Service Excellence: Leading The Way To Wow!: What Does The Guest Want?

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Service excellence: Leading the Way to Wow!

WHAT DOES THE GUEST WANT?

Guestology is simple. Study the guest, know what that person really wants and expects, and then provide
it--plus a little bit more. A guestologist never stops studying the guest, using all the scientific tools
available to know what that guest really wants and values. Since guests change, the study is never
complete; the guest service product, the environment, and the delivery system must also change to make
sure that each guest is satisfied enough to come back. Leaders of outstanding guest service
organizations spend considerable time and effort studying the guest and using this information to shape
their decisions on the three Ss: strategy, staffing, and systems.

This chapter will review the book's important concepts. Then we shall conclude by showing how the
leader brings it all together and makes it happen.

STRATEGY

In this era when an amazing amount of information about guests and competition in providing services to
those guests is available, only organizations that truly understand what guests want will survive and
prosper. They first use this information to design a corporate strategy. They discover which of their
competencies guests consider core and concentrate on making these core competencies better. They
use the wants, needs, and expectations of guests to sharpen their marketing strategies, their budgeting
decisions, their organizational and production systems design, and their human resource management
strategy.
Southwest Airlines is an excellent example of a company that has used its understanding of the guest to
discover and then provide what its passengers really want. Like most organizations, the airline originally
used guest surveys to ask what guests wanted. It learned that guests 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 want--they want everything.

Southwest realized it couldn't give its customers everything because nobody could. Gourmet meals with
wine in big comfortable seats and low fares--it can't be done. So Southwest did additional research to dig
deeper into guest preferences and learned that customers really wanted low fares and reliable schedules
with friendly service. The Southwest product is now exactly what its target market wanted and, more
importantly, wanted enough to pay for and return to again and again. The point is that the guestologist
must dig deeper than the simple market survey of guest preferences to understand what preferences
actually drive guest behavior. The organization can use the results from this deeper probing to match up
the organization's core competencies and mission with what customers want. Even better for Southwest,
giving guests what they want 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.

The Key Drivers

The outstanding guest service organizations have done what Southwest has done. They study their
guests extensively to discover what the guests both want and value in the guest service experience and
use this information to align all the elements of their corporate strategy with these expectations. On the
basis of studying their targeted guest market, these organizations can identify the key drivers of the guest
experience. Some are highly influential; some may seem relatively unimportant. Nonetheless, they all
contribute to the impression that the guest takes away from the guest experience and are part of the
determination of whether or not that guest will return. A trip to a theme park, or a visit to a restaurant or
hotel, is a holistic experience to most people; excellent guest service organizations do the research
necessary to identify all the separate components of this whole experience. Then they manage them.
Drivers: The Basics

In a sense, these drivers can be divided into two categories. One group are those things that guests
expect the organization to offer its guests to operate in the particular market segment. A resort hotel must
have nice, clean hotel rooms with the expected amenities like shampoo and body lotion. A casual dining
restaurant must have reasonably priced food, table servers, clean rest rooms, and relatively prompt
service. Guests expect these characteristics at a minimum. These are basic expectations that the
organization must meet; otherwise guests will be dissatisfied. If the organization fails habitually to meet
these basic expectations, it will fail altogether. The basic characteristics are the necessary but not
sufficient guest experience aspects that organizations must offer if they seek to maintain a reputation and
attract the repeat business that leads to long-term success.

Drivers: The Wows

The second category of drivers are the characteristics and qualities that make the experience memorable.
These are the wow things that the excellent organizations provide in some or all parts of the guest
experience. The organizations find a way to go beyond meeting the basic expectations with which guests
arrive when they come in the door or onto the property to have a service need satisfied. The outstanding
hospitality organizations provide the key factors that impel guests to return again and again, and even
motivate guests to tell all their friends about these exceptional organizations.

Disney, Olive Garden, Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, and other outstanding guest service organizations
continuously survey their guests to find out how well they are providing the basics that guests expect. The
organization must then dig deeper to identify which factors are true keys to turning guest satisfaction into
a wow experience.

For example, Disney knows that its guests expect transportation to be available so they can move from
one part of the Walt Disney World Resort complex to another. Disney surveys its guests to be sure that
they are satisfied with the transportation system. On the other hand, no one comes to the Walt Disney
World Resort mainly to ride a bus, and the transportation system seldom shows up in guest surveys as a
source of dissatisfaction, nor do guest opinions about the transportation system predict guest intent to
revisit Disney. Even when the bus experience isn't up to the guest's level of expectation, that minor
service failure shows no relation to overall satisfaction or with intent to return. Unless bus service is
outrageously poor, dangerous, or grossly unsatisfactory in some other way, it has little or no impact on
how guests react to the overall Disney experience. In contrast, the guest's perception of the quality of the
rides and attractions, the dazzling nature of the fireworks displays, and the quality of cast member
interactions with guests are highly correlated with guest satisfaction and intent to return, so they--and not
bus service--become the focus of managerial concern; they are key drivers.

Study, Study, Study

The point is that you don't know what factors in the service product, the environment, and the delivery
system are the key drivers of guest satisfaction and intent to return until you carefully study all the
possible drivers. Many times what management learns in such studies is a surprise because what
management thought would be keys when it designed the components don't turn out to be so from the
guest's point of view. This difference between what the organization delivers and what the guest expects
or really wants is the service gap that Len Berry has identified, and it happens. No matter how much
experience an organization has in surveying and studying guests, it will still be surprised occasionally by
what guests say is really important to them.

