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Build a strong culture of service, and Manage each moment of truth in the service experience. This article will talk about each key and how it leads to service success.
Robert C. Ford (Ph.D.-Arizona State University) is currently associate dean for graduate and external programs and a professor of management at the University of Central Floridas College of Business Administration. He joined UCF in 1993 as chair of the Department of Hospitality Management after serving on the faculty of the University of North Florida and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has authored or co-authored over 100 articles, books, and presentations on organizational issues, human resources management, and guest services management, health care and related service management topics. His texts include Principles of Management: A Decision Making Approach and Organization Theory. His recently published text, Managing the Guest Experience in Hospitality, is a compendium of hospitality-based concepts important in managing any service organization. Ford has also been an active professional serving the Academy of Management as director of placement and the division chair for both the Management History and the Management Education and Management Development Divisions. In addition, he has been the chair of the Accreditation Commission for Programs in Hospitality Administration and president of the Southern Management Association. He currently is a Fellow of the Southern Management Association and the associate editor and editor-designee of the Academy of Management Executive.
Cherrill P. Heaton is professor of organizational communications at the University of North Florida. In addition to teaching organizational and business communications in the M.B.A. and M.Acc. programs at UNF, he has taught over 100 short courses for business and industry in these subjects. Formerly a stockbroker in Miami and Wall Street, he is the co-author of Essentials of Modern Investments. With Robert C. Ford, he has co-authored three books: Principles of Management, Organization Theory, and Managing the Guest Experience in Hospitality. He has a B.A. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Florida State University.
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they treat customers this way. Instead, they think of customers as their guests and treat them accordingly. They go out their way to make their guests comfortable, to help guests derive the maximum value from the experience they have paid for, and to ensure that the experience is as rich, enjoyable, and satisfying as they know their guests expect. This sounds easy, but it isnt; more is required than just being nice to people. These benchmark organizations also work hard to determine the key drivers of guest satisfaction: what their guests want and what will satisfy them enough to keep them coming back.
long a wait can be before guests become unhappy, what price points are acceptable to guests, and what number of drops the runaway elevator in the Tower of Terror must have to satisfy the guests quality standards for the attraction. They seek to measure everything that is important to their guests and manage these key elements thoroughly. Other benchmark guest service organizations study their guests as well. They survey guests continuously and train their guest contact employees to check with guests about their experience every chance they can. The benchmark organizations dont miss any opportunity to talk to their guests and ask them How was everything? In addition, they employ trained mystery shoppers pretending to be guests, to acquire feedback on the quality of the experience in a structured, systematic way. Even if the guests tell you what is important to them, you cant always nd out how well you did simply by asking them. Mystery shopper programs are another way of nding out if you met their expectations and kept your promises. The point is that the benchmark organizations spend a lot of time and money to nd out what their guests value, expect, and want. Then they deliver it. The RitzCarlton Hotels used customer surveys to identify 18 key drivers. RitzCarlton then hired a process manager for each hotel. That managers responsibility is to eliminate aws and reduce work-cycle times by 50% in the systems that deliver the 18 keys leading to customer satisfaction. The basic drivers are so important that RitzCarlton wants someone in every hotel to be worrying about them all the time. The basic drivers may not always be the ones discovered rst. The company may often have to dig below the surface to nd out what customers really want. Southwest Airlines surveyed its customers and learned that they wanted cheap fares, on-time performance, great meals, comfortable seats, free movies, and more. Southwest quickly recognized that, human nature being what it is, if you ask people what they wantthey want everything.
