Learning from the Ritz
The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain has won two Baldrige Awards because of the quality of its management system. A key element of that system is how well it trains and empowers its hotel workers to satisfy and delight customers. Any employee can spend up to $2,000 on his or her own to improve a customers’ experience. Would you trust your employees with that responsibility?
Now an unlikely company has brought in trainers from the Ritz to show their dealers how to create a consistent sales experience and create loyal customers. The company? Cadillac.
According to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Cadillac has copied Ritz’s pocket-sized ‘Credo’ cards, which explain how customers should be treated.” Cadillac service managers now have greater flexibility to “wow” customers. One dealer in the Chicago area gave employees $300 to $500 in “wow” money, which may be an iffy proposition if the employees haven’t been trained in how to dole out that money responsibly. The last I heard, new employees at the Ritz receive more than 250 hours of training in their first year of work, and a good part of that training is in customer service. Without the training, the “wow” money may just become, “Wow, look at all the money we wasted.”
It’s all about the culture and the management system. Companies that try to emulate one chunk of a world-class system without having the culture and the other key elements of the system in place may see short-term improvement, but it won’t last. The system will absorb the change and return to the way things used to be. It will snap back. You cannot change a culture—you cannot improve just customer service or just employee engagement—without changing the system.
Hopefully, Cadillac understands that since it has something else in common with Ritz-Carlton: It also won a Baldrige Award. Unfortunately, that was 20 years ago. My guess is that little remains of the leadership and management system of those glory days.
Click here to read the Bloomberg Businessweek article, “What Cadillac Is Learning from the Ritz,” by Jeff Green and David Welch, June 17, 2010.
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