Accumulating Information

Excellent guest service organizations study their guests extensively and also accumulate the information
they have learned about guests, individually and collectively. Computerized databases and sophisticated
techniques of database analysis allow the organization to know a great deal about its guests, either as a
demographic or psychographic group or as individuals. The best organizations mine these databases to
dig up as much as they can about what is important to their guests so they can ensure that what is
expected is provided.

A Key Driver: Personalize

The outstanding guest service organizations that attract repeat customers have an added advantage;
they can accumulate information on their frequent guests and use this information to further customize the
guest experience. In other words, they know that a key driver is to personalize the guest experience
(everyone wants to be special and treated like an individual), and intelligent use of a customer database
allows the best to get better at doing these things. Customizing each guest's experience to match the
guest's unique needs and expectations is becoming increasingly easy.

Ritz-Carlton is one of the best, but others are finding innovative ways to build a relationship with each
customer based on powerful computer analysis of customer information. While personalizing is not easy
with a high-volume, mass-produced experience like a themepark attraction that is designed to appeal to
20,000 or more guests from all over the world every day, these data-based systems are making it easier
for service settings like hotels and even restaurants to provide individualized guest interaction. Making
every guest feel special is an important way for an organization to differentiate its guest experience from
all others. Finding out what makes that person feel special is one role of a guestologist.

Knowing what makes each guest feel special enables organizations to add the wow factor that all guest
service organizations want to provide to keep their guests coming back time and time again. The wow is
the difference that the little bit more than the guest expected can make; it can turn the satisfactory
experience into a memorable one and can keep the organization at the top of the customer's mind when
thinking about where to go the next time that particular guest service is desired. Wows can be built into
the service product, the environment, the service delivery system, or all parts of the service experience.
Based on knowledge about guest likes and dislikes, the designers of the experience can build in those
things they expect will give the wow. They should, however, always follow up to find out if they were
successful and, if not, should try to find out where and why they failed.

At Epcot

Wows don't have to be expensive, complicated, or elaborate, although they may be. Epcot provides good
examples of a relatively inexpensive and a relatively expensive wow experience, one in the delivery
system and one in the environment. The less expensive illustration is the leaping fountains next to the
Imagination Pavilion. As guests exit this building, they are surprised to see a series of shooting fountains
where the water appears to leap from one spot to another as if on a track. No one expects such a sight as
they leave; people did not come to Epcot to see it; but when people see it they remember it and
remember it as a wow.

The second, more expensive example is part of the "Honey, I Shrunk the Audience" attraction. People
enter expecting a typical 3-D movie experience that will be made special because of Disney's technical
and creative movie-making skills. What they don't expect but get by design is the feeling of mice running
around their feet (actually, a spinning Nylon line), and a wet spray that seems to come from a sneezing
dog in the movie. The guests expect the realism of 3-D but not that much, and it becomes a wow for
them.

Plan, Plan, Plan

Providing the guest with both the expected parts of the guest experience and the wow factors is the result
of extensive planning. And as we know, planning starts with the guest. Capacity and location decisions,
the design of personnel policies, the selection of production equipment--all must be based on the
organization's best estimates of what kind of experience the guest wants, needs, and expects from the
organization. If the organization's mission is to provide a theme park experience, then the first issue to
resolve is where to build the physical plant and how big to build it. If the organization's mission is to build
a chain of casual dining restaurants, then it must identify what food tastes, portion sizes, locations,
exterior appearances, and restaurant size it should have. These decisions can be properly made if based
on solid and extensive market research, and guestologists use the best data they can find to make them.
While many guest service operators still base these decisions on hunches and their own personal
preferences, the outstanding ones always start with the guest and make sure that every decision is based
on a thorough knowledge and understanding of the guest.

Get Constant Feedback

The good ones also know that this discovery process is never ending; they constantly seek feedback from
their guests about what works and what doesn't. Guest needs, wants, and expectations change, and
good organizations change with them in response to evolving guest expectations. Those organizations
that constantly seek to exceed guest expectations build in their own future challenges. Today's wow is
tomorrow's standard expectation for the guest who has been there and done that. The outstanding
organizations are constantly seeking new ways to wow their guests, and they survey guests constantly to
find out what these changing expectations are.

The Planet Hollywood in Orlando, largest in the chain, has two kitchens--one for each floor. It is therefore
a nearly perfect experimental site for testing new menu items, portion sizes, and other service product
features. Since the guests are typically tourists who randomly distribute themselves between the two
dining levels, different menu strategies and concepts can be tried and compared to see which are best
suited for the Planet Hollywood customer. The ability to test and compare new ideas constantly gives the
food production people at Planet Hollywood a statistically valid approach to finding new ways to wow their
guests. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney-MGM Studios, which simulates a runaway elevator
dropping thirteen floors, is a second illustration of how guest feedback can be used to improve guest
satisfaction. While the ride as originally designed--two big drops and one little drop--was exciting, guests
thought it was over too quickly. They wanted more hang time, more weightless feeling during the five-
minute ride. Based on the guest feedback, Disney in 1999 introduced a new sequence with seven minor
and major drops, in about the same length of time. Guests now feel that the Tower of Terror is an
excellent ride, just scary enough and just long enough.

Culture Fills the Gaps

One last issue in the strategy area is the organizational culture. Managers of outstanding hospitality
organizations need to remember the importance of the organizational culture in filling in the gaps between
what the organization can anticipate and train its people to deal with and the opportunities that arise in the
daily encounters with a wide variety of guests. There is no way to anticipate the many different things
guests will do, ask for, and expect from the service provider. The power of the culture to guide and direct
employees to do the "right thing" for the guest becomes vital. Good managers know that the values,
beliefs, and norms of behavior that the culture teaches its employees become critical in ensuring that the
frontline employee does what the organization wants done in unplanned and unanticipated situations.