Southwest realized it couldnt give its customers everything because nobody could. Gourmet meals with wine in big comfortable seats and low faresit cant be done. So Southwest did additional research to dig deeper into customer preferences and learned that their customers really wanted low fares and reliable schedules with friendly service. The Southwest product is now exactly what its target market wanted and, more important, wanted enough to pay for and to return again and again. Even better for Southwest, giving customers what they really, basically wanted provided extra cost savings to Southwest; turning an airplane around between arrival and departure is considerably easier, faster, and cheaper without having to clean up all the mess and clutter caused by unwanted frills like food service. Organizations in other industries certainly dont allocate resources on a hit-ormiss basis. But they often use allocation criteria like internal needs or top managements preferences rather than the key drivers of customer satisfaction. The benchmark hospitality organizations, on the other hand, rely on their knowledge of the guests key drivers to allocate resources. They dont want to put money into parts of the experience that dont matter that much to customers, nor do they neglect parts that are truly important to customer satisfaction. If one component of the service experience receives relatively low ratings, the organization may accept them if surveys also show that these ratings have little effect on guest satisfaction and intention to return. If a component shows a strong statistical relationship to guest satisfaction and return intention, it is obviously a key driver; these organizations allocate resources to that component to wow customers and keep them coming back.
knowledged as an individual is or can be a key driver for just about every customer. Everyone wants to feel special and be treated as an individual. Personalizing the experience is one way to wow customers. The excellent guest-service organizations that attract repeat customers allocate signicant resources to study their customers extensively and also accumulate the information they have learned. Computerized databases and sophisticated techniques of database analysis allow the organization to know a great deal about its customers as individuals. The best hospitality organizations mine these databases to dig up as much as they can about what is important to each guest so they can customize the experience. Intelligent use of a customer database allows the best to get better at doing these things. Customizing or personalizing each customers experience to match the customers unique needs and expectations is becoming increasingly easy for all organizations. The increased emphasis in services on relationship marketing or the market-segment-of-one concept has been made possible through the increasing power of computers to store, digest and interpret large quantities of information. The idea is to nd out so much about customers that the organization can treat each person as a separate market. When customers return warranty cards on products, ll out the information on cents-off coupons, or send in for free premiums such as t-shirts and company-logo coffee mugs, they provide information that companies can use to gain a better understanding of their customers and their unique needs.
room and bed. Their denition of a properly prepared room includes having service providers check the information system to review items that todays incoming guests have indicated in previous stays are important to them. They know from retained information that certain customers expect to nd extra pillows, hot chocolate, or specic magazines in the room when they arrive. The RitzCarlton database tells the hotel what the exact preferences of its guests are so staff can be sure that the desired items are in the room when guests arrive. RitzCarlton also asks its employees to provide information related to service delivery. Employees are asked to listen for and record in the database any relevant guestrelated information that might assist the hotel in adding value and quality to the guests experience. For example, if a oor sweeper overhears guests talking about celebrating their anniversary, the sweeper is supposed to pass the information along so that the hotel can take some notice of this special event. The employees help deliver the wow Ritz Carlton experience by adding useful information to the organizational information system, which helps to ensure that all the people involved in providing the guest experience have the information they need to do their jobs in the best possible way. The powerful applications of modern information technology provide the employees with the information necessary to satisfy and even wow the customers by personalizing the service experience. RitzCarlton is one of the best, but other guest-service organizations have also developed innovative ways to build a relationship with each customer based on powerful computer analysis of customer information. While personalizing is not easy with a highvolume, mass-produced experience like a theme park designed to appeal to thousands of customers every day, these data-based systems are making it easier for service settings like hotels, and even restaurants, to provide individualized customer interaction. Like managers everywhere, the managers of the best hospitality organizations know that
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making every customer feel special is an important way for an organization to differentiate its customer-service experience. The difference is that these managers aggressively use this knowledge to make their guests feel personally treated. American Express Co. may have taken this approach as far as anyone. In addition to putting basic demographic information about its customers into a database, the company also stores information about every customer transaction. The company has dedicated seventy workstations at its decision sciences center in Phoenix to scan mountains of data on millions of Amex cardholders. They know which stores the cardholders shopped in, the restaurants where they dined, the places they visited, and the airlines they ew, how often they went, and how much they spent when they got there. Amex can infer from the data what is likely to appeal to each customer in the future, andto encourage customers to use their credit cards more can target specic promotions like weekend getaways on their favorite airline to their favorite city to stay at their favorite hotel. Amex gured in 1994 that the personalized marketing strategy made possible by this relationship-based information system increased member spending by 15 to 20% in the markets where it was used. Any organization able to offer this degree of personalized service can make it tough for competitors who cant provide their customers with similar value. Information systems and the powerful advances in information technology make it happen, and many organizations now have access to the power of building personalized relationships with their present customers and offering such relationships to their future customers. The best hospitality organizations know that success is never nal, and that the drivers of customer satisfaction today may not work or may be too commonplace tomorrow. Because what impresses customers now may not be sufcient to encourage their return in the future, organizations must continually survey their guests, know the key
hospitality organizations excel at making every decision with guest satisfaction in mind, no matter how uncomfortable or complicated that decision may make their own lives as operators. Their mantra is simple: Everything starts with the customer.
