting a frontline team to create the service moments customers repeat to other people.

Louie Gravance spent years as a Disney Institute professor before taking the same methods into Fortune 500 businesses, and he is the author of Service Is A Superpower. He works on the gap between a service standard written in a handbook and a service standard a team member actually chooses to meet.

His sessions are built for the people delivering the service, which makes him a strong fit for all-hands events, conference kick-offs and internal training days. Creating WOW Moments: Service As A Superpower and Inspiring Employees To Deliver WOW Moments both hand an audience something to use the next morning.

Learn more and book Louie Gravance →

David Salyers

Book David for

Servant leadership that makes a service culture hold together as the business scales.

David Salyers was one of the first marketing employees at Chick-fil-A and went on to serve as VP of Marketing, a career spent inside a business whose reputation rests almost entirely on how its people behave at the counter. He speaks on servant leadership, marketing built on remarkable experiences, and what it takes to keep standards consistent across a growing estate.

His talks, among them Spark A Revolution From The Inside Out and The Power Of "Moment-ization", suit leadership audiences deciding how to fund and defend service quality when the pressure is on margins.

Learn more and book David Salyers →

More expert ideas: customer service and hospitality speakers

Five further speakers who come at the same subject from marketing, operations and consumer research.

Doug Lipp

Doug Lipp headed training at Disney University and wrote the bestselling Disney U. He works with global organisations on the training infrastructure behind consistent service, covering leadership, innovation and how a brand keeps its standards steady across decades. The Magic Of Exceptional Customer Service is his core service keynote.

Learn more and book Doug Lipp →

Hamish Taylor

Hamish Taylor has run Eurostar and Sainsbury's Bank, and now advises companies and governments on customer focus and cross-sector innovation. Understanding Your Customer and The Customer Promise Model give an audience a structure for deciding what the business is actually promising and whether it delivers.

Learn more and book Hamish Taylor →

Brittany Hodak

Brittany Hodak works on turning customers into superfans, using her SUPER Model framework to lift retention and lifetime value. She brings a marketing lens to service, which makes her useful for teams who own the customer relationship after the sale.

PepTalk Fact: Brittany has built fan engagement programmes for clients including KISS, Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton 🎤

Learn more and book Brittany Hodak →

Vinay Parmar

Vinay Parmar is a former FTSE 250 Chief Customer Experience Officer and a Top 50 Global CX Influencer. He speaks on customer-centricity and digital innovation, and is a good choice when the brief involves changing how a large organisation is structured around its customers.

Learn more and book Vinay Parmar →

Kate Hardcastle MBE

Kate Hardcastle MBE is a consumer behaviour expert who has worked with Disney, Marks & Spencer and EVRI on profit, sustainability and brand longevity. The Human Touch in a Digital World: Reimagining Retail in the Age of AI speaks directly to teams deciding which parts of their service to automate and which to keep human.

Learn more and book Kate Hardcastle MBE →

Choosing the right speaker for a service brief

Start with who is in the room. A session aimed at frontline teams needs someone who has done the job and can talk about the shift itself: Louie Gravance and Doug Lipp are built for that audience. A leadership offsite deciding where to invest is better served by Will Guidara, David Salyers or Hamish Taylor, who deal with the trade-offs and the cost of holding a standard. If the brief leans more towards frontline retail talent, our roundup of retail and service talent development speakers is a good next stop, and for a broader look at customer experience specialists beyond hospitality, see our guide to the best customer experience speakers.

Then decide what you want people doing afterwards. Service keynotes tend to land hardest when they are paired with something practical, whether that is a workshop slot, a Q&A with your own managers, or a follow-up session a quarter later once teams have tried the ideas. Most of these speakers offer a workshop format alongside the keynote. Ask at the point of enquiry, while the format is still open. For more on turning a keynote into lasting behaviour change, see our piece on making every employee a proactive brand ambassador.

💡 Interested in booking Will Guidara, Louie Gravance or David Salyers for your next event? Get in touch with the PepTalk team and we will scope the right format and a quote for your audience. You can also call us on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US). Remember, it's always a good time to get a PepTalk!