Finding what's forgotten.
Starting this week and running through Sept. 20, guests can check out the cameras, take pictures and print them using an HP Photosmart 245 photo printer installed at the hotels
Following up on the original Hotel Room as Showroom article, Yahoo Reports that Fairmont Hotels and HP are partnering to offer guests digital camera rental and printing during their hotel stay.
Thanks to Perception Analyzer and Peter Davidson.
Clients, customers, collegues don’t care why there’s a problem. They just want it fixed and to move on. To do that, each person approached with a client issue needs to take ownership of problem and feel they have the authority to deliver a satisfactory solution quickly.
Take this Ritz Carlton experience for example:
At exactly 7:00 p.m. I returned. I was there, but dinner wasn’t. At 7:11 I called Gloria…she immediately apologized and said a rush would be placed on my order. At 7:22 there was a knock at the door….”Mr. Blackman, Gloria and I once again apologize that your dinner has arrived late. Tonight, your meal is compliments of the Ritz.”
Gloria didn’t need to check with her manager – the Ritz trusts each and every employee to solve their guests issues effectively. All organizations need to trust their employees to take this level of ownership.
If it takes you or your collegues longer than 30 seconds to find a piece of information, then your workplace organization needs drastic improvement.
I recently attended Minnesota Technology’s overview on Lean for the Office. The 30 second rule is a great yardstick to measure your day against.
Extend the principal a bit..if no one but yourself can find the information needed to conduct business, the office is being held hostage, and you can’t take a vacation. Two points that wear down the morale of the workplace.
Recently – a collegue recounted his experience selling a fully-capable product with a price less than half its competitors.
“After the presentation, the customer turned to the sales representative and asked, ‘What’s wrong with it?'”
This, more than 78 years after J. Walter Thompson’s research for Pond’s Cold Cream proved that price and quality are directly correlated in customers’ minds
Compare the potential customer’s – “What’s wrong with it?” – with the following from JWT’s 1926 Pond’s customer research:
“Reasonable in price, used by everyone, many women had begun to think that they could not be as good as creams that were more costly or that were imported.”
This strategy also works in the service industry, illustrated by this exchange between a collegue and an industry leader:
“How to do you get clients to buy into your recommendations?”
“Charge more.”
How little can I do to successfully reach this goal?
Continually asking youreself that questions is the best ways to minimize rework, reach goals quickly, guarantee sustainable solutions, and design for wear.
This approach creates a functional prototype quickly, keeps stress levels down, and keeps product teams lean.
Johanna Rothman has an excellent post highlighting other benefits of this approach from the product development perspective:
- Understanding the requirements is a scarce resource, and we should focus our energies towards delivering something that shows we understand the specific requirement and the value it has to our customer.
- Schedule is critical and we don’t have time to do it again, or build technical debt
- Project cost is important, and we need to manage it
and another on how this approach specifically addresses rework
See how little you can do, and deliver that much as quickly as possible. The technique I use most often is to break the pieces into groups of requirements/features and then perform iterations within whatever lifecycle the people are used to.
Thanks to NerdHerding for Beginners.
Hotels are now leveraging their experience comforting weary travelers and giving their guests the opportunity to take the hotel experience home.
Marginal Revolution points to a Forbes article documenting the Regency in Manhattan’s addition of price tags to their bath mats, pillows, and bath robes.
In a related development, Selelect Comfort recently announced a partnership with Carlson Hotels to replace 90,000 guest beds over the next 2 years with a custom-designed Sleep Number Bed.
As much as it’s a excellent way for “consumers to get a better night’s sleep away from home” it’s also a great way for consumer to have more experience with Select Comfort’s products. With the lifetime of matresses in the decades, capturing one more household is definitely benefical.
On-stage; where employees are likely to bump into customer.
Off-stage; where they are not.
It’s one of my favorite ideas from The Experience Economy is that of on-stage and off-stage.
Preventing off-stage behavior from occuring on-stage is the key to a good customer experience.
My wife has a recent example of where the two collided for a poor customer experience:
The Starbucks was busy when I got there. As I was standing in line, I overheard the barista on the phone:
“It’s real busy right now, I know I scheduled you for 6pm, can you get here by 4?….Hey, I don’t need that kind of attitude from you – especially over the phone.”
She hangs up, turns to me and smiles, “How may I help you?”
How large is “on-stage”? Big. Pine and Gilmore relay Jury consultant Robert Hirschhorn’s advise that law counselors to drive minivans because, “You never know when a juror is going to see you getting in or out of your car.”
UPDATE: Perception Analyzer has also noticed inconsistencies in the Starbucks experience.
Corporate IT departments consider new collaborative technologies (Wikis, Weblogs, Instant Messaging) as rogue elements to be eliminated. When in fact, they are increase productivity.
Ross Mayfield points to this eWeek article describing one organization’s battle with its own people.
The most recent problems came to light when a network failure cut off e-mail and Web access throughout the company’s far-flung operations.
Instead of simply calling it a day, creative employees quickly implemented workarounds. One group installed a quick and dirty Wiki to enable team communications.
Another took advantage of America Online Inc.’s Instant Messenger application to route files and messages between geographically remote employees. Others used Web e-mail and wireless networking to keep the company’s business flowing.
The CIO’s response was predictable: He moved quickly to lock down corporate desktops and laptops to prohibit users from installing unapproved software or accessing unsupported Web services.
New technologies are not without risk, but by eliminating homegrown productivity innovations Corporate IT departments themselves risk being considering irrelevant – thereby increasing constituents finding their own unsupported solutions.
A couple years back, Wal-Mart decided to sell toys…cheap. Toys R Us knew they couldn’t compete on price, so they decided to compete on experience – thereby increasing their margin.
Experience is a more sustainable advantage than price, selection, or service. It’s much closer tied to your brand reputation than any of the other attributes. Starbucks’ Brand Experience allows it to sell custom CDs in-store. Disney’s Brand Experience allows them to put their name on everything from clothing to cruise ships. By articulating your identity outside of your current product or service offering, opportunities to create a holistic, margin-widening, experience for your customers will present themselves.
Sending those jobs to India would cut the costs even more, to maybe $10 an hour in wages and overhead. But JetBlue thinks the better service from home agents offsets that price advantage, notwithstanding the occasional barking dog in the background.
His [David Neeleman, the discount carrier’s chief] motivation was mainly to make agents happy, the theory being that happy workers sound better on the phone than morose ones.
Some of the clients we’ve worked with have call centers in North Dakota handling their customer inquiries and concerns. The exerpts above are from The Slipper Solution at Forbes.com outlines discount air maverick JetBlue’s call-center strategy – call-center employees work from home.
First, cost-cutting eventually cuts service quality and brand reputation. Two things JetBlue should be averse to compromising. Secondly, happy employees make for happy customers. The relationship front-line employees have with customers is reflective of the employer-employee relationship. That’s why Working Pathway’s focuses on improving the employee experience.