American Spa Magazine Spa Consultant Of The Year

Thank you! American Spa Magazine 2010 Professionals Choice Awards

A resounding thank you to the readers of American Spa magazine, for naming me as one of your Favorite Spa Consultants for 2010! It’s been an privilege to be part of this industry for over 26 years. I join some marvelous company in this honor. A great way to end the year!

See the article here

Customer Experience Experts Wanted

Customer Service: Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery

You can find this training in our Learning Academy listed as

Part 4 of our Spa Concierge Finishing School.

Get your team trained in “extreme customer service” (just in time for the holiday rush.)

  • Are you confident in your employees’ ability to resolve guest complaints?
  • Do they know how to handle the inevitable issues that arise in a busy spa operation?
  • Are you certain that guests leave your spa satisfied?
  • When was the last time they received training in complaint resolution?

A great reputation has always been the best way to market a spa. But the internet has made superior customer service a crucial survival skill.

Web search is one of your top marketing modalities, and negative reviews can cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Our employee training webinar, “Moments of Truth: Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery” can give you a chance to economically and quickly get your team up to speed. The webinar is co-presented by Lisa Starr and Peggy Wynne Borgman. We include time for your questions at the end of the presentation.

Don’t let another month pass without inoculating your front line team against mediocre customer service, and common errors.

“The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled,” said the founder of Neiman Marcus. This webinar is designed to enable your front desk team to manage the inevitable mistakes and mishaps of a busy spa operation, while strengthening customer relationships and improving customer service. The adrenaline-charged moment when an upset customer complains is a make-or-break event for your business. Make sure your team doesn’t hide their heads in the sand–ensure that they will ride to the rescue of your reputation!

Agenda:
• Why your team must treat complaints as an opportunity
• 96% of your guests won’t complain; how to treat the 4% who do
• Using complaint resolution to improve relationships
• How online review sites have magnified the power of unhappy guests, and what to do about it
• Managing the “fight or flight” response when confronted by an upset customer
• The five steps to masterful complaint resolution
• Cultivating awareness: the ounce of prevention
• How to ask questions that get real answers from your guests
• Making it easy to complain
• How and when to apologize
• Helping the guest realize you’re “on their side”
• Avoiding the common mistakes of complaint resolution, including explaining, blame and scapegoating
• How to effectively manage a “venting” guest
• Techniques to improve your listening skills
• How to tell the difference between an upset and an abusive customer–and what to do about it
• Restoring a guest’s faith
• Making amends without giving away the store
• What most clients really want from “amends”
• The hidden danger in giving refunds too quickly
• What to do when your offer of amends is rejected by an upset guest
• How to prevent problems from recurring

Please check the Events and Learning Academy pages for our offered trainings.

 

ISPA

ISPA Day 2 Inspires & Motivates

Second full day of conference began with early morning  Professional Development Sessions.  Well, truth be told, it actually begins even earlier in the morning in the Precor Experience Center, or at the Greet the Day session, but due to the all of the parties and dinners the previous night, 6:30am does not have a lot of takers.  Excellent morning sessions were offered, including timely, actionable advice on using social media from Kathleen Turpel of Imaginal Marketing, who works with many beauty and spa businesses, and suggestions on incorporating stress management therapies into your life and spa menu from Brent Bauer, ISPA Board member and Mayo Clinic Associate Professor.

After the morning sessions, it was time to review and bid on Silent Auction items, which were incredibly numerous, and hit the show floor.  One of my interesting finds included Kumani Essentials, a new line of skin, body and haircare started by esthetician, massage therapist, aromatherapist and Spa Director Stacy Fader that is made with Fair Trade Certified shea butter, sourced in Burkina Faso.  These high-quality products allow spas to create effective signature treatments and address social responsibility concurrently.   Another new introduction is the Sidekick sunless tanning unit from Evolv, which along with advanced chemistry and engineering, offers the first-ever heated airbrush tanning technology.  Several vendors still had missing booths, due to a shipping snafu, but leave it to Boldijarre Koronczay of Eminence to turn that into a humorous marketing opportunity!

