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Customer Experience Experts Wanted

Customer Experinece Wanted: #1 In a Series

Customer experience, or “CX” in industry parlance, is the real-world outgrowth of UX, User Experience. While this seems ironic, if not absolutely bass-ackward, the big players in the consumer space figured that if online user experiences were so important, maybe offline user experiences might matter, too.

For decades big business has been paying lip service to customer service. (United Airlines, anyone?) Companies legendary for their customer service, like Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines and Ritz Carlton, were in short supply. That’s why these superstars turn up again and again whenever customer loyalty and customer service are discussed.

Now research has quantified the benefits of improving customer service. In their book Outside In, Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning of Forrester Research document the dawning understanding on the part of Fortune 500 companies that there really is a competitive advantage and when you deliver superior customer service.

This is why, when I enter Wells Fargo Bank today, I feel like I’m entering the set of a musical entitled The Happiest Bank in the World. I am greeted with smiles and hellos, walking through a veritable gauntlet of friendly, well-groomed folks. Even the security guy brought my dog some water on our last visit. When I visit the branch, which is increasingly seldom, I look for my business banking specialist Gustavo so I can say hello. It’s a little bewildering, how happy they all are–after all, it’s a bank–but it has done wonders for my perception of the Wells Fargo brand.

I co-founded one of the country’s first day spas, Preston Wynne, and operated it for thirty years. I recently hung up my spa spurs, but what got me up in the morning for those 360 months was the opportunity and challenge of creating customer delight.

For every minute of that company’s existence, it has been about delivering memorable and satisfying “CX.” (Not even I can resist the allure of this bite size acronym.)

Our mission statement was short and sweet: “Do everything in our power to enable our guests to feel absolutely wonderful, whether they’re calling us on the phone or visiting us for the day.”

Easier said than done, we know. Even with 50 employees, infusing that idea into everyone’s behavior every minute of every day was a work in progress. It is something akin to a spiritual practice–the work is never actually done. We fail in new ways constantly, learn from that, and refine our approach, including customer service protocols, over and over.

Great CX begins with great people. Our strategy was to hire people with personality attributes that not only enabled them to create a superior CX but literally compelled them to do it, as described in the customer service best-seller Who’s Your Gladys? How to Turn Even the Most Difficult Customer into Your Biggest Fan, where we were profiled along with service legends like Thai airlines.

The most important characteristics:

  • empathy
  • positive outlook (glass half full)
  • resilience
  • sense of humor
  • good self esteem

How do you figure out if the person who’s applying for a job with your company possesses these traits?

  • Interview the holy heck out of them (and ask the right sort of questions)
  • Expose them to lots of different people in your organization and get their take
  • Have them do a paid audition for a few days
  • Check references. Good people have fans who are willing to sing their praises.
  • “Hire slow and fire fast,” recognizing that if it’s not a honeymoon to begin with, it never, ever gets better.

One shortcut to finding the right customer care specialists is to use a social-style categories, such as DISC or Myers-Briggs. We made use of a system that classifies people as either relationship-driven or results-driven. (Guess who gives better customer service?) Then those subsets are broken down as risk-takers (who don’t really care what others think of them) and those who are risk averse (who fear rejection.)

The best social style for customer care is the Amiable style (relationship driven/risk averse.) Next best is Expressive (relationship driven/risk-taking) though they’re better salespeople and tend to make more mistakes when using systems or following protocols. Someone who’s halfway between the two is ideal. Too much fear of rejection can turn an employee into a puddle when facing an angry customer.

Next blog: Three ingredients of world class CX

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.

Seven Steps To Abundant Sales And Stellar Customer Service

Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery

 

  • 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, “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 training 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

Visit our Learning Academy and click on “Spa Concierge Finishing School“. The 4th unit in this online class will help you tackle these challenges.

Outside Is In

Outside is In

I was doing a hardhat tour of a new spa in the wine country yesterday, one we did the space plan for at the soon-to-reopen Hotel Yountville. (Yes, the teeny Napa Valley town whose restaurants are famed for possessing more Michelin Stars than most major cities.) I remember being a bit challenged by the dimensions of the floor plate as I was working on the design a year ago. But as I walked through it yesterday, I was delighted by what I saw.

