The Million Dollar Greeting. Dan Sachs
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is about being on the other person’s side. So, by our definition, in order to provide great service to any group of people, we need to put ourselves in their shoes and figure out what they want and deliver on that kind of experience.” Communicating with empathy, however, can be tricky, especially for younger generations who have grown up communicating via text, Snapchat, and Facebook. Many of them haven’t had as much personal human interaction as earlier generations, so it can be difficult for them to imagine walking in a customer’s shoes. “In terms of millennials and what they’re looking for—it’s a low-touch, high-tech kind of interaction,” says Salgado.
Moreover, even when people are trained how to empathize, they need to know how to take the information they glean and convert it into action. As Salgado explains, “What does your demographic want? What does your individual customer want? You need to tailor that experience to match that desire.” If we accept that these are the right questions to ask about hospitality, then we can start to evaluate the tools that achieve hospitality success—primarily through understanding how leaders create an environment that fosters empathy with employees and, ultimately, customers. Mastering this equation can lead to a multitude of successes, both emotional and financial.
Starting Fresh
Have you ever thought about how many times you encounter service in your daily routine? I have, and what I’ve come to realize is that I provide or experience a “service” (the idea of helping or doing work for somebody else) multiple times throughout the day, starting as soon as my alarm clock goes off. Because my interactions with others—family, friends, coworkers, and strangers alike—dominate my day, they also set the tone for my own behavior, which then influences my attitude toward others. This idea is nothing new, but it’s very easy to lose track of how significantly our own actions can affect the people around us and vice versa.
Usually, my morning begins by waking my kids up and getting them ready for school, along with letting out and feeding our black poodle, who is the most compliant of all of them. It feels like a pretty mundane routine, day in and day out, and I’m sure many of you experience the same type of feeling, like you’re on autopilot. But if I take a step back and think about it, my morning “routine” is actually the beginning of my own personal quality service delivery experience. And that delivery experience definitely varies, because if I’m honest with myself, I’m not a vessel of boundless energy and optimism every morning, though I wish I were.
Even if I manage to get the kids to school on time and myself to work without too much drama, we’ve still influenced each other. Having repeated this harried thirty-minute daily exercise thousands of times, I’ve learned a lot from it. Take the following situation, which happens more often than I would like it to.
It’s a Tuesday. I’m out of bed a few minutes late and because I didn’t plan for any extra time, I’m already behind my schedule of waking, feeding, and getting my kids ready for school. So, I rush them out of bed, let the dog out, find some food in the fridge, and start to get everyone moving. In the midst of preparing breakfast for the kids and the dog, there is little or no effort to interact. They’re still tired and I’m rushed, so we don’t greet each other with a smile or even speak. In fact, in the rush of the routine, I’m the only one who’s normally saying anything at all, and usually I’m only reminding them to hurry up so I can get them to school on time. If we’re lucky, we all get in the car in one piece and start rolling through stop signs on the way to school. If, God forbid, somebody forgets something (as is often the case), a dark cloud moves over the car, we turn around, and rarely speak for the rest of the trip.
You may argue that providing a meaningful experience for my kids early in the morning every single day is beyond a reasonable expectation. That’s a lot of breakfasts to enrich! However, I have come to appreciate that the morning “rush” to get out of the house is a useful window into the concept of customer service generally. When thinking clearly, I know I should be treating my kids the way I want to be treated when I am picking up my coffee at the local deli or working with my clients throughout the day. It’s easy to make excuses for not creating a memorable experience day in and day out, but in the end, creating a quality experience is what can make or break your day.
We’ve all read about, and can appreciate, the value of starting the day with a smile and a positive attitude. I’m not suggesting that life is a bowl of unicorns and strawberries, but smiling at the start of the day really does seem to take the edge off. Those days that I do slow down, I notice how much more positive my interaction with my kids is. All of us feel less stressed and more relaxed, which affects everyone—including the dog.
Of course, positivity is not always possible with three kids, misplaced homework, and a dog that wants a walk, but our daily interactions offer a window into empathy, a central theme of this book. Great organizations are able to systematically cultivate empathy, which translates into action, which creates memorable experiences for their guests. This holds true whether you are making breakfast, following up with test results for a patient, or selling a pair of shoes.
Here’s another common situation, and one that you are probably very familiar with.
It’s Saturday, and you’ve got a lot to do. The first thing on your list is to call your cable company because your internet is down. After being put on hold for fifteen minutes, a representative finally picks up the phone. You explain the problem, and he tries to help you. However, you can’t understand what he’s saying. You keep asking him to repeat what he wants you to do, and both of you are getting more and more frustrated. In exasperation you ask to speak to his manager. He says the manager is busy, but he’ll put you on hold to wait for her. The line is promptly disconnected, so you have to start the process all over again and before you know it, you’ve wasted three hours trying to get your internet working again before the nightmare ends. You vow to look for another cable service provider as soon as possible, despite feeling deep down that they’re all pretty much the same.
Whether it’s not receiving an apology from the barista who gave you a latte when you asked for an espresso, arguing with a clerk when you try to return an item that’s clearly broken through no fault of your own, or trying to deal with the cable company, you likely encounter bad service every day. It’s frustrating and demoralizing because it seems to be spreading to every type of business. And it’s easy to see examples everywhere, especially when they “go viral,” as have several eye-opening incidents with airlines over the past couple of years.
In many of these cases, customers distributed videos of poor employee behavior, resulting in negative brand identity for the companies. These issues are more likely to occur when an organization has not made a commitment to implementing systems that reward exceptional customer experiences. Therefore, the result we see as consumers is mostly disappointing, a “death by a thousand pricks” that has devolved into these negative patterns of behavior. I am not suggesting that just a song and a smile can change the workplace, but there are meaningful, purposeful tactics that can improve how employees and coworkers feel about work and ultimately improve the interactions between any organization and its customers, guests, clients, or patrons.
Take a step back and think about businesses and people who deliver outstanding customer service and how they make you feel when you interact with them. Probably pretty good, right? This isn’t exactly a revelation, and trying to understand the framework for developing and building great customer relationships is nothing new. There are a lot of smart people who have written about the value of managing and maintaining customer loyalty, and some of them do it so well that they offer classes (a couple of them are even mentioned in this book). However, this book is focused on attacking the challenge of quality service delivery from a different angle. Namely: as the economy and workforce evolve, and as employees and consumers increasingly interact over the internet and even choose to forgo personal interaction whenever possible, what is the value of delivering great service? And how can empathy translate and even expand in the digital age?
The Times They Are A-Changin’
As the workforce transitions and millennials begin to take a more prominent role in frontline and leadership positions throughout the service economy, the need for understanding and managing quality customer service is compounded. In the past, many organizations in the service