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 that the organization and its leadership says and does is consistent with the culture it
wishes to define and support. The more intangible the product, the stronger the cultural values, beliefs,
and norms must be to ensure that the guest service employee provides the quality and value of guest
experience that the guest expects and the organization wants to deliver.
STAFFING

People Make the Difference

The second S, staffing, has become an increasingly important factor for all guest service organizations as
they realize the most effective way to differentiate themselves from their competitors is on the quality of
the service encounters that the service contact personnel provide. In this day of widespread
computerization and standardization, competitors can readily imitate the service product, the physical
elements of the environment, and the technical aspects of the delivery system. For one service
organization to duplicate the successful differentiating factor of another doesn't take very long. A chicken
fajita on a taco shell that the driver can hold while driving the car is an innovation for only as long as it
takes competitors to offer one-handed fajitas in their drive-throughs as well. People, not fajitas, make the
difference. If Taco Bell has friendly servers and Burger King does not, customers will go to Taco Bell--
unless they've just got to have some ground beef, or they for some reason require the ambiance of the
Burger King environment, or they have an uncommon fondness for the Burger King way of producing
food. For everybody else, the service people make the difference.

Empowering the People

The challenge is to empower the server to engage each guest on a personal, individual basis while still
maintaining production efficiency and consistent quality in the service delivery process. Guests enter
Epcot's Spaceship Earth at a fast pace. The cast member greeting the arriving guests has just time
enough to tell each guest, "Keep your arms and hands inside the car, sit down, and watch your step when
entering the moving sidewalk." This encounter is highly mechanical and too short for the cast member to
do much more than state this important information before the next guest arrives and needs to be
reminded of the same safety precautions. Repeating their little speech feels to employees very much like
working on the assembly-line job of Detroit automakers and Akron tire producers. About every six
seconds a new guest, car, or tire arrives; the employee has to do or say something briefly, then the guest,
car, or tire disappears down the assembly line to another worker's station. How can this job be made fun,
fair, and interesting? While the Epcot workers at least have the benefit of human contact rather than
contact with a tire or an auto, finding fun in the job is an effort.

Some employees in these positions figure it out and actually do have fun. They are usually the ones who
were selected properly in the first place. Finding the right people for these jobs is an important
responsibility of the selection process. Putting the people in these routinized jobs who are suited for them
eliminates many of the problems in delivering high-quality guest experiences. Some people are just plain
good at quickly establishing personal contact with guests, and they can be identified through effective
selection techniques. Finding these people and training them in the basic skills necessary for effective
service delivery is a key responsibility for human resource managers in hospitality organizations.

Server Responsibilities

Recall that servers have three responsibilities in the guest experience: they deliver the service product (or
in some cases create it on the spot), they manage the quality of the encounters or interactions between
the guest and the organization, and they identify and fix the inevitable problems. Too many organizations
train only for the first of these responsibilities and neglect the other two. In many instances, receiving the
service product is just one element in the guest's determination of the quality and value of the guest
experience. Servers must also be trained to deal effectively with the variety of personalities and concerns
that different guests will bring to the guest experience.

Selection of the right person for the job starts by clearly defining what the job requires. If you want a
person to be a ticket seller, then you hire a certain bundle of skills. If you want that person to be a
vacation planner and also sell tickets to implement these plans, that takes an entirely different set of skills.
Any job has knowledge, skills, and ability requirements; the organization's challenge is to find the "ideal
employee" who fits these requirements. Such employees can and should be identified so that the
employment decision can be made properly. Selecting the right people and placing them in the right jobs
is one real key to ensuring the quality of the guest experience.

Training

The second part of the staffing issue is training. The right person in the right job must be trained to do it
the right way. Many jobs in the guest service industry are repetitive, simple, and boring. They also require
incredible attention to detail and concentration on task performance so that the employee provides the
same service experience in the same flawless way for each guest. It is easy for employee Dave Johnson
to zone out, daydream, or otherwise lose interest in saying "Thank you for visiting Epcot" to the 20,000th
guest. By that time his legs are tired, his attention span is short, and his interest in greeting one more
person with a friendly smile and positive eye contact is about zero. Part of Dave's training should include
how to cope with the nature of the job. When the encounters are short--as at a fast-food drive-through
window, convention check-in, or entry point for a theme-park attraction--the training challenge is
particularly difficult.

Satisfaction from Satisfying

Similar jobs exist in the industrial sector, and job rotation, job enlargement, and job enrichment strategies
have been tried with varying levels of success. The advantage guest service organizations offer to
employees over most industrial settings is the guest and the positive feedback and stimulation that
dealing with guests can bring. Once employees learn how to derive some sense of satisfaction out of
doing something that makes a guest smile or finding ways to make a child happy, they have the ability to
enjoy their jobs and something to take home and talk about that they accomplished that day. Many
hospitality organizations have discovered that some of their best employees are older, retired people.
They are often lonely, bored, and looking for something to do that will bring them into positive contact with
other people. Hospitality jobs are especially good in providing this particular opportunity to them. Some
organizations that originally recruited older people because of labor shortages have found to their
pleasant surprise that older people bring an enthusiasm for service that makes them great employees.

If you just process people, you get discouraged and bored in many hospitality jobs. If you engage people,
the job becomes interesting. The challenge here is the short-cycle jobs where guest contact is so fleeting
that the opportunity to engage guests is nearly nonexistent. As a contrasting example, consider the
waitstaff in a fine dining restaurant. With their longer time of contact, employees can use a variety of
interpersonal skills to make the job personal and fun for themselves and their guests. They can interject
their personalities to make the outcome a function of their own ability to provide a good guest experience.
They have the time. Loading a high-volume ride at Epcot or serving a fast-food customer is a different
matter and a far greater challenge for both employee and management. Guests don't have time to notice
employees and their contributions to the quality of the guest experience. The level of employee
engagement and subsequent satisfaction with making the difference is considerably less, and it is these
jobs that create the biggest challenges for managers seeking to provide their employees with jobs that are
fun, fair, and interesting. Their challenge is to find ways to give each employee the opportunity to be
unique, recognized, and noticed as an individual by the guest while not compromising the speed and
efficiency of the production process used to deliver the service product.

