This HotelWorldNetwork article summarizes three customer satisfaction studies this year: The J.D. Power and Associates 2009 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Study, the Market Metrix Hospitality Index, and the American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan. The author points out that the results of the studies differ,...
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The Wegmans Way
My strategy this week was to do a reverse engineered approach to source my article. Forbes recently came up with the Top 100 Best Companies to work for in 2009, and I noticed that Wegmans continues to be among the top five for several years in a row. I...
Cutting Staff Turnover for a Better Guest Experience
Understood in business is the axiom that happy staff translates to happy customers. A derivative of this axiom is unhappy workers will quit. Brendan B. Read’s article from TMCnet.com focuses on retaining labor and reducing staff turnover. While the article focuses primarily on contact centers, his investigation is relevant...
Leaders As Anthropologists
Last week, in Coyle’s ‘The Company’ segment, we heard from top CEOs about paying attention to warning signs and confronting reality. Today, we hear from a Bryant University professor who espouses the philosophy that leaders should be anthropologists. That is, leaders should get out of their offices and become...
Customer Feedback is a Two-Way Speech
Jim Coyle, , Blog, Quality Review, 0
This article by Gary Schwartz reminds us that guest feedback is a dialogue and that a healthy dialogue with anyone can be ruined when one party simply drops out of the conversation unexpectedly. You begin a conversation by asking someone how they feel about you, and after they give...
What Service Customers Really Want
Jim Coyle, , Blog, Quality Review, 0
This Harvard Business Publishing article discusses the importance of guests being able to reach knowledgeable employees on first contact. Although the article studied call centers, it stresses importance of how hotel and restaurant employees need to be able to efficiently handle requests, inquiries, and complaints on their first shot....
Parsing the comfort food menu
The Center for Culinary Development (CDC, http://www.ccdsf.com), a food and beverage product development company, recently took a look at consumer behavior and how it relates to ‘comfort food’ in a study of over 3,700 customers. The CDC looked at the comfort food preferences of different demographic groups they described...
Fundamentals for Retaining Quality Staff
Hiring valuable hospitality staff and training them to meet the demands of the guest is agreeably a vital part of best practices in any economy. According to research by Cornell University faculty, the turnover cost for a line level position could be estimated at $6000. Are there ways to...
Rebrand and Regain Trust
With the economic meltdown and the many sources available for online chronicling, companies must rebrand to win back consumer trust. A September 2009 article from BusinessWeek reports large corporations like AmEx must produce ads that resonate differently, that show they are not greedy villains but another entity that helps...
Video: Danny Meyer’s Speech on His Book–Setting the Table
Danny Meyer’s is arguably one of the leading authorities on delivering a great guest experience. His secrets, discussed fully in his book Setting the Table, all stem from the overarching notion of service vs. hospitality. In the video, Meyer starts by explaining great hospitality is ‘how staff make people...
