All Posts Tagged With: "customer service"
Creating a Unique Customer Experience
Like me, you will probably never travel to Bogota, Columbia, but that doesn’t make Andres Carne de Res any less interesting. It’s a restaurant—two actually, one in Bogota and one a half-hour outside of Bogota—that offers such a unique experience that it’s full all the time without promoting itself. You can get a sense of its uniqueness by checking out its Web site here. It’s in Spanish but you don’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy it.
Kaihan Krippendorff wrote about the restaurant on Fast Company’s Web site. He teaches a service innovation class using an 8-P framework that helps companies find the disruptive innovations that will differentiate it from the competition. Andres Carne de Res is a case study in disruptive innovation:
1. Product. Check out the restaurant’s amazing menus on its Web site. It pastes yellow butterflies to its local beer bottles and serves wine in hand-painted bottles. While the products may be different from those of its competitors, they certainly are packaged and presented in unique ways.
2. Price. Krippendorff got a menu that was a metal case about the size of shirt box that had a scroll inside and you turned a handle to roll it up or down…
19Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLearning 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…
21Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAn Online Gold Mine
I was halfway into “Lost” when an alarm blared in my hotel room. A recorded voice told me to exit the hotel using the stairs. I did what most people probably do, which was check the hallway and look out the window. I didn’t see or smell a fire. I started putting my shoes on when a different voice announced that we should stay where we were while they assessed the threat. I watched “Lost.” A few minutes later, the first voice once again demanded that we leave the building. I was on the 17th floor and was in no hurry to comply, but I finished getting my shoes on, grabbed my wallet, phone, and briefcase, and headed for the stairs. I never got there: The second voice explained that it was a false alarm and we could return to our rooms.
A month later I stayed in the same hotel. Same thing happened, although they were more efficient this time: They told us to ignore the alarm before I could get my shoes on.
The next morning, the hotel forgot my wake-up call.
When they sent an email asking me to take a short survey, I did, explaining why the false alarms and…
30Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhen “Very Satisfied” Is Impossible
The reverse side of the bill that hotel staff slid under my door this week pleaded with me to be VERY SATISFIED with my stay. I may be receiving an email satisfaction survey. According to the front office manager, “We ask that if for any reason you do not feel that you are able to rate us a VERY SATISFIED with your Overall Satisfaction that you contact a Guest Services Manager prior to your departure.”
Somebody’s bonus is tied to satisfaction scores.
It’s hard to judge whether or not I was “very satisfied” with the hotel. The check-in went smoothly. The TV worked. The room was comfortable and quiet. The wake-up call came on time. The bed was a little hard for my taste. The price was reasonable. If those are the criteria, I was “very satisfied,” but how satisfied can you be when you’re tired from travelling and away from home and bored? That’s what makes such satisfaction surveys problematic.
On the other hand, if I compare my hotel visit with my airline experience, I would give the hotel a “6” on a 5-point scale. You won’t see an airline begging for a “very satisfied” rating because who in their right mind would be…
18Dec2009 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedOrganizational Improvement Training
The Alliance for Performance Excellence offers inexpensive online training on a broad range of organizational improvement topics. I can’t vouch for the quality of the training because I haven’t taken a course, but training provided by the Alliance, which is a network of Baldrige-based award programs, should be excellent.
Click here to review a complete list of courses on such subjects as:
- Control charts
- Customer service excellence
- Data-driven decision making
- Lean
- Problem solving
- Process management
- Quality tools
- Six Sigma
- Statistical process control
If you take an online course through the Alliance or have taken one, let us know what you think by commenting on this article or sending us an email.
10Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWorld-Class Employee Orientation
According to its Web site, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company “sets the gold standard in luxury hospitality worldwide.” A recent Luxury Brand Tracking Study verified that The Ritz-Carlton has become the most preferred luxury brand among other hotels in its competitive set. Twenty-four of its hotels received AAA Five Diamond Hotel Awards in 2009 and 16 received Four Diamond Hotel Awards. The company has won the Baldrige Award twice.
The Motto of The Ritz-Carlton—one of its gold standards—is “Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen.” The company employs 38,000 Ladies and Gentlemen. Every one of them is empowered to use his or her own judgment, without seeking permission from a supervisor, to spend up to $2,000 on each guest each day.
In his enlightening book, The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Joseph A. Michelli devotes a chapter to describing how the company hires, trains, and empowers its employees to provide world-class customer service. I encourage you to read the book. Here are the key points:
- It selects people from the same candidate pools as everyone else and pays the same as others in its industry.
- It involves frontline employees who have been…
Ground Zero for Customer Service
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…
9Sep2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