Trust the Technology or the People?

Future employees will expect more job challenges and increased opportunities to be responsible for the
guest encounter. Future managers will have increasingly efficient mechanized production and delivery
systems available to them. Managers may have to choose between trusting these systems and trusting
their employees to provide a high-quality and consistent service experience for their guests. The need to
trust the employees will intensify as the competition for talented employees becomes greater. Good
people want to take the responsibility, and the successful organizations will be those that find ways to
preserve the quality and value of the guest experience while empowering their employees to be
responsible for guest satisfaction.
Setting the Standards

The third part of the staffing issue is the management responsibility to set performance standards and
reward employees who meet them. Managers must define for the employees what their job
responsibilities are, what the standards of performance are, and what management expects. These must
be clearly spelled out and reinforced and rewarded by managers every day. Once a manager lets an
employee provide service of less than outstanding quality, overlooks poor employee performance, or lets
a "bad show" situation continue, the message goes out to everyone that managers don't always really
mean what they say about providing high-quality guest service. Just as a guest has many moments of
truth during the course of a single hospitality experience, employees have many moments of truth with
every manager every day. What happens during these moments of truth tells the employees a great deal
about what management really believes in. This is where the organizational mission statement, corporate
culture, and corporate policies about guest focus become real. And just as one employee at one moment
of truth can destroy the guest's perception of the entire company and what it stands for, so too can one
supervisor overlooking one violation of quality standards or job performance change the way an employee
looks at an organization. While most organizations have done a good job of developing selection
techniques and providing the necessary job training, many fall short in the reinforcement area. When they
let things slide, they miss the chance to reinforce the positive and coach away the negative aspects of
employee performance.

Disney's policy of requiring its managers to be in their job areas walking the walk and talking the talk is a
vital part of how the message is sent to employees that everyone is responsible for guest service,
including them. This policy also builds a sense of equality among the employees in that everyone is there
to serve the guest.

Make It Fun

The last critical aspect of staffing is fun. Since the frontline employee is such an important part of setting
the mood for the guest, and since the research shows the importance of employee attitude in determining
the attitude of the guest, the guest service organization needs to find ways of ensuring that its employees
are having fun doing their jobs rather than just going through the motions. While this is partly a selection
issue it is also a managerial challenge to find new and exciting ways to celebrate successes and
introduce a sense of fun and playfulness without letting the play get so far out of hand that it interferes
with the quality or safety of the guest experience. Most people like to celebrate, and employees are no
different.

Employ the Guest

Just as organizations can benefit from thinking of their employees as customers or guests, they can also
benefit from thinking of their customers as employees. This gives the organization a different way of both
looking at and thinking about their customers if they define them as quasi-employees.

Customer-employees can serve several important functions. They can give helpful feedback to the
organization regarding their level of satisfaction with the guest experience. In effect, they can be
knowledgeable unpaid consultants. Guests are typically part of the service environment and help create
the service experience for other guests. If being surrounded by other guests is an important part of each
guest's experience, then how the guests are employed in helping to create each other's experience
becomes an important part of the management process.

Most importantly for hospitality organizations, customers can often be allowed, encouraged, and trained
to coproduce the service experience. They can actually create the salad they like at the salad bar, clean
up their own trash at the quick-serve restaurant, or check themselves out of the hotel. This coproduction
strategy can benefit both the customer and the hospitality organization. The organization saves on labor
costs, and knowledgeable customers are likely to get the hospitality experience served "their way"
because they helped to produce it. Plus, they don't have to wait for service because they're producing it
themselves.

SYSTEMS

The last S is all the organizational systems that support the guest experience. The best people in the
world trained to perfection can't satisfy a guest if they deliver a bad product or deliver a good product late.
In a huge, complex system like Walt Disney World Resort or a simple system like Ralph's Restaurant
down on the corner, the whole system needs to be carefully managed so the right product is delivered to
guests as they expect it to be. Guests don't care that the bed sheets are not clean yet because the
laundry broke down, that the organization forgot to rotate its stock so the eggs went bad, or that the
person responsible for solving their problem is on break. They just want hot, fresh, properly cooked eggs,
a clean room and a comfortable bed after a tough day on the road, and someone who will respond
promptly to a legitimate concern. If these things don't happen, then the production system, the support
system, the information system, or the organizational system has failed, and someone had better fix it
fast.

Systems and Guestology

The most highly developed applications of guestology can be found in the systems area. Models of guest
behavior in many situations can be built and used to understand and predict the ways in which the
organization can satisfy the guest's expectations. Simulations are an important technique for doing this,
and with the decreasing costs of computers and increasingly user-friendly software packages, simulations
will become more available and relevant to all types of hospitality organizations.

Once the planning process has gotten the design right and the measurement systems are in place to get
guest feedback, the stage is set to use simulations of the entire guest experience to see if it all works as a
system. By knowing what guests will do, Disney can make sure that the right capacity has been built into
attractions and all other features in the park, from rest rooms to telephones to merchandise outlets, to
handle the number of guests expected on the design day. The design-day selection and the parameters
used for the design day (such as the fifteen-minute average wait) drive the rest of the capacity decisions
to ensure that the "designed" experience can be provided to the guests. Since the Disney design day is
set at a high level of attendance, most guests on most days will experience a betterthandesign-day
experience because the lines will be shorter than designed capacity, everywhere from rest rooms to the
best attractions.

