"Everybody
can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have
a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject
and verb agree to serve. You only need to have a heart full of
grace. A soul generated by love." Martin Luther King Jr
How true this is. Have you ever
wondered why some organisations are able to provide an
exceptional service experience when other equally resourced
organisations can’t? Ever had a wonderful experience in a
two star hotel and a lousy experience in a five star hotel?
Could it have been something to do with the people who served
you?
I
remember a visit to Disney in Florida. I was attending a
conference on creative leadership and my wife came along with
me. We stayed on after the conference to experience Disney
and during the visit it was my wife’s birthday. Some of
our relatives and friends, knowing we were going to be away, had
sent birthday cards in advance and these were duly packed,
unopened into her suitcase. On her birthday, the cards
were opened and displayed in our hotel bedroom. When we
returned after a day in the theme park, there sitting at the end
of the bed was a little dog sculptured out of towels and pinned
to it was a note saying “Happy Birthday Elaine from Mags, your
room maid”.
How many times have I told this
story? Many, and each time Disney gets advertised and
recommended as does their hotel, the Grand
Floridian. The room maid
was one of those people that Martin Luther King was referring
to, and OK, she earned a little extra tip at the end of our
stay.
When we talk about great customer
experiences, those memories of great value that last and get
passed on to others, it is invariably the people involved who
created those memories.
Psychologists
agree that personality drives behaviour which then drives work
and business success. This applies right through an organisation
from leaders to front line staff. Personality is about 50%
the result of genes (nature) and about 50%
the result of the way someone was
brought up
(nurture). So the adage
‘hire for attitude, train for skill’ is absolutely right. But
most businesses don’t do it. They ‘hire for experience, or
intelligence, or aptitude (or simply availability)’ and then try
to ‘train for attitude (or behaviours)’. And that doesn’t work.
So how can you populate your
organisation with people that have a ‘natural ability’ for
service. Well, first you need to recognise the
behaviours that are required for the style of service you want
to promote. How easy is that I hear you say?
Quality experiences don't "just
happen". They get orchestrated like a piece of music or a
play, note by note, scene by scene. So, if you are casting
for a play, do you just take the first dozen people who happen
to walk by? Of course you don’t, you audition. And
as a critical part of the audition process you are matching the
applicants personality to the character he/she will play.
Once the person has got the part, then the rehearsals begin.
Great, if you are opening a new play
or setting up a new business. But how do we develop our existing team
to deliver extraordinary customer experiences, when some of them
were recruited because they were the only ones that applied for
the job and you were desperate for a pair of hands. At
Catlow Consulting we have been studying behaviour and what makes
great service for a number of years. We have been looking
at organisations from the outside in for quite a time. We
have developed what we call the “One Team Approach”, which looks
at your people just like you would look at the cast of a play or
the musicians in a symphony orchestra.
Experience shows that introducing
the “One Team Approach” really works,
because your customers will soon notice and
tell you. It also allows you
to implement any new service more effectively and efficiently,
and even makes the not so well thought out ones work well
too. It enables managers to concentrate their efforts in the
right places, on the people that are doing a great job, instead
of in the wrong places, on those that aren’t (which is where
they often spend most of time if you’ve hired the wrong people).
Above all, it makes being at work a pleasure, with everyone
helping each other and doing their best to deliver those quality
service experiences.
It’s no co-incidence that at Disney, employees are called "cast members", an interview is called "an audition" and when they go to work they are "on stage".