anticipated situations, even if the organization hasnt said so. The culture must be planned and carefully thought through to ensure that the message sent to all employees is the one the organization really wants to send. An important part of any strategy is to ensure that everything the organization and its leadership says and does is consistent with the culture it wishes to dene and support. The more intangible the product, the stronger the cultural values, beliefs and norms must be to ensure that the customer-service employee provides the quality and value of customer experience that the customer expects and that the organization wants to deliver.
parents cant get them to clean up their rooms at home. But the problem is even more complicated than merely training employees to do their jobs, on top of having good interpersonal and problem-solving skills. The hospitality organization has to serve a multitude of very individual people or VIPs, each of whom expects something a little bit different from the experience. The hospitality product cannot be packaged and put on a shelf for purchase. It is ever changing and dened anew in the mind of each guest every time it is experienced. Traditional organizations rely on policies and procedures to ensure proper command and control of the employees producing the products. Hospitality organizations have to substitute culture and empowerment (to be discussed later) for command and control, because no one is smart enough to anticipate and plan for every conceivable desire and requirement that each unique guest will bring to the hospitality experience. Thus, benchmark hospitality organizations spend considerable time and money teaching a culture value system so that when a guest wants something that isnt discussed in the training manuals or cant be done by the book, the employee who has learned the culture will still know how to do the right thing for that particular guest at that particular moment, will want to do the right thing, and will be empowered by the organization to do it. Here are some examples of how a strong culture has motivated and guided employees to make the right decisions.
tion: How can I get a yellow and black tag for my bags? The passengers had noticed that bags with those tags arrived rst, so they wanted the special tags. The baggage handler realized that because the passengers asking him the question were the rst ones to arrive at the carousel, they had to be rstclass passengers, who deplaned rst. And yet they had to wait 20 min on average for their bags, while some other passengers were getting rst-class luggage service. First-class passengers are highly protable to airlines, and the baggage handler saw that something was wrong with the service being provided to them. The baggage handlers inquiries revealed that the passengers perhaps least deserving of rst-class luggage service, those ying on stand-by, were getting it. Because they were the last to board, their luggage was loaded last and unloaded rst. The baggage handler reported his ndings and made a simple suggestion: load rst-class luggage last. Although the idea was simple and had obvious merit, implementing it meant that BA had to change its luggage-handling procedures in airports all over the world, and that took time. But it was done, and the average time of getting rst-class luggage from plane to carousel dropped from 20 min to less than 10 worldwide, and under 7 min on some routes. An employee who understood the BA culture saw a way to improve the system and got it done. He had no idea he was going to receive a service award of $18,000 and two round-trip tickets to the United States on the Concorde. The baggage handler didnt take a creative path to solving a customer problem because he had to, but because he wanted to. He saw a problem, saw the creative possibilities in a new idea, and passed it along for development. How can any organization create and sustain a culture like thisin which employees not only do their jobs efciently and competently but also want to go the extra mile? How can such a strong customerfocused culture be created? Two ways suggested by the success of these benchmark
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guest-service organizations are (1) by celebrating the organizations service heroes and telling their stories, and (2) by encouraging the organizational members to teach each other the appropriate cultural values. But the hospitality benchmarks also know that the most important contribution to the organizational culture is the behavior and teaching of its leaders. American Express creates and maintains a strong customer-focused culture. One way is by recognizing those employees who have provided exceptional service to customers as Great Performers. Two customer service people in Florida got money to a woman in a foreign war zone and helped her get on a ship out of the country; travel agents in Columbus, GA paid a French tourists bail so he could get out of jail; an employee drove through a blizzard to take food and blankets to stranded travelers at Kennedy Airport; an employee got up in the middle of the night to take an Amex card to a customer stranded at Bostons Logan Airport. Any organization has its cultural heroes employees who have gone above and beyond the call of dutyand their stories should be preserved and shared. American Express distributes its Great Performers booklets to all employees worldwide.