The Wait

In many hospitality organizations, the most visible part of the guest experience is the wait for service. The
wait system, therefore, requires extra organizational time and attention to ensure that the inevitable waits
are tolerable and within the limits guests will accept without becoming dissatisfied. Waiting periods are
easily modeled and studied with simulation techniques and easy-to-use computer software. Everything
from the number of urinals at a football stadium to the number of front-desk agents at a hotel to the
number of seats on an airline route or theme park attraction can be simulated based on guest demand
data. If you know how many guests are coming to your place of business and can estimate a predictable
distribution to represent their arrival patterns and times for service, modeling how the waiting experience
can be managed and balanced against capacity is relatively simple.

The management of waiting time is important both from the capacity standpoint and the psychological
standpoint. Since few organizations can build enough capacity to serve peak demand periods, and few
hospitality organizations have the ability to stockpile their mostly perishable and intangible product,
managing the wait is critical for all hospitality organizations. The greater the perceived value of the guest
experience, the longer the guest will wait. Again, this area is susceptible to empirical research; how long
guests will wait for anything before they give up and leave can be studied, measured, and understood.
Disney knows that guests are willing to wait much longer for a "thrill" ride like Space Mountain than for the
Country Bear Jamboree.
The management of strategy, staffing, and systems is the key to guest service excellence. They all count
in creating the guest experience, and they are all related. Making any strategic change will necessarily
impact the service product, the environment, and the service delivery system. It all starts with the guest.

HOSPITALITY AND THE FUTURE

People Making the Difference

The division between those hospitality organizations that figure out how to engage the entire employee
and those who use employees only from the neck down will widen. Value added to guest experiences
through the skills of employees providing them will become a more important differentiating strategy as
the decreasing costs and increasingly available technology make the hospitality product and service
delivery system components (except for people) increasingly easy to duplicate and emulate by all
competitors. If all burgers taste alike, then the "feel-good" part of the burger service experience becomes
an increasingly important part of the total. Advertising alone can't provide this difference and in fact may
be counterproductive if guests don't get what the glowing ads lead them to expect. Cast members will
make the difference between Disney and competing guest experiences, and the quality of cast member
encounters with guests will determine whether Disney experiences are disappointing, satisfactory, or
wow, magical-moment service experiences that build the positive word of mouth and repeat business that
Disney and almost everyone else depends on in the hospitality industry. If your guests are at least 70
percent repeat customers, as is true at the Walt Disney World Resort, you must be doing something right,
and if their continued repeat business is vital to your organization's survival, you had better find a way to
keep doing it.

Service or Price

Service organizations will increasingly compete on service or compete on price. A successful group of
organizations in every service sector will seek to add value to each guest service experience (like a Ritz-
Carlton) or seek to define value on price alone (like a Red Roof Inn). By making sure that they focus on a
particular niche of the market, advertising to that niche what it will do for them and then doing it very well,
these companies (like a Southwest Airlines) will thrive. The effective use of new technology and
techniques in the service delivery system will allow those organizations emphasizing price as their
strategy for attracting their market niche to succeed in appealing to and satisfying the price-conscious
market segment. The efficient users of high technology will find ways to offer low prices and still make
money. The high end of the various service markets will succeed for the same reasons. They too will use
technology, but for them technology is only a means to the end of providing the maximum amount of
service their guests have come to expect at a price that is reasonable for the service level. Both types of
organizations will rely on technology to deliver the best value to their guests in the most efficient way.
They will, consequently, make money through their efficiency where the less efficient competitor will fail.
They can increasingly customize the product to each guest's expectations at the price point plus offer a
little bit more as they can provide their employees with the necessary information to personalize the
service in a prompt, friendly, and efficient way.

The hospitality businesses in the mass market between these two ends of the spectrum will have the
most difficult challenge in the future as many are already having today. They will be challenged in offering
guest services as personalized as the service-oriented firms in the marketplace have been able to offer
and which guests now expect, while providing the low prices which the price-oriented firms in a
competitive marketplace have also led guests to expect. This middle group of organizations seeking to
serve the mass market may do neither very well. They may find themselves in the position of
overpromising and underdelivering, which is not the way to have satisfied, loyal, or repeat guests.

Keeping Promises

The excellent guest service organizations of the future will use every tool at their command to figure out
what the guest wants and then provide it in a way that is consistent with the guest expectations of value
and quality. If they promise a high-quality experience and friendly service, they had better provide them or
the customers will not come back. Most service organizations depend on repeat business, and to fail their
guests will cost them dearly in a competitive marketplace. Once you tell your customers what you will do
for them, you've made a commitment and a promise. If the promise is broken or the commitment
unrealized, guests will be unhappy and will tell everyone they know how unhappy they are. Few
organizations can afford to break their promises, and the more a guest service organization depends
upon repeat business, the less chance it can take of violating that trust. Information and opinions about
service quality are freely available now and will become more so in the future. If a dissatisfied guest posts
a negative comment on the Internet about your service, that comment may be readily accessible on a
computer somewhere forever. Computers can be programmed never to forget, and the more they are
involved in helping customers make selections among guest service providers, the more critical it is to
avoid failing the guest. Disney now has an employee whose only job is to monitor the Disney discussion
groups on the Internet to detect and hopefully correct guest complaints and false rumors that show up on
this powerful communication medium. A job classification that didn't even exist ten years ago will become
an increasingly important part of the organization's communication strategy as it seeks to avoid the
negative word of mouth that can now travel almost instantly across cyberspace to the entire world.