Afternoon Professional Development Sessions were all excellent, and I found myself bouncing among three topics; an up-to-the minute Global Trends panel moderated by Susie Ellis of SpaFinder and featuring Andrew Gibson, Liz Terry & Andrew Jacka; “Seven Financial Habits of Highly Successful Spas,” always timely and relevant financial advice dispensed by John Korpi and Ryan Crabbe, and a very informative Risk Management lecture by field experts Lori Wood and Tony Hirsch of the Resort Hotel Association.  All of these sessions were valuable, and in particular Ellis’s just released 10 trends to watch for 2011 gave us a taste of the year ahead.  Keep your eye out for the list, which is usually released in early December.  There were additional breakouts on social media and loyalty which were also reportedly terrific.  As usual, too many topics for one person to cover, you really do need to bring a team.

Our afternoon General Session featured the truly inspirational Doc Hendley, a tattooed bartender who, at the age of 30 started his own non-profit, Wine to Water, and to date his group has dug, repaired and sanitized drinking wells to supply water for 25,000 people in 5 Third World countries.  Hendley is a self-described “average guy” who took what he saw around him and turned it into something to benefit thousands of people and make a difference in the world.  His story of determination and willingness to undertake personal risk to accomplish his goal was one that made me think about the power that we all have within ourselves.

The 2010 ISPA Foundation Silent Auction took place after the general session, and raised more than $70k for the ISPA Foundation, which funds educational and research needs for the spa industry, and then everyone dispersed for more parties and dinners.

 

ISPA

Report from ISPA 2010, 20th anniversary edition.

Spa industry executives and vendors from around the globe are gathered in Washington D.C. for the 20th annual ISPA conference.  The conference is an annual “must-attend” for many due to the high quality educational breakouts, motivational keynotes, and networking opportunities.

Monday offered 10 Professional Development Sessions on a variety of topics.  Barry Moltz gave an impassioned presentation entitled “Customer Service is the New Marketing,” point being that now that customers are online talking about your business in so many channels, if you focus on providing high quality client experiences, the clients do the marketing for you.  Neil Ducoff gave a compensation presentation, and I was so happy to hear him mention the “sweet spot” of 30-35% of revenue for provider pay; as a country, we need to keep working on that.  There were other excellent presentations on marketing, communications, and menu engineering, and a “State of the Industry” session where ISPA shared 2010 performance statistics.  More on those in another blog!

The opening General Session is the first time during conference that all of the attendees convene in the same room, and we find a bag of spa products and goodies on each seat.  This year the bag was a little light on products, another sign of the tough economy, I suppose.  Or perhaps vendors do not feel that this mass giveaway is a worthwhile endeavor.  ISPA Chairwoman Jean Kolb greeted us, and then we enjoyed an unusual and inspirational story-telling session, using spoken words by Eric Saperston which were illustrated by the folky singing and guitar playing of Edwin McCain.  The message was, take the twists and turns your life journey presents you with and go with them.  Do what you love, follow your passion.  A story we’ve all heard before, but told in an imaginative way.

Following the General Session the Expo floor opened for the first time and we enjoyed wine and hor’s d’ouevres while greeting vendors and fellow conference attendees.  Some of the new innovations include a new treatment table, the Clodagh Libra, on which clients can receive manicures, pedicure,s facials and massages; skin and body products that smell and sound edible from Farmhouse Fresh; and exciting music management options from Imagesound Americas.

Tune in tomorrow for more on the ISPA Conference.

Oakworks Founder Jeff Riach shows off his wares

Spa Competition

Lisa Starr’s presentation, the Four Cornerstones of Spa Success

Lisa presented at Les Nouvelles Esthetiques in South Africa–she loved every minute of it. The vibrant spa community members she met there impressed her with their professionalism, vision and a real thirst for practical, real-world management education. Here’s the Powerpoint from her presentation at the conference, one of her top-rated and most impactful classes.