normal chairs whenever a person of extra girth comes into the restaurant. Needless to say, telling the Larry Chair story at an opening reveals a great deal about the companys cultural values and sends a strong message to the new employees about how far the restaurant (and they) should go to respond to and meet a customers needs. All organizations can use stories, heroes, myths, and legends to help teach the culture, to communicate the values and behaviors the organization seeks from its employees in their job performance, and to serve as role models for new situations. Most people love stories. Its so much easier to hear a story of what a hero did than to listen to someone lecturing about customer responsiveness in a formal training class. Not only are the stories more memorable than some arbitrary ve points seen on a classroom overhead, but the tales can be embellished in the retelling and the culture thereby made more alive. Tales of old Joe and what wondrous things he did while serving customers teach desired responses to customer concerns and reafrm the organizations cultural values at the same time. Every organization should capture and preserve the stories and tales of its people who do amazing things, create magical moments, to wow the customer. The effort will yield a wonderful array of inspiring stories for all employees, as well as send a strong message about what the organization values and desires in its employees.
They may appear anywhere at any time to lend a helping hand. Another Southwest effort to promote the culture and the Southwest Spirit was the Walk a Mile in My Shoes program, which encouraged people to use a day off without pay to shadow another employee doing another job. The program helped employees understand how their jobs t together in making the organization work. They also created a Helping Hands program, to get people to spend some time helping employees at other locations where the growth in trafc was overwhelming. All of these programs have had multiple positive effects for the organization and its employees. They reinforce the togetherness of the extended family that Southwest believes is an important part of its cultural value system, allow members to teach each other the cultural norms of helping, caring, and having fun at work, and provide a strong visible expression of the cultural values that all employees are encouraged to share.
ployees exactly as they want employees to treat their customers. They use rituals to recognize and reward the behaviors that the culture values, and they praise the heroes whose actions have reected worthy cultural values. Other employees can use these hero stories as models for their own actions.
cilities. Employees see and emulate this care and attention to detail. Walt Disney was a benchmark of how to teach the organizational culture. Here is how he described his function within the organization: My role? Well you know I was stumped one day when a little boy asked, Do you draw Mickey Mouse? I had to admit I do not draw anymore. Then you think up all the jokes and ideas? No, I said, I dont do that. Finally, he looked up at me and said, Mr. Disney, just what do you do? Well, I said, sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everyone. I guess thats the job I do. Walt was supporting and maintaining the culture. He knew that to do so, he had to stay close to both his employees and Disneys customers. Only in walking around can managers see for themselves that the quality of customer experiences is high, that concerns of customers and employees are being met, and that everyone remains focused on the customer. Unlike the manufacturing industry, which can rely on statistical reports to tell managers how things are going on the production line, managers of these benchmark service organizations inform themselves about how things are going by staying as close to the point where the guest experience is produced as possible. Many restaurant managers are told to meet every customer and to make as many table visits as possible to talk to them; hotel managers wander the lobbies to observe the reactions of customers; and theme park managers monitor the looks on guests faces to make sure they are having a good time. All these strategies are based on the simple idea that the reason for the organizations existence and basis for its success is the customer. For these benchmark organizations, being out with the customers and interacting with the
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employees who take care of the customers is an important organizational value and not just a company slogan, and managers from the top down must set the example.