Yesterday's Wow

The future will be information management, people management, increasing ability to understand what
each guest really wants (a "market niche of one" that allows the organization to build a relationship with
each guest), and focusing on the organizational core competencies that satisfy these guest expectations.
The future will also bring forth more knowledgeable customers with ever-rising expectations. The more
competitors in the marketplace try to outdo each other in providing wow experiences, the more familiar
these experiences will become. Yesterday' s wow becomes today's expected minimal level of service.
Hospitality managers will need to engage the entire organization in constantly reviewing all aspects of the
guest service product, the environment, and the service delivery system to find new and, hopefully, not
easily duplicated features that add the wow.

Server-Customer Interaction

The easiest and most fruitful area in which to develop these features is in the interaction between servers
and customers, where hospitality employees can make a wow experience happen. The challenge here is
to empower them without jeopardizing the quality and consistency of the service product. Human error is
inevitable, and the need to blend technology and people to provide a high-tech and high-touch experience
of consistently high quality will be the biggest and most interesting challenge for the future guestologist.

LEADERS AND THE FUTURE

Leading from the Front

We conclude by stressing an idea that has been implied throughout this book: managers must lead
employees toward excellence. The importance of the leader in hospitality organizations cannot be
overemphasized. The leader is the symbol of what the organization stands for and believes. If the leader
doesn't lead, all the efforts to discover the key drivers that cause the customer to seek out a particular
hospitality experience, the expense of designing the service delivery system, and the effort to recruit and
train the best people are wasted. Every day and in every way the leader must set the example and show
all employees what their value is to the organization and to creating the hospitality experience.

Everyone wants to feel that what they do has value and meaning to a purpose larger than enriching a
company's top executives and stockholders. Leaders not only inspire their employees to realize their
individual worth to the organization; they also help employees see what contributions they make to the
greater good by doing their jobs with excellence. Telling people how important it is that they do their jobs
well is not enough. All employees must understand and believe that their contributions make a difference
and that doing well whatever they do is vital.
All Jobs and People Have Value

Many organizations make efforts in this direction but, once again and finally, few do it as well as Disney.
The Disney organization has inspired its employees to believe they are responsible for creating happiness
for many who need it and many who would not otherwise have it. The tremendous publicity they give to
the "Give Kids the World" foundation and related ventures is not only a good thing to do but it also
inspires the people inside Disney that what they do is important and has value beyond the individual jobs
they perform. The company reinforces this idea with the regular use of terms related to a theatrical
production, such as good show, bad show, on stage, off stage, and cast members. These terms
constantly remind all employees that what they are doing has a greater purpose than merely sweeping up
guest trash, working at a hamburger stand, or cleaning bathrooms. Each job has value and the person
doing the job has value because of the contribution to the larger purpose. This is a vital part of inspiring
people not only to do a job but to do it with pride and commitment. Obviously, not every employee or cast
member will be deeply affected, but this idea is planted in so many employees' minds that it creates the
strong cultural reinforcement that focuses everyone's attention on producing an "excellent show" for each
guest. This is a powerful leadership technique and a valuable way to ensure that everyone stays focused
on the guest.

Leaders, Employees, Guests, and the Larger Purpose

The lessons behind these leadership techniques are simple but worth recalling at this point. Each reader
of this book has aspirations to lead, or why bother studying the management of hospitality organizations?
Here is a chain of relationships as conceived in the early 1990s by Walt Disney Attractions CEO Judson
Green: The commitment and enthusiasm of great organizational leaders will lead to involvement and
passion among organizational members. (1) Leaders find ways to provide jobs that are fun, fair, and
interesting. Leaders establish a culture of guest service excellence and reinforce it by word, deed, and
celebration. Leaders give value to employees by showing them they are valued for both their contributions
to the organization and to the larger purpose toward which the organization aspires. Leaders have the joy
and the responsibility of making it all happen: happy, motivated servers, wow guest experiences,
delighted and loyal guests who return repeatedly and form the foundation of organizational business
success.

We have often used Disney as the benchmark, the standard, the reference point, so it is fitting that we
conclude by showing what value Disney places on its leaders. From the beginning, Disney intuitively felt
that a direct relationship must exist between leadership behaviors, the cast member experience, the guest
experience, and customer loyalty. Eventually the organization was able to support the intuition
statistically. According to Disney executives Craig Taylor and Cindy Wheatley-Lovoy,
We have long known that a direct, measurable relationship exists
between how cast members feel about their jobs and how that gets
translated into the level of service they provide. Creative,
high-quality service for guests links directly to their intent to
visit us again--a key part of Disney's success.... We can now
verify statistically what we believed intuitively five years ago:
There is a direct link between leadership behaviors and a quality
cast experience, a quality guest experience, and our business
success. The correlation is strong and specific. (2)

Taylor and Wheatley-Lovoy conclude, "In the business units in which cast members rate their leaders as
outstanding in such behaviors as listening, coaching, recognition, and empowerment, the guest
satisfaction ratings are the highest." (3)

The Leader's Challenge: Blending It All Together--Seamlessly

Finally, the leader blends together the strategy, staff, and systems so that everyone knows how and why
to concentrate on the guest. The strategy must be right, the staffing right, and the systems right if the
combined effort is to succeed in providing the outstanding guest experience the organization is in
business to provide. If the leader sees that any element is not contributing to the employee's ability to
provide outstanding experiences, the leader will fix it or have it fixed. Just as the organization wants to fix
any guest problem that detracts from the guest experience, the outstanding leader wants to fix any
employee problem that detracts from that employee's ability to provide an outstanding guest experience.

Figure 14-1 below sums up all the elements that leaders must manage if they are to meet this challenge
effectively. They must:

* Define an organizational vision of what guest segment is to be served and what service concept will best
meet their expectations.

