Where There’s a Will There’s a Way

Two weeks ago, I delivered a customer care seminar to over 140 people at the Elysium Hotel, one of the finest 5-star hotels in Cyprus. As I was making a point about the importance of providing immaculate customer service by “going the extra mile” and exceeding customer expectations, one of the senior waiters shared a true story with us which, he felt, backed up what I was saying.

He recounted an incident that took place many years ago when he was a young man working in a hotel on the Greek island of Rhodes. One of the guests had made a particular request, which had put most of the hotel’s front line team on the defensive. One by one they came up with reasons and excuses why what he wanted could not be done – at least not at that hotel.

On hearing them and seeing that they were obviously unwilling to help him, the guest turned in a moment of quiet desperation to the waiter – the participant in my class – who was standing nearby and said something that would remain forever etched in his memory. The frustrated guest told the hotel staff, “You have given me a thousand reasons why it can’t be done. Can you please give me ONE reason why it can?”

One thing that makes people excel and companies stand out is the ability to give customers that one reason why “it can be done”. If a need arises, successful companies learn how to satisfy it as quickly as they can. And, of course, the most successful of all anticipate every possibility and ensure that they can respond satisfactorily with one aim in mind: to create a loyal customer.

The motto of the celebrated Ritz-Carlton Hotel (“We are Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen”) exemplifies this anticipatory service provided by all staff members. The former president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel company, Horst Schulz, who knows more than most how to keep people happy and why it’s so important, once stated memorably, “Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction, you must improve.”

Recently, Icelandair made a fascinating new addition to its list of stopover extras in order to improve on Schulz’s “100% customer satisfaction”: Free friends. From now until April 30, Icelandair passengers can request a “Stopover Buddy.” This is an Icelandair employee who will accompany a traveller – completely free – as a local tour guide who’s ready to go skiing, cooking, horseback riding or whatever the traveller’s particular interest happens to be.

Icelandair already offers transatlantic passengers the option to make a stopover in Iceland for up to seven days at no additional charge. The “Stopover Buddy” is a new incentive to get passengers to partake in Iceland’s tourism market and there are different ones for every interest (culture, lifestyle, food, and even health). Each Buddy has a 30-second video showing his or her unique Icelandic adventure, like Inga ósk ólasfdóttir, a travel consultant and Food Buddy. You can even request that Icelandair CEO Birkir Hólm Guenason personally join your adventure. How’s that for personal service and going the extra mile?

It would be a mistake to think that such extremely high standards only apply to companies and organisations with the ‘luxury’ status of the best 5-star hotels or national airlines. Every business should aim to surpass its competition’s customer service level or, alternatively, to give 100% customer satisfaction – settling for any less is not giving the customer experience the priority it demands. I recently came across a perfect example of the lengths that some people will go to in order to be the best and, at the same time, to have an incredibly high level of customer and staff satisfaction and loyalty: Pal’s Sudden Service.

This small American fast-food outlet which operates 26 locations with less than 1,100 employees in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia has managed to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award – one that, over the years, has gone to the likes of Cadillac, FedEx and the aforementioned Ritz-Carlton.

So what’s so special about this particular organisation? It’s easier to ask what’s not special about it. Nothing about Pal’s is average. The most obvious difference is its fanatical devotion to speed and accuracy – in other words, giving its customers many reasons why “it can be done!”. It is a drive-through restaurant where customers pull up to a window, place their orders face-to-face with an employee in less than 18 seconds and then drive around to the other side of the facility and pick up their order in less than 12 seconds. This is four times faster than the second-fastest quick-serve restaurant in the whole of the United States. And Pal’s is not only about absurdly fast service. It is also unbelievably accurate. It makes a mistake only once in every 3,600 orders!

The Canadian writer and leadership expert, Robin Sharma, once wrote: “The quickest way to grow the sales of your business is to grow your people.” The CEO of Pal’s clearly believes this and his philosophy is evident in the way the company hires and trains its staff, and links its identity in the marketplace to its approach in the workplace. “If you watch professional athletes, everything they do looks so smooth and fluid,” says CEO Thomas Crosby. “But eventually you realize how much work went into that performance, all the training, all the skill-building, all the hours. It’s the same for us.” The way pal does it is by evaluating candidates through a 60-point psychometric survey, based on the attitudes and attributes of its star performers. Pal understands that character counts for as much as credentials, and that who you are is as important as what you know.

Once Pal’s has selected its candidates, it gives them massive amounts of training and retraining, certification and recertification. New employees get 120 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own, and must be certified in each of the specific jobs they do. Remember – this is a fast-food drive-through restaurant!

Every day on every shift in every restaurant, a computer randomly generates the names of two to four employees to be recertified in one of their jobs. They take a quick test, see whether they pass, and if they fail, get retrained for that job before they can do it again. (The average employee takes 2 or 3 tests per month.)

“If you want people to succeed, you have to be willing to teach them,” says Thomas Crosby, and to show that he means it, Pal’s has assembled a Master Reading List of 21 books for all the leaders in the company, ranging from timeless classics to highly technical volumes on quality and lean management. Every other Monday, Crosby invites five managers from different locations to discuss one of the books on the Master List. Furthermore, all leaders at Pal’s are expected to spend 10% of their time teaching, and to identify a target subject and a target student every day.

The end result of all this commitment to hiring smartly and teaching continuously is that Pal’s employees show the same sense of loyalty as its customers. In 33 years, only seven general managers (the people who run individual locations) have left the company voluntarily!

It doesn’t matter if a company is an airline, a luxury hotel or a fast-food restaurant: unlike their less successful competitors, the best ones will always find a way to give their customers that “one reason why it can be done” rather than a long list of excuses why “it can’t be done”. Like Pal’s and Icelandair, they are bold enough to reinvent the rules of the game, thereby setting the bar higher than the competition while, at the same time, surprising and delighting their customers. To combine the advertising slogans of two more hugely successful companies, Nike and Adidas: “Just do it”. “Impossible is nothing”!