warding behaviors that the organization wants repeated. Leaders can teach the culture by how they publicize and reward success. They can also teach the culture by how they react to service failures. Whether the organization handles service failure well or poorly affects the customers, of course, but it also tells the employees how committed the organization is to customer satisfaction. Employees need to know that this commitment is more than a slogan. How the organization nds and xes its service errors sends a loud message to employees about what the organization truly does believe in. Let us say that the management of Hotel A is defensive about customer complaints and keeps them secret (though employees will hear about them), resolves complaints as cheaply and quietly as possible, and seeks people to blame for the complaints. The management of Hotel B, on the other hand, aggressively seeks out and xes service failures. It disseminates ndings about complaints and failures to employees, makes quick and fair adjustments for failure, and seeks solutions rather than scapegoats. We can predict that the employees of Hotel B will give better service.
tion, they use these cultural values to guide their behavior and act accordingly. In addition, as part of their teaching responsibility, managers tell stories about employees who did outstanding things for guests. Disney employees know that the commitment of the organization to guest happiness and satisfaction is nearly absolute and that they should do whatever they can do ensure the delivery of this service product, this happy experience, to each and every guest. Culture makes a tremendous difference, and the benchmark organizations protect, nurture, and teach it whenever they can. Organizational leaders in all elds know intellectually that culture is important, but they do not always teach and live the culture with the force and consistency necessary to drive employee behavior.
to this little boy; these were his prized possession, purchased on the rst day of the visit and worn faithfully ever since. The ride operator looked. The ears were nowhere to be found, and the operator watched as hope died in the little boys face and the fathers concern grew. The ride operator seized the moment, went across the walkway to a souvenir stand, took two Mickey hats, put one on dads head and one, triumphantly, on the boys. Management got a letter of thanks a few weeks later. The family spent a lot of time and money at the theme parks, but this one simple act by a truly committed employee made the trip memorable for this family. If the Magic Kingdom employee had not been empowered to go grab a set of Mickey Ears for the little boy, the family would have returned to the Midwest unhappy. The ride operator had absorbed Disneys guest-focused culture and had also been empowered to take any reasonable action necessary to achieve guest satisfaction. The action cost Disney a little bit of money, but the payoff Disney earned in good will, customer satisfaction, and positive word-ofmouth advertising more than made up for any lost revenue. Employee empowerment is essential in hospitality because situations occur so frequently in which the employee must make a decision on the spot about what to do for the guest to produce a wow or x a problem. If the guest asks for special service, complains about a service error, or wants to substitute one thing for something else, the guest contact employee must know what to do and be able to do it. Training and culture teach the employee what to do. Organizational willingness to empower the employee to do it will ensure that the employee can match the experience to the guests expectations. Clearly, employees have to be not only well trained, but also well trusted to make the right decision for the guest without requiring time-consuming checks with a senior manager for approval. Guests want their problems solved and their needs met now. Employees must be empowered to respond
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now, or guest expectations will not be met, and guests will go elsewhere in the future. The benchmark organizations give their employees the training and latitude to make those responses.
are all well managed and that each moment of truth will be a positive one for the customer.
diagram. Then the general areas within which problems might arise that could delay the delivery of meals are attached as bones to the spine. Four typical areas might be equipment, personnel, material, and procedure. All of the possible contributors to an equipment failure then become bones attached to the equipment bone, and so on with each of the four areas. Using a technique called Pareto analysis, the percentages of late meal deliveries associated with each cause are listed next to the cause in their order of importance. The analysis might reveal that, say, 90% of all late meal deliveries were caused by only three or four of three dozen possible causes. In this example, taken from life, the organization determined that most late deliveries happened because room service personnel could not nd an available elevator promptly. Further analysis of the unavailable elevator shbone revealed that because not enough sheets were being stored on each oor, housekeepers were making inordinate use of the elevators to go oor to oor to nd extra sheets. Fixing the sheets problem xed the room service problem. What at rst appeared to be a personnel problem turned out to be a material problem.
they encounter that might annoy, anger or provoke less guest-oriented people. Employees must of course be trained well and continuously in their job skills, interpersonal relationship building, and problem-solving techniques. The organization must also create a job environment that promotes fun, so that both the employees and the guests have an enjoyable experience. The benchmark hospitality organizations understand the statistical relationship between positive guest experiences and positive guest-contact employee attitudes. If employees are not feeling and acting positive, guests probably wont either. Finally, these organizations work hard to reward people for service excellence. The benchmark hospitality organizations nd excuses to celebrate success; they know that such celebration rewards, reinforces, and promotes guest service excellence.