Questions and comments are always welcome!

Four Cornerstones Of Spa Success

Groupon-Groupoff

My reply to the Groupon rep who contacted me this week

Hi, Jane,

After evaluating the Groupon model we decided it was not a good fit for Preston Wynne Spa. I’ll explain exactly why, as I think it may be helpful for you to hear as you approach other companies in the spa and salon industry.

Spas need to be much more strategic about the number and type of clients we seek, and deep discounting is a crude tool at best. We have very high cost of sales because most of us pay our workforce when a service is done (either through a fee for service or by commission). This is not a model where you can add customers and and automatically increase profit, where modest incremental profit x volume = success, as in a movie theatre or bowling alley or whalewatching boat. Even a restaurant has indirect labor costs.

To us, there is no point filling our most popular and profitable times with Groupon customers, and Groupon did not, at the time, enable us to limit redemption periods to weekdays. (In fact, I got some attitude from Ms. XXXX, i.e. who said scornfully, “we’re not just here to sell your Tuesday morning at 9 a.m.”)

I will say that she produced one spa reference who *was* pleased with her Groupon promotion, but I don’t know the spa’s age or location, both factors that make a world of difference these days.

We are actually experimenting with an offer with one of your competitors, one that enabled us to control much more of the factors involved and targeted our prime demographic, not the Free World.

I am deeply, profoundly unconvinced that Groupon customers consist mainly of potentially solid, loyal potential clients. Discounting has not been shown to create loyalty in past studies done on this marketing modality. Discounting creates a relationship in which there is an expectation of further discounting. Discounting is a depressing, stunningly un-creative and ultimately zero-sum game. (There is always, as I tell my consulting clients, someone who is dumber or more desperate than you.) The participants in Spa Week, another periodic discount promotion, who have come to our spa were uniformly high maintenance and low performance. And they were self selected spa fans.

To me, Groupon and its host of imitators are simply feasting on the carcass of recession-battered, desperate small businesses. And if that is the recipe for the fastest growing company in history, God help us all.

*That’s* why we don’t want to play.

Jane, that’s probably more than you wanted to know, 😉 and I encourage you to pass my comments on to your management team.

Thanks!
Peggy Wynne Borgman

Mastering The Mindset Of World Class Service

FRONT DESK TRAINING, 2/20: Mastering the Mindset of World Class Service

World class service is no accident. To achieve this elevated level of guest care, you must start by grounding team members in the unique “mindset” that inspires top service organizations. Especially during a recession, team members don’t always exhibit the right attitude, or may not seem to be inspired, about delivering superior customer service. Yet it’s more important than ever, especially because spa visits are less frequent. Your customer’s expectations are high, and employee spirits may be low. This webinar will help you jump start team morale.

This fast paced live session, led by Wynne Business President Peggy Wynne Borgman, will inform, engage and inspire all spa personnel, regardless of their role. Recommended as a “core course,” it’s the perfect prelude to our skills training programs, such as “Mastering the Reservations Call.”  It’s a great way to kick off a service improvement project, meeting, or coaching session.

  • What is “world class” service?
  • What do customers value most and why is it so hard for most spas to deliver this?
  • How staging experiences differs from delivering services or filling orders. Getting out of the “transaction” mindset.
  • Guest expectations of their spa experience: are you prepared to deliver?
  • The three key components of world class service: Values, Systems and Art
  • The core values of great service providers
  • Structure: the sacred geometry that holds your spa together
  • The Power of Consistency: how Systems drive world class service
  • Art: How World Class service providers create delight
  • Understanding social styles and how they affect our communication with others–coworkers and clients alike
  • Techniques for achieving rapport quickly
  • Moments of Truth in World Class Service: how to survive the test

At just $99, about the cost of one comped service, you can’t afford to miss this session. Train four employees at one computer and the per-employee training cost is just $25. Please make sure you are using a computer with speakers, and check your volume level before the session begins.