Interior architect Lisa Holt of DLS Hotels, our client, did an impressive job of creating a light-filled, airy and charming interior as she took my design from two to three dimensions. Lisa has been an enthusiastic spa visitor and has actually owned and operated a small luxury hotel and spa with her husband and DLS partner David Shapiro.

Fortunately, one direction we could go was up. Lofty ceilings and spectacular, tall treatment room doors create a slightly Alice-in-Wonderland feeling.

In the wine country, the last place I want to be is a cave (unless it’s filled with champagne.) Lisa brought the outside in with extensive use of tall windows, repeating the elegant rhythms of the doors, and we designed small private garden sitting areas off each treatment room. Bringing the outside in takes a small footprint and helps it to live large. The wet areas of the spa give onto a lounging pool, extending the spa experience effortlessly outside.

Being able to get outside while at the spa is a real luxury, and even a little bit of outdoor space can enhance the guest experience dramatically. I know that I’m willing to spend more time at a spa when I can be outside sometime during my visit. Resorts usually get this right and plan for it from the outset, though I’m often surprised at how catacomb-y spa designs can be and cut off from the outside.

Outdoor space is not always an option, especially for day spas in retail settings. But sometimes an opportunity is right under our nose, in the form of ugly-duckling outdoor space that has become invisible to us through its very familiarity. It’s hard to look objectively at your own space, especially if you’ve been in it a long time, so sometimes it’s worth consulting with a designer to see what they “see.” One of my favorite publications for inspiration for small outdoor spaces is Sunset. They have a long tradition of outdoor makeovers that are simple, clever and inexpensive.

A few years ago we turned some found space on a second floor balcony at Preston Wynne Spa and turned it into a cabana-curtained loggia replete with cushy furnishings, outdoor rugs, and a private pedicure area for al fresco treatments. Five feet wide and thirty feet long, it was not useful for much of anything and surfaced with a very unattractive waterproofing seal. We added decking panels that sat atop the surface to create a more attractive foundation, and a fountain to muffle outside noise, as well as lush planter boxes (these also helped create more privacy.) With some soft goods (which are easy to refresh each year) it has become one of the most popular features of our spa.

Bonnie Waters at Changes Spa and Salon in Walnut Creek, California, found an unloved easement between a parking lot and the side of her building, a plain little patch of tanbark and forlorn shrubs. She convinced the building owner to allow her to use the space, which had no other purpose, and developed it as a charming outdoor terrace for her spa’s newly expanded retail and party room, screening it from the parking lot with landscaping. Because she couldn’t make permanent changes to the easement, she used decomposed granite with pavers set into the soil, rather than mortar.

Probably the best example of enhancing the guest experience with “found” outdoor space is at Osmosis Spa Sanctuary in Freestone, California. After years of operation as a landmark day spa specializing in Japanese enzyme baths, Michael Stusser, the visionary owner of Osmosis, carved a spectacular and authentic Japanese garden from a patch of creekside brush. This work of art is now the highlight of any visit to the spa and has created a remarkable identity for Osmosis.

I’m looking forward to experiencing the new spa at Hotel Yountville, inside and out, after our opening during Harvest season. Spas at their best reconnect us to nature and a more natural way of being. Outdoor space is often more than a sum of the parts; it’s always a great value-add.

Seven Steps To Abundant Sales And Stellar Customer Service

Spa Employees From Hell!

We posted this short, funny, customer service video on YouTube, showing common sales and service “horrors” that happen in spas and salons everywhere, ruining chances of retaining guests, rescheduling, and retailing. Each vignette illustrates a fatal flaw–some obvious, some more subtle–and all of them re-enactments of real spa employee behavior I’ve personally experienced. It’s a great clip to show at a spa staff meeting, and certain to get people talking.

When you’re ready for the horror to end, you’ll find each of these scenes, along with vignettes showing the proper way to “replay” each, available on DVD and mp4 format, titled Selvice: Seven Steps to Abundant Sales and Stellar Customer Service.

Please email us to receive a copy.

Thanks to BoomCycle Online Marketing for their stellar video editing on “Tales from the Spa.”