* Select employees with service-oriented attitudes and train them in the necessary skills.

* Create and make available the incentives that will motivate empowered employees to provide
unsurpassed guest service.

* Ensure that employees have the proper resources to provide outstanding service.

* Design specific delivery systems that translate plans, employee skills, and resources into an experience
that meets guest expectations and perhaps even wows the guest.

* Provide the measurement tools that allow employees (and coproducing guests) to see how well they are
doing in providing the targeted or desired guest experience.
Figure 14-1 Leadership Keys: Achieving the Best for the Guest.

Skills + Incentives + Resources + Delivery System + Measurement -


Vision = Unfocused Employees = Unfocused Service = Confused Guests

Vision + Incentives + Resources + Delivery System + Measurement -


Skills = Untrained Employees = Probable Failed Service = Disappointed
Guests

Vision + Skills + Resources + Delivery System + Measurement -


Incentives = Unmotivated Employees = Lackluster Service = Disillusioned
Guests

Vision + Skills + Incentives + Delivery System + Measurement -


Resources = Unsupported Employees = Inadequate Service = Complaining
Guests

Vision + Skills + Incentives + Resources + Measurement - Delivery


System = Unreliable Employees = Unreliable Service = Unsatisfied Guests

Vision + Skills + Incentives + Resources + Delivery System - Measurement


= Uninformed Employees = Inconsistent Service = Unfulfilled Guests

Vision + Skills + Incentives + Resources + Delivery System +


Measurement = Unsurpassed Employees = Wow Service = Delighted Guests

Measurement is critical for ensuring that all the other factors are correctly focused on achieving the best
for the guest. If you don't know how you're doing, you don't know if you need to do better, so you don't
know how to do better. If you try to improve guest service, you don't know if you have succeeded.

The chart in Figure 14-1 shows how the guest and the guest's experience can be negatively affected
when any one of these important leadership keys is missing or forgotten. Negative effects will not always
occur. Just as service failures happen in the best-managed organizations, so can the frontline staff of
poorly managed organizations sometimes provide successful guest experiences in spite of the
organization and its faults. When one or more leadership keys are missing, however, the chances of
consistent service success are reduced. The exact effect on the guest experience may not be predictable
in precise terms, but it will not be a happy one.

The chart shows the effects that a missing leadership element can have on employees for a reason.
Although managers will do as good a job as they can of managing the nonhuman elements, their ability to
change them may be limited. If the dining room is already constructed and the kitchen equipped and set
up, the manager may not be able to do much managing of the guest service environment and the
mechanical parts of the delivery system. In a way this is good news; it enables managers to focus on the
people part of the guest experience: the guests as part of the environment for each other, the guests as
they participate in creating their own experiences, the servers as they try to contribute to outstanding
experiences, the back-of-the-house employees as they provide what their internal server-guests require.
These many and ever-changing elements of the guest service situation require and deserve each
manager's attention; using a theme restaurant as an example, perhaps it is fortunate that the elaborate
fantasy setting and the frying system don't require moment-to-moment attention as the people do.

If the organization's leaders lack an overall vision of a target market and its expectations, this lack will be
communicated from the top throughout the culture and may lead to unfocused service; servers are not
sure exactly what they are trying to achieve, and guests received mixed messages and inconsistent
experiences. If managers put untrained people in guest contact positions, service failures and
disappointed guests are probable. If incentives are lacking or inappropriate, unmotivated employees will
simply go through the motions of providing lackluster service experiences. Failure to provide resource
support for people in both the front and the back of the house will prohibit even a motivated and guest-
focused front line from providing adequate service. Similarly, flaws in the delivery system will keep the
best of personnel from providing reliably satisfactory guest experiences, much less experiences that
delight; as the saying goes, "a bad system will defeat a good person every time." Finally, if levels of
service quality and guest satisfaction are not measured, employees will be frustrated by not knowing
whether the guest experiences they are providing are achieving the organizational service vision or not,
so in a hit-or-miss fashion, they will continue to provide inconsistent service.

Only when they are all in place can the leader be effective in enabling and empowering employees. Only
then can empowered employees provide the wow experiences that fulfill the organizational vision of
providing remarkable service to delighted guests.

The leaders of each hospitality organization have an awesome responsibility and challenge. It is these
people who must motivate and empower employees to do what must be done to create the guest
experience with excellence. A poorly manufactured car can be recalled for a retrofit; a bad guest
experience is a bad guest experience forever. A tire can be inspected many times by trained quality
control engineers before it is sold; a guest experience cannot be inspected because it does not even exist
for inspection before it is provided. The guest experience must be right the first time, or the server must
be empowered to fix any problems on the spot.

Every manager from the chief executive officer to the frontline supervisor must ultimately make sure that
all this happens, that employees feel good about what they are doing, that they convey this feeling to
guests, and that guests leave knowing the experience was worth every penny paid and maybe a little bit
more. Leadership makes the difference between success and failure in today's hospitality organizations,
and it will make the difference in the future. This is the leadership challenge.

BEGINS--AND ENDS--WITH THE GUEST

By now, you may be reciting the components of the guest experience in your sleep: service product plus
service setting plus service delivery system. But isn't something or someone missing? If that is a model of
the guest experience, where is the guest? Obviously you can't have a guest experience without a guest to
experience it. That's the whole point; without the guest to initiate it, the components that the organization
has assembled--the carefully designed service product, the detailed and inviting setting, the highly
trained, motivated servers, and the finest back-of-the-house people and facilities--are just an experience
waiting to happen. Throughout this book, we have made the point that it all starts with the guest. We think
it fitting that we conclude by saying: it all ends with the guest, too!

