Beyond "Outrageous," And "Legendary" Customer Service Training: Creating
"Ordinary Excellence, Daily!"
It’s time for a new approach to hospitality and customer-service training in the
lodging industry. It’s true that the industry has been innovative in other areas
in the past 15 years; witness the reinvention of our “product” many times over,
as we have seen the standard hotel room morph itself into a plethora of versions
of the four walls and a bed that comprised our unexciting inventory in 1990.
Now, most destinations feature hotels ranging from boutique to bare bones but
clean, from ultra-luxury to micro-economy, and include “suite” hotels ranging
from a guestroom with a couch to a fully furnished, residential-style suite.
Similarly, we as an industry also have been innovative in re-engineering complex
distribution channels, especially of late when “brand.com” has made a remarkable
turnabout in its game of tug-of-war with its online travel agency
vendor/partners. But when it comes to hospitality and customer-service training,
we as an industry to a large extent continue to re-circulate the same old-hat
customer-service training content.
How many times have we all sat in workshops or read articles about “Moments of
Truth,” a phrase originally coined by Jan Carlson, c.e.o. of SAS Airlines, who
authored a great book by the same name in 1987. How many training programs have
we completed that were based on catchy phrases like “legendary,” or
“outrageous?” When I first read author Ken Blanchard’s great writings on
legendary service in the late 1990’s, and read T. Scott Gross’ wonderful book
titled “Positively Outrageous Service” when it came out in 1994, I have to admit
it was all quite inspiring. (I’ve also enjoyed those authors’ excellent, more
contemporary works, too.) Stories about the heroic undertakings of front-line
staff members to assist customers in extraordinary ways are always fascinating.
But often all that lies beneath the lodging industry’s many versions of
similarly named service training is content we’ve all heard before, such as:
“Use the guest’s name three times,” “Smile and have eye contract,” or “An upset
guest will tell 9 to 10 others,” a statistic I first heard reported by the TARP
Reports in 1986.
While such programs can be motivating, participants often get nothing more than
a flyer with a cute acronym about communications techniques and “Five steps to
handling a guest complaint.” They then return to the real world, where guest
loyalty is either won or lost every shift, every hour, whether on the phone or
in person.
If you are looking for a more refreshing and practical approach to customer
service training, consider creating Ordinary Excellence, Daily!
In short, creating Ordinary Excellence, Daily! means giving guests what they
really want, which is more than forced smiles, scripted welcome greetings and to
hear their name overused robotically when their room service tray arrives.
Even though sincere smiles and authentic greetings are nice, if you waste 10
minutes of time fumbling through the property-management system or with a broken
card-key machine, a smile won’t increase the guest’s satisfaction. Likewise,
four-step complaint-handling techniques won’t “fix” the guest in an unkempt room
or the guest who moved the bed to find enough outlets for her cell phone
chargers.
So the first two components of Ordinary Excellence, Daily! are providing a
quality physical product that meets expectations or exceeds, and maintaining the
technology/systems that allow us to deliver the physical product in a timely and
efficient manner. The good news is that there’s a growing number of hotels
excelling in achieving these first two components. Thanks in part to higher
brand standards, which have been more consistently applied, (and to brands
willing to deflag franchisees who don’t maintain these standards), the traveling
public sleeps in a cleaner, more finely appointed and safer guestroom than ever
before.
The even better news is many top leaders in the hospitality industry today still
believe the pursuit of hospitality is worthwhile. They already aspire to create
Ordinary Excellence, Daily, for their guests, although they probably don’t call
it such. I for one think our industry has steadily raised the bar on “service”
and that the overall guest experience has improved significantly in the past 15
years. I can also tell you that for the 80+ nights I spent on the road last
year, I had a lot fewer outrageously bad experiences than I used to in the late
1980’s and early 1990’s, at least when it comes to the physical
product/cleanliness and service/systems efficiency.
While that’s all good news, the bad news is that too few hotels have achieved
the third component for creating Ordinary Excellence, Daily, which is a
corporate culture rooted in hospitality. It is this component that will turn
customers into repeat guests and word-of-mouth advertisers, just like
“outrageous” and “legendary” training, but is more applicable to every
interaction with every customer, every day.
To create such a corporate culture of hospitality, your team must truly
understand hospitality at its core. The dictionary tells us that that
hospitality means treating guests with warmth and generosity. To help your team
achieve this paradoxically simple yet elusive missing component of most hotel
company cultures, start by helping them understand that hospitality is more than
a communication technique or five-step process; rather, it is an operating
philosophy for daily living.
Ask your team to commit, along with you personally, to providing an
individualized gesture of authentic hospitality for every customer encountered,
whether a guest, a travel agent, a third party, or an “internal customer.” Ask
them to join your commitment to making sure that regardless of who is standing
across the front desk or talking on the other end of your telephone line, an
authentic gesture of warmth and generosity will always be extended.
The Ordinary Excellence, Daily! philosophy is easy to implement and everyone has
dozens of chances to utilize it every day. Whether offering a wake-up call
during a late-night check-in, volunteering driving directions at check-out,
pausing for a heartfelt thank you, or simply saying (and meaning) “It was really
nice talking with you today” to conclude a call, the hospitality component of
ordinary excellence is easy to apply in the real world of hotel operations.
The implementation doesn’t take any extra time, cost any more money or require
the purchase of any new training program. It is easy to get started and you’re
probably already on the road with having a quality physical product and
efficient technology/systems, especially if you’re part of a leading brand or
membership/affiliation group.
Just make sure before you implement the hospitality component of your Ordinary
Excellence, Daily! process that as a leader you are also willing to make the
commitment. Visionary leaders cannot delegate “hospitality” to the next level
down the organizational chart while they operate by another protocol.
Oh, and despite being a great model for incorporating service excellence
principles into everyday actions, the only bad news about Ordinary Excellency,
Daily! is that OED makes a terrible acronym to name a training program!
CONTACT
Doug Kennedy
Phone: 954.981.7689
Email: douglas@douglaskennedy.com
The Douglas Kennedy Company
http://www.douglaskennedy.com
921 S. Park Road, Suite 206
USA - Hollywood, FL 33021
Phone: 954.981.7689
Email: douglas@douglaskennedy.com