The Transforming Power Of Hospitality In Business

World Class? Not so fast.

In an increasingly virtual world, the “high touch” spas are one place consumers go for good old fashioned, live, hands on (literally) customer care. When our clients finally tear themselves away from their keyboards, PDAs and iPads, they’re ready to have their socks knocked off–by your employees.

Are they up to the challenge?

As we all know by now, the new generation of spa goer is the quintessential “tough room.” Millennials currently have a hair-trigger sensitivity about perceptions of slight and a penchant for ignoring their (grandmother’s) admonition, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say it at all.” Actually, they don’t say it. They go online.

Of course, all these dark thoughts used to stay trapped in a “thinks” bubble over the heads of your clients. Now their concerns, quirks and criticisms are out there, for all the world to see. And as you’ve heard me argue before, that’s good. We can learn from our mistakes faster, albeit in a public forum.

Embarrassing, yes? Efficient? You betcha. (Did you ever do the dumb thing again after the teacher called you to the front of the room?)

So, Ms. Spa Director, you’ve made some lofty promises about your team. And you’ve done some training. (“We had that training,” is one of my favorite phrases. Alas, training doesn’t work like a measles vaccine.)

Here’s one of the first challenges…have your staff members ever patronized a spa like yours (or better yet, yours)? How can you expect an employee who hasn’t actually been a guest of a five-star resort to know what they’re supposed to be creating? How can a receptionist in a renowned medical spa know what your patients are expecting? Would you trust a pastry chef to bake a fabulous chocolate torte if they’d never tasted chocolate? Begin your training program for any employee by having them start as a guest. (The prospective employees that research your spa by visiting as a guest first move to the front of the selection process!)

One of the core values of world class service is empathy, a trait common to people attracted to the spa industry. Individuals who are highly endowed with this trait will have an enormous leg up in creating a great service experience for your guests. Yet the road to lousy service is paved with good intentions. World class service requires, not just a good heart, but a lot of structure. A good head.

The best kind of structure is like training wheels: initially, you ask that a new employee follow protocols to a T. You ask that they get a manager’s approval for anything remotely “out of the box.” Then, as you watch them in action, observe their instincts, their judgement, you can gradually give them more latitude. Some people flunk out at this point. If an employee lacks horse sense, all the niceness in the world will not compensate.

Five-star, world class service is not nearly as regimented as you might think. Several years ago, Ritz Carlton hit a ceiling of service with their heavy reliance on scripting. The evolving “world class service consumer” doesn’t want a rigid formula. They want an artistic service experience. The CEO of Auberge Resorts believes that “at the five star level, guests don’t want scripting.”

At a certain point, after your employees have reproduced excellent service standards with consistency, it’s time to let them improvise. At that level, service truly becomes art.

The recipe for world class service is simple, but it’s not easy (thanks to Holly Stiel for that distinction.)

1. Hire people with outstanding core values, including empathy, mutual respect, personal integrity and healthy self esteem
2. Train them: formally, informally, by example, repeatedly, and by having them train others
3. Give them the opportunity to express their individuality and elevate their performance to art

Let’s look at #2: Training. We all agree it’s important. But in the “tyranny of the immediate” that rules busy spa operations, there’s often more lip service than action. Pulling everyone together for a group training (still the most effective way to train) can be next to impossible. But letting a staff member attend a webinar during “downtime” is something any spa can pull off, and sooner rather than later.

Ambitious initiatives can be expensive and have a short half-life. This leads to the very wrong conclusion that training doesn’t deliver adequate ROI. “World class” status can actually be achieved more easily by taking consistent, small and common-sense training steps. The key is measuring. “What gets measured, gets done,” as the saying goes. If you know that a front-line employee needs to complete three specific training sessions before he or she completes the New Employee Period, that’s simple. Enabling them to determine when and where those sessions take place, within a time period, makes it more likely that they’ll succeed.

The spa industry, following the lead of retail stores, is bifurcating into luxury and economy sectors. The middle has already begun to atrophy. Neither path is easy; one is a red ocean of endless discounting, the other a challenging world of ever-higher expectations. World class service, to paraphrase, is not a destination, but a journey.