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Today our episode of Customer Experience Heroes is about The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain. In an article in the Huff Post, the author Chris Hurn recounts how the hotel chain made a personal impact on a young family, that was so kind that the story has reverberated around the world.
A young family had just visited The Ritz-Carlton in Florida for five day vacation. Upon returning home their young son began to lose his mind, his dearly loved giraffe was Missing in Action. The infant son was truly going to make his parents pay. After a few intense bouts of crying the parents got creative and explained to their son that Joshie the giraffe had been a little stressed lately and needed a little extra R&R. Joshie was still at the resort and would be home in a few days.
After a call to The Ritz the staff called back and let the parents know they had found Joshie. The head of housekeeping laughed at the story the parents had told their son. A few days later Joshie arrived in the mail with some hotel branded gifts and a photo album. The album featured photos of Joshie by the pool relaxing, driving on the golf cart, getting a massage at the spa and the list went on. His son was delighted to be reunited, and loved the photos of Joshie’s prolonged vacation.
Now guess what hotel this family is going to stay at from now on? And guess how many times this story has been told worldwide?
The thing to understand is that the Ritz-Carlton didn't stumble into being a great customer experience based company. They have created a culture of great customer experience across their whole organization, starting with the employee experience and then connecting that to the customer experience.
We help companies implement customer experience solutions into their organizations. The first thing we do is have them purchase our customer feedback software, or customer communities. The first step is to onboard all of their employees into the software so that the company can send out monthly employee feedback surveys, and invite them into qualitative private or group discussions to find out more how the company can improve. Most bosses are too insecure to have the employees give feedback, but trust me when I say this, your employees collectively know how to improve your company more than any expensive consultants you may hire.
Once the community is set up with your employees, then you can start onboarding your customers. You want to start small, and slowly beginning sending out surveys, and creating a monthly discussion to get a better understanding of your customers perspectives. Once the community is set up, you will be able to easily add more and more customers, and send out regular market research type surveys.
If you would like to find out more about how an experience management community could help you with customer experience management and or employee management then please do not hesitate to contact us!
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