“Fine” Is the Enemy of Exceptional

Fine has become the single biggest deterrent to exceptional customer experiences.

I stayed at a hotel property recently and it was fine. But that’s all it was—fine.

The word “fine” derives from the Latin “finire,” meaning “to finish,” by way of Old French and a meaning of “skillfully done”, to end up in modern English as an accepted synonym for “high quality.” But “fine” has lost its luster.

Fine is not a rave review. Unfortunately, in business we’ve become okay with fine, and as long as fine is acceptable, I doubt people will feel motivated to deliver outstanding anything, particularly experiences.

One hotel stay proves the problem

It does not require that much effort to elevate fine to exceptional—just a reasonable degree of intelligence and enough imagination to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Case in point: At breakfast during that hotel stay, I asked the waitress if I could have egg whites. She replied, “We don’t have egg whites today.” Really? Nowhere in that kitchen is there an egg? Is there no one who can separate it? Yes, I had breakfast, and yes, it was fine. But how much more effort would it have taken to create an exceptional experience in that situation for a “Diamond-level” loyalty customer?

Likewise, my check-in experience was fine. The front desk clerk who served me was personable and engaging. But that wasn’t what I was hearing from the other check-ins going on, which made me wonder, why only one out of five? Is it the training? Once you start to notice the ubiquity of “fine” customer experiences, you start to wonder, how did we—as individuals, as managers, as leaders—get so comfortable with fine?

Fine has got to go

Fine has become the single biggest deterrent to exceptional customer experiences. I want to help people eliminate the word “fine” from their vocabularies. Fine is no longer good enough. If I want fine I can find it anywhere, and that’s the point. “Fine” does not and cannot distinguish your performance from your competitors’.

“Fine” is the enemy of exceptional. Fine stops us from trying harder, working smarter, aiming higher, to create a memorable level of experience. Does anybody remember a fine experience? On the street where I stayed there were eight different hotels. If I go back to that city, “fine” isn’t enough to earn my repeat business. Exceptional experiences are what pull customers back. Exceptional experiences are what earn their loyalty. Exceptional is noteworthy. Fine is not.

Expect exceptional

You have to constantly coach, motivate, and inspire your team to aim higher than fine. If you have any aspiration of getting to exceptional, you have to examine every individual, every role, to ascertain what it would take to truly exceed every single customer expectation.

Let’s reimagine what that check-in experience could be. I have a reservation when I show up. I have a roller bag. What do you think I’m doing there? “How may I help you?” doesn’t cut it. How hard is it to anticipate a hotel guest’s needs? If I arrive at 11pm and I’m one of the last guests to check in, how hard is it to greet me with “I’m guessing you’re Mr. Nour. Welcome. Here are a couple of bottles of water. I’ve got you checked in, here’s your room key. Welcome to our property.” That elevates my experience beyond fine.

This isn’t just about the hospitality trade. Across any type of business, if we teach customer-facing employees to be proactive, if not predictive, we could definitely elevate fine customer service to exceptional customer experiences. Look at every step of that experience journey. What do customers need at each stage? How do we not just meet that need today but start anticipating their future needs? Use data intelligently and in real-time. Ask better questions. Help the team anticipate how to make each buying experience memorable. Not just of products and services, but of information, repute, and the essence of a brand.

Let’s start getting creative about how we make exceptional the new status quo. If you choose to be in the service business, whether you’re the general manager responsible for hiring, or part of the training team responsible for developing those hires, you have to instill a “we will do whatever it takes” mentality. Not just a mantra from corporate HQ, but a real genuine philosophy that everyone believes in, strives toward, and achieves, proven by metrics and rewarded with compensation.

My dad drove into me, “Can’t is dead. Will do killed it.” I submit that fine is also dead: Exceptional killed it.

Fine is your enemy. What will it take for your organization to kill it?

Nour Takeaways

1. If you think about your own recent customer experiences, you will likely agree that “fine” now means “just okay.”

1. Fine is the single biggest deterrent to exceptional customer experiences, a missed opportunity to earn loyalty.

1. Raise the bar for your customer-facing team by encouraging and rewarding behavior that elevates “fine” to “exceptional.”

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 David Nour has spent the past two decades being a student of business relationships. In the process, he has developed Relationship Economics? - the art and science of becoming more intentional and strategic in the relationships one chooses to invest in. In a global economy that is becoming increasingly disconnected, The Nour Group, Inc. has worked with clients such as Siemens, Disney, KPMG and over 100 other marquee organizations in driving profitable growth through unique return on their strategic relationships. Nour has pioneered the phenomenon that relationships are the greatest off balance sheet asset any organizations possesses, large and small, public and private. He is the author of several books including the best selling Relationship Economics - Revised (Wiley), ConnectAbility (McGraw-Hill), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Capital (Praeger) and Return on Impact - Leadership Strategies for the age of Connected Relationships (ASAE). Learn more at www.NourGroup.com.