Follow These 5 Rules and Become a Customer Service Leader

No Matter What Business You’re In…

Does your customer care team deliver “Big Wow” and “Everyday Wow” moments? According to Micah Solomon in this recent Forbes piece points, customer service leaders do that. It’s part of their DNA. It’s all part of 5 core disciplines that companies like Ritz Carlton have been following for years. As a result, these organizations have become the standard bearers for superior customer experience.

If you would like to know more about how Skybridge Americas can help you deliver world-class care to your customers, please reach out. We would love to talk!

How To Bring Ritz-Carlton Caliber Customer Service To Any Type Of Business

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company is an evergreen model and benchmark for companies aiming to transform their customer experience and achieve an exceptional level of customer service.

In retail, for example, the Apple Store customer experience is strongly informed by what Apple learned from the Ritz-Carlton. You can see it in how Apple Store employees greet and guide incoming customers, in how hard they strive to avoid being merely transactional, and—most visibly–in the concept and design of their Genius Bar, which is a loving knockoff of a Ritz-Carlton concierge counter.

(The popularity of the Ritz-Carlton model is such that it affects my consulting practice as well–I’m a customer service turnaround expert and consultant–as I find myself fielding requests from businesses that want to become “the Ritz-Carlton of Banking,” “the Ritz-Carlton of hospitals,” “the Ritz-Carlton of software vendors,” “the Ritz-Carlton of Information Services,” “the Ritz-Carlton of Museums,” and so forth.)

In San Francisco last week, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the caretakers of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company’s service standards and culture, Yael Ron, the general manager of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco, a genuine landmark of its Nob Hill neighborhood.  Our conversation started out with a word of caution from Ms. Ron:

“To create an exceptional customer experience, you don’t start with the customer; you start with the employee. This surprises a lot of people, and a lot of people get this wrong,” says Ms. Ron. “The gemstones of our hotel are our Ladies and Gentlemen [Ritz-Carlton’s term for its employees]. We embrace them and support them, and we know we can count on them to nurture and grow the interactions with our guests.”

This is only one of the factors that make emulating the Ritz-Carlton not as straightforward as it may sound. So I asked Ms. Ron, who came to the San Francisco property after a sparkling career in hospitality in locations as disparate as Tel Aviv and Cleveland (or, as I like to think of it, “from the Middle East to the Midwest”), to share additional pointers.

She obliged me with five principles that are applicable to organizations, in any industry, that are striving to create a superior customer service experience, environment, and culture.

  1. Jealously guard the culture that defines you as an organization. “The Ritz-Carlton has always been about engagement and relationships.  But how do we keep it that way? It comes down to being a guardian of our culture at the individual property level, because if you don’t watch and nurture and embrace a culture, it can go away before you know it. You need to be investing in the team, in ways that keep the team on track to guard and grow the culture.”
  2. Engage customers when they want to be engaged. “At the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, we believe in building relationships.  But you build the relationship by engaging guests when they want to be engaged, not when it says on some branding checklist that we should be sure to engage them at a particular checkpoint.

“Take hotel check-in: If they want to rush through check-in, or use an automated check-in option, we will find time to share with them later, rather than slowing them down when they don’t want to be slowing them down.  The check-in experience isn’t necessarily the time or place where guests wish to be engaged, so we have to understand, respect and create alternative options to engage.”

Read the entire article here >

-Bobby Matthews

Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Skybridge Americas
bmatthews@skybridgeamericas.com

 


Find out how Skybridge Americas can help you delight your customers and grow your business.

We seamlessly integrate our superior customer care skills with your brand messaging. For more information, contact us at 763-299-4570 or submit our contact form.