I was recent­ly stay­ing at a pur­port­ed­ly 5 star hotel and whilst I had an enjoy­able stay I did­n’t feel like the staff went above and beyond to achieve full 5 star sta­tus. Upon arrival there was no concierge to assist us with our bags in the pour­ing rain, our room was­n’t ready, our break­fast was served cold and was miss­ing items and there was no milk in the room for teas and cof­fees.

Now, while I agree that some of these items are triv­ial, they all accu­mu­late to the feel­ing that I was hard done by and the hotel failed to meet my expec­ta­tions of 5 star ser­vice. It’s a feel­ing you nev­er want your cus­tomers to have.

Now com­pare that to how amaz­ing it feels when some­one exceeds your expec­ta­tions. Would­n’t it be amaz­ing if we could leave our cus­tomers with that feel­ing every day.

To do so we need to under­stand our cus­tomers. Why are they buy­ing from us. If they are buy­ing a drill it’s not because they want a drill. They want to drill a hole in their wall so they can hang a pic­ture of their fam­i­ly. By under­stand­ing our cus­tomers needs and wants we can serve them bet­ter and give them that same buzz by exceed­ing their expec­ta­tions.

Take a look at your cus­tomer process­es — is the cus­tomer at the fore­front of every inter­ac­tion. If not then why not and how can you improve this process?

It’s often dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the best ser­vice and human nature means we focus on the neg­a­tives. There­fore I find it use­ful to imag­ine the worst ser­vice pos­si­ble for a cus­tomer and then sim­ply reverse it! Instead of turn­ing up and a guests room not being ready make sure your sys­tems and process­es are in place to have them ready ahead of time. Make sure there is fresh milk in the mini­bar free of charge rather than no milk, or the hor­ri­ble UHT pack­ets. It’s not dif­fi­cult but some­times even good ideas aren’t adopt­ed.

Please include a link to the blog above “Why are good ideas so hard to adopt?”