 

 

Seven Steps To Abundant Sales And Stellar Customer Service

WEBINAR: Mastering the Mindset of World Class Service

Registration for this webinar is closed. 
You can find this training on our Learning Academy page as
Part 1 of the Spa Concierge Finishing School.

World class service is no accident. The first step toward achieving this elevated level of guest care is to ground team members in the unique “mindset” that inspires top service organizations. Are you concerned that team members don’t always exhibit the right attitude, or don’t seem to be inspired, about delivering superior customer service? This webinar is a great way to kick off a service improvement project, meeting, or coaching session. This fast paced webinar, recorded live with Lisa Starr and Peggy Wynne Borgman, will inform, engage and inspire all spa personnel, regardless of their role. Recommended as a “core course,” it’s the perfect prelude to our skills training programs, such as “Mastering the Reservations Call.”

  • What is “world class” service?
  • What do customers value most and why is it so hard for most spas to deliver this?
  • How staging experiences differs from delivering services or filling orders. Getting out of the “transaction” mindset.
  • Guest expectations of their spa experience: are you prepared to deliver?
  • The three key components of world class service: Values, Systems and Art
  • The core values of great service providers
  • Structure: the sacred geometry that holds your spa together
  • The Power of Consistency: how Systems drive world class service
  • Art: How World Class service providers create delight
  • Understanding social styles and how they affect our communication with others–coworkers and clients alike
  • Techniques for achieving rapport quickly
  • Moments of Truth in World Class Service: how to survive the test

Please check the Events and Learning Academy pages for our other offered trainings.

Mastering Complaint Resolution And Service Recovery

Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery

This training was offered as a webinar and is currently available online as Part 4 of the Spa Concierge Finishing School and also accessed on our Learning Academy page.
Below are the topics which are covered. 

Join us for this employee training session, co-presented by Lisa Starr and Peggy Wynne Borgman. We include time for your questions at the end of the presentation.

  • Are you confident in your employees’ ability to resolve guest complaints?
  • Do they know how to handle the inevitable issues that arise in a busy spa operation?
  • Are you certain that guests leave your spa satisfied?
  • When was the last time they received training in complaint resolution?

A great reputation has always been the best way to market a spa. But the internet has made superior customer service a crucial survival skill.

Web search is one of your top marketing modalities, and negative reviews can cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Our employee training webinar, “Moments of Truth: Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery” can give you a chance to economically and quickly get your team up to speed.

Don’t let another month pass without inoculating your front-line team against mediocre customer service, and common errors.

“The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled,” said the founder of Neiman Marcus. This webinar is designed to enable your front desk team to manage the inevitable mistakes and mishaps of a busy spa operation, while strengthening customer relationships and improving customer service. The adrenaline-charged moment when an upset customer complains is a make-or-break event for your business. Make sure your team doesn’t hide their heads in the sand–ensure that they will ride to the rescue of your reputation!
Download for unlimited use within your business.

Agenda:
• Why your team must treat complaints as an opportunity
• 96% of your guests won’t complain; how to treat the 4% who do
• Using complaint resolution to improve relationships
• How online review sites have magnified the power of unhappy guests, and what to do about it
• Managing the “fight or flight” response when confronted by an upset customer
• The five steps to masterful complaint resolution
• Cultivating awareness: the ounce of prevention
• How to ask questions that get real answers from your guests
• Making it easy to complain
• How and when to apologize
• Helping the guest realize you’re “on their side”
• Avoiding the common mistakes of complaint resolution, including explaining, blame and scapegoating
• How to effectively manage a “venting” guest
• Techniques to improve your listening skills
• How to tell the difference between an upset and an abusive customer–and what to do about it
• Restoring a guest’s faith
• Making amends without giving away the store
• What most clients really want from “amends”
• The hidden danger in giving refunds too quickly
• What to do when your offer of amends is rejected by an upset guest
• How to prevent problems from recurring

Please check the Events and Learning Academy pages for our offered trainings.
Spa Directors Management Intensive

Spa Director’s Management Intensive 2011

 

If you own, manage, or plan to open or acquire a spa, this program is a must!