everyone that meeting or exceeding standards is an important determinant in the success of the guest experience, so everyone needs to pay attention to it. Measuring what is happening to the customer in every step of service delivery is critical in understanding where the problems are and whether the solutions being tried are actually xing the problem. Saying to a service provider, I want you to do a better job of satisfying customers because your customers seem unhappy doesnt give much guidance. To tell employees in measurable terms what guest expectations are and how well they are being met can be extremely helpful. Indeed, in the best circumstances when the measures of guest expectations and employee performance are clear, fair, and completely understood by employees, they will be able to measure for themselves how well they are doing. Self-management through self-measurement is a fundamental premise for the W. Edwards Deming quality-circle movement that anchored the quality-improvement literature and efforts in totalquality management. All organizations use measurements and standards to some extent. Understanding that you cant manage what you cant or dont measure, the benchmark hospitality organizations measure all aspects of service delivery conscientiously and consistently.
worse off than they were before the moment of truth, depending upon how successfully they can recover from failure Here is an example of an organizational procedure designed to help customers avoid failure at a potential moment of truth: nding the car in a crowded parking lot. Speedparking is often used at theme parks, where a lot of cars are arriving across a broad time window. Under the direction of a parking attendant, the cars line up and park in successive spaces. Each row is lled before cars go to the next row. This parking method is fast; it keeps all cars facing the same way and in line to park in the next available space. If a departing family shows up lost and uncertain as to where their car might be, Disney has a way to handle the problem. When customers rst stream into the parking area, the Disney parking attendant writes down the time each row is lled. To help a family that cant nd the car, the attendant pulls out the list of what sections were parked at what times. The attendant asks the family about what time they arrived at the parking area, then uses the list to locate the car. In this way, Disney prevents a customer-caused failure that could have ruined the days experience. A moment of truth in the food service business is the moment when the guest looks at the food as it is served; is it what the guest ordered? If not, a service failure occurs. Hard Rock Cafe prevents failure at this moment of truth by hiring an extra person to stand at the end of the food preparation line to match the order with whats on the plate, to catch discrepancies before the customer ever sees the order. Even though the traditional job description for wait staff includes this checking responsibility, the extra person reduces the possibility of error even further. The wait for service and the customers reaction to it comprise a moment of truth in many service organizations. If the wait is so long as to annoy the customer, a service failure results. The Opryland Hotel in Nashville cross-trains some of its employees so that they can be called upon in peak demand times when the front desk is extra busy. If the
lines get too long for the regular front desk team, this swat team staffs extra computers to reduce the wait for the incoming or departing customers. When the customers themselves make a mistake that could lead to an unsatisfactory service experience, a moment of truth occurs. Leading organizations prepare for these moments so they can help to correct them with sensitivity. That way customers leave feeling good about their overall experience and appreciating how the organizations personnel helped them redeem themselves. We have already shown how speed-parking can help customers nd lost cars. Imagine how depressed you would feel if the parking attendant guides you and your large family to your lost car on a hot day, then you nd that you have lost your car keys and are locked out of your car. Disney has a way to handle this problem. Its parking attendant, prepared for this moment and perhaps even looking forward to it because it provides an opportunity to wow you, calls the parks Auto Patrol to your rescue. In seconds, they make you a new set of keys for free! Even though key problems are not its fault, the customeroriented organization believes that the customer needs to be wrong with dignity. Benchmark hospitality organizations know that customers who are angry at themselves may transfer some of that anger to the organization. To overcome this very human tendency, these organizations even nd ways to x problems they didnt create so that angry, frustrated people leave feeling good because a bad experience has not been allowed to overshadow or cancel out all the good. By providing this high level of customer service, the organization earns the gratitude and future patronage of customers and enhances its reputation. Any organization that seriously reects on what really happens to its customers when they storm out of the store because of a poorly handled purchase transaction, leave an auto dealership unhappy because they cant get their defective tires replaced, or write an angry letter to the computer manufacturer because their power supply keeps cutting off, should spend some time considSUMMER 2001 45
ering the lessons that hospitality organizations have already learned well. Unhappy customers dont come back, and worse yet, they may set up a web site and tell the entire world about their unsatisfactory experience.
