The Baldrige Criteria have several questions that, when asked, can trigger the “deer in the headlights” stare. In my experience, this question almost always gets that response:

“How do you ensure that customer support requirements are deployed to all people and processes involved in customer support?”

The questions that precede it ask how you determine the key mechanisms to support your customers, what those mechanisms are, how they vary with different customer and market groups, and how you determine your customers’ key support requirements. By the time people get to the last question of the bunch, they are frequently so exhausted from scrambling to answer the first four questions that this one pushes them over the edge. Most can come up with their key customer support mechanisms, although the processes for determining what they are can be dodgy. They can usually describe the variations in mechanisms, but few have good answers for how they determine their customers’ support requirements.

Answering the last question well requires sound, systematic approaches to the first four, which is why it can be frustrating

One organization that has world-class responses to these questions is The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. A two-time Baldrige Award recipient, Ritz-Carlton excels because of its legendary customer service, which is described in The New Gold Standard by Joseph A. Michelli.

Ritz-Carlton ensures that its “customer support requirements are deployed to all people and processes involved in customer support” through training and communication. New customer support employees—which is everyone who has contact with customers—receive 250 hours of training in their first year of employment. They are taught how to be “Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen,” which is Ritz-Carlton’s motto.

To ensure that all Ladies and Gentlemen knew what that service entailed, Ritz-Carlton identified 20 Basics, which were the customer support requirements sought by the Baldrige Criteria. These included such things as:

• Each employee is empowered.
• Uncompromising levels of cleanliness are the responsibilities of every employee.
• To provide the finest personal service for our guests, each employee is responsible for identifying and recording individual guest preferences.
• “Smile—We are on stage.”

The Ritz-Carlton deployed these 20 Basics so well—and its people took them so literally—that employees focused more on enacting the standards than creatively responding to guest needs. So the company replaced the 20 Basics with 12 Service Values, moving from “ways of doing” to “ways of being.”

The Service Values are written to address the personal responsibility of each employee. Here are the first three:

• I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life.
• I am always responsive to the expressed and unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.
• I am empowered to create unique, memorable, and personal experiences for our guests.

Despite resistance to moving from 20 Basics to 12 Service Values, especially from leadership, the company fully deployed the new standards in six months. With the ongoing training it provides on the Service Values, the daily, start-of-shift meetings at all locations that help reinforce them, and the measures it tracks to gauge performance on them, Ritz-Carlton is the benchmark for successfully deploying customer support requirements to those employees who serve customers.

Help us grow our Baldrige community:

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...