Presented by Lisa M. Starr and Peggy Wynne Borgman of Wynne Business Spa Consulting

 

If you’re already involved in spa operations, you’ll find solutions for your toughest management challenges. If you’re planning a facility, you’ll leave this program with a clear-cut strategy for business success. If you’re considering a career change or advancement into spa management, the Spa Director’s Management Program will put you miles ahead of the competition. This fast-paced, information-packed program is full of original, innovative but practical concepts that are actually at work in top spas. We work hard to make sure the days you spend with us are extremely rewarding. You’ll also take home our exclusive text, an incredible reference you’ll use again and again. This includes tools you’ll be able to put to use the day you return to work. You’ll have a chance to meet other spa industry professionals, a diverse group of people, from all over the world. Participants typically represent a variety of industries and greatly enrich the program with their input. You’ll create a support network that will prove invaluable as your business or career grows. The small size of the class ensures individual attention and maximum interaction.

Financial Management

  • Managing by the numbers: understanding financial statements
  • How productive is your spa? An accurate way to measure
  • Compensation Design: the key to profitability
  • Owner compensation: what’s fair?
  • Plugging the profit “leaks” in your spa operation
  • Discounting: is it right for your facility?
  • Staying out of trouble: proper accounting practices for spas
  • The raging gift market: taming the tiger

Marketing Mastery

  • “One-to-one” marketing: cheaper, better, faster
  • Customer retention: your best marketing tool
  • Calculating your actual cost of customer acquisition
  • A formula to instantly boost your sales by 33%
  • The power of PR: developing your media kit
  • Positioning your spa to survive intense competition
  • Essential components of great spa brochures

Successful Programs

  • Developing a compelling service program
  • Long-term programs: the new spa package
  • Programming for profit: which services to emphasize
  • Two key trends that must guide your program design
  • Staging spa experiences: the perils of packages
  • Workflow: managing its impact on quality and morale
  • Scheduling for maximum productivity.and quality

Leadership

  • Recruitment: effective strategies for hiring the best employees
  • Why the customer comes “second” in a successful spa
  • Why you’re doing everything yourself.and how to stop it!
  • Managing communications issues in your spa team
  • Why you can’t motivate your staff and what to do about it.
  • How to produce great staff meetings
  • Managing conflict between technical and support teams
  • Getting your support team to “think on their feet”

Quality Management

  • What customers value most: it may surprise you
  • How to manage quality in the “closed door” spa environment
  • The three essential ingredients of world class service
  • Training = quality: building your in-house program
  • How to instill a “quality” mindset in your entire team
  • Customer relations: resolving complaints
  • Comps, refunds and redo’s: how to use them wisely

Retail Success

  • Harnessing the awesome power of retail sales
  • Teaching spa therapists to sell
  • Tools and Techniques that support retail sales
  • Do you need a Home Care Consultant?
  • Creating a profitable retail mix
  • Retail Trends
  • The Spa Store: Visual Merchandising and Display
  • Mail order and online stores: Are you ready?

Seminar venue: The charming Inn at Saratoga, along the banks of Saratoga Creek in the historic village of Saratoga. Nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, the Inn at Saratoga is a peaceful Silicon Valley hideaway. Just 20 minutes from San Jose International Airport (SJC) and 50 minutes from San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

If you would like this course offered LIVE in your location, please reach out to us at seminars@wynnebusiness.com

to discuss or access our online Spa Directors Management Intensive here.