Lessons Learned

1. Train employees to think of the people in front of them as their guests.

2. Start with the guests, both external and internal.

3. Build a strong culture and sustain it with stories, deeds, and actions.

4. Manage all three parts of the guest experience.

5. Articulate a vision, transcending any single job, that gives all employees a sense of value and worth in
what they do.

6. Organize, staff, train, and reward around the guest's needs.

7. If it is critical to organizational success, measure it carefully and then manage it carefully.

8. Create jobs that are fun, fair, and interesting.

9. Keep in mind the strong relationship between happy, satisfied employees and happy, satisfied guests.

10. Prevent every service failure you can, find every failure you cannot prevent, and fix every failure you
find-every time and, if possible, on the spot.

11. Exceeding guest expectations today may not even meet them tomorrow.

12. Never stop teaching; inspire everyone to keep learning.

Case Studies

The Penland Heights Resort

Nestled in the mountains of western North Carolina, the


luxury-level Penland Heights Resort has been family owned for
generations. The employees have also been members of families who
have served the guests of the Penland Heights for all those
generations. They and Tom and Laura Lunsford, the owner-operators,
have taken a familial pride in providing the most outstanding guest
service in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

For many years, the Penland Heights was the only employer in the
mountain town of Penland. Then progress began to encroach on the
town, in the form of fast-food outlets, video stores, tourists, and
Florida families who picked off the prime mountain locations as
sites for modernistic chalets. The Penland Heights maintained its
dignity and its superiority, but the employees on whom the Heights
had counted for so long were getting older, and the new generation
just did not seem to have the same service values as their elders.
Yet, what could the Penland Heights do? Most of the young people
left the area as soon as they graduated from high school. Only the
younger family members of the aging employees chose to stay in
Penland, to work at the Penland Heights.

Tom and Laura Lunsford dreaded the day when they and their
guests would have to depend on "the new generation," and as had to
happen, eventually the more youthful employees outnumbered the
long-time loyal employees. The time also came that the service for
which the Heights had long been famous began to slip. The senior
Lunsfords felt that the new generation just did not have the
service values of their older family members. The Penland
management had empowered the older folks to a high degree and were
happy to do so. They thought that they would have to exert much
more control over their sons and daughters; otherwise the old
resort would soon be on the auction block.

Their daughter Granada told them they were wrong. "These are
great kids. They love this old barn of a place. Sure, their ideas
... our ideas ... are different from yours. But this world and this
business are different from what they were when you were younger
and took over the Heights. If you give us kids a chance, we will
not only hold the line; we can bring the Penland Heights back to
the level of the glory days."

1. What are the basic leadership issues in this case?

2. What leadership skills must Tom and Laura Lunsford either


have or acquire to continue managing this hotel successfully under
the changed social, cultural, and economic conditions of the
times?

3. Do you think Tom and Laura, who are intelligent, well


meaning, experienced, and highly motivated but somewhat old
fashioned, are sufficiently adaptable to fit in with the "new
breed" of employees? Can these old dogs learn new tricks? Or in all
probability does the future of hotel leadership lie with their
daughter Granada who, even though inexperienced, is more in tune
with the times?

The Hotel Kitchen


Jean Crine, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America,
works in a hotel kitchen as a sous chef. Unlike some hotel
restaurants, which seem to exist only so that their hotels can
refer to themselves as "full service," this restaurant is the best
in a fairly large city. Crine and a few other women hold
responsible positions in the hotel, but most of the significant
positions are held by men.

Crine shares a kitchen with the executive chef, three chefs, and
two assistant chefs, all males. The atmosphere in the kitchen was
very relaxed and was more social than professional until Crine was
hired. When the executive chef isn't around, the other chefs tend
to treat Crine like a little sister--teasing her about her
clothing, her hair, her formal training (they all learned on the
job), mistakes in her work, what she ate for lunch, and her
lifestyle. She has expressed her annoyance at this patronizing
treatment, but her irritation has only prompted an increase in the
teasing.

On one occasion, Jean noticed an assistant chef (subordinate in


organizational level to her) tossing a large salad without wearing
the required rubber gloves. She politely asked him not to do so. He
responded by sticking a handful of garlic dressing into her mouth.
She retaliated by dumping a jar of olives on him. Some of the olive
juice splashed onto a chef working on the other side of the sink.
He grabbed Crine and started shaking her. She told him to remove
his hands, and he yelled that no woman would tell him what to do.
The assistant chef was also yelling that no woman would tell him
how to toss a salad. On another occasion, one of the chefs put a
picture of a woman wearing only a chef's hat on the kitchen wall.
Crine asked him to remove it, but he refused. Crine spoke to the
executive chef, who made the chef take the picture down. He was
furious.

The chefs complain that Crine is outspoken, easily offended,


domineering, and rebellious. They claim she is the cause of all
disharmony in the kitchen and detrimental to morale and production.
The executive chef has spoken severely to her about her tendency to
"overreact."

Concerning the incident with the salad, Crine maintains that the
assistant chef's sticking garlic dressing in her mouth was
inexcusable and that her reaction was normal for any person with
self-respect. She insists upon her right to be treated as a
professional by her coworkers, despite their apparent feeling that
women are not equal in ability to men. She feels that to tolerate
treatment as an inferior in the world of high cuisine would put an
end to her career.

Recently, Crine returned to the kitchen after a two-day absence.


She remarked that it was good to see everyone again. One of the
chefs replied, "Too bad the feeling isn't mutual. I wish you hadn't
come back."

1. How could the organization have avoided this problem?

2. To what extent if any has Crine brought on her own


difficulties? Or do you view her purely as the victim in the
situation?

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