CONCLUSION
These three pointsmake every decision with the customer in mind, build a strong service culture, and manage the moments of truthare a large part of what makes the best guest service organizations the best, and they can be keys to improving any organization that serves the customer. Give customers what they want instead of what you think they should want, build a culture where everyone believes in providing service excellence, and then manage every moment of truth so as to provide the best possible experience for customers. They will then be at least satised and possibly wowed. They will return again and again to spend their money with you instead of with your competitors. These are the competitive advantages of outstanding hospitality organizations, and they work very hard to sustain them. These three keys can become competitive advantages to organizations in just
about any eld. Whether a customer is seeking to buy a car, refrigerator, shirt, or house, or get a loan or u shot, set up a bank account, or open a stock market account, these lessons can be applied. Too many organizations set themselves up for their own convenience, listen to their engineers instead of their customers, and hope quality control catches all their mistakes. They should instead be seeking to implement these key lessons from hospitality and trying to listen more systematically to their customers to understand what they really expect from the product or service. Then, they can organize themselves to deliver this product or service as seamlessly and effectively as possible. An old saying in hospitality is true in any industry: If you dont give customers what they want, your competitors will. This is a hard lesson for many in the more traditional business sectors to really believe, but the successes of the benchmark hospitality organizations provide a convincing argument that emulating what they do is worth a try.
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY For more on making decisions with the customer in mind and treating customers like guests, see Robert C. Ford and Cherrill P. Heaton, Managing the Guest Experience in Hospitality (Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers, 2000); and Leonard L. Berry, Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success (New York: The Free Press, 1999). The information about the Amex database and relationship marketing is from Business Week, 5 September 1994, 61. For more on organizational cultures, see Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1992). The story of the SAS purser and the snowstorm is from Karl Albrecht, At Americas Service: How Your Company Can Join the Customer Service Revolution (New York: Warner Books, 1988), 124 125. The story of the British Airways baggage handler and the yellow and black tags is from Alan G. Robinson and Sam Stern, Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen (San Francisco: BerrettKoehler Publishers, 1997), 9 11. The Southwest Airlines Culture Committee and the Walk a Mile in My Shoes program are described in Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg, Nuts! Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success (Austin, TX: Bard Press, 1996), 166 172. The Bill Marriott, Jr., story illustrating the importance of the leader in dening and sustaining the organizational culture is from Albrecht, At Americas Service, 130. The Walt Disney pollen quote appeared in Walt Disney: Famous Quotes, printed for Walt Disney Theme Parks and Resorts, 1994. For more on empowering employees, see Robert C. Ford and Myron D. Fottler, Empowerment: A Matter of Degree, Academy of Management Executive 9 (1995), 2128. A compelling discussion of the link between employee satisfaction and customer ratings of service quality can be found in Benjamin Schneider and David E. Bowen, The Service Organization: Human Resources Management Is Crucial, Organizational Dynamics 21 (1993), 39 52. The relationship between employee satisfaction, guest satisfaction, and prots is discussed in James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr., and Leonard A. Schlesinger, The Service Prot Chain: How Leading Companies Link Prot and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value (New York: Free Press, 1997). To read more about service failure, see Stephen S. Tax and Stephen W. Brown, Recovering and Learning from Service Failure, Sloan Management Review 39 (1998), 75 88. Jan Carlzons Moments of Truth (New York: Ballinger, 1987) provides a detailed explanation of that concept and how Carlzon used it to rejuvenate SAS. For information about planning and blueprinting to help ensure the success of the service experience, see G. Lynn Shostack and Jane KingmanBrundage, How to Design a Service, in Carole A. Congram and Margaret L. Friedman (Eds.), The AMA Handbook of Marketing for the Service Industry (American Marketing Association, 1991), 243261. Flowcharting the service experience and the shbone technique for problem solving are described in D. Daryl Wyckoff, New Tools for Achieving Service Quality, Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly 25 (1984), 78 91.
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