Most spas aspire to, and offer, good customer service. A few even reach “world class” status. But no matter how good the spa, there will be days when Something Happens and it all comes crashing down to earth.
Bad things happen to good customer care professionals, which means that your service isn’t measured by how good you are on a good day–it’s about how good you are on a bad day. A chef friend who possesses two Michelin stars told
Every interaction with a team member is a chance to model excellent customer service.
me once that 3% of his guests, on any given night, would not be happy.
“Service Recovery” is the friendly term we use to describe the process of trying to fix things when we screw up. Training hospitality professionals to “recover” gracefully and skillfully is essential, but it’s hard. Simply reminding your team to employ the Golden Rule is not going to do it. As well, even the best techniques and tactics, scripts and procedures will often fail unless you and your team have mastered the mindset of World Class Service.
In many spas, when something goes wrong, the owner or director rides in on a white horse to save the day. While it’s essential for your team to see the right behavior and approach “modeled” in order to learn what to do, this can reinforce the belief that saving the day is the leader’s responsibility. What happens when the gal in the white hat isn’t there? No one wants to deal with an unhappy customer, and if this is perceived to be your job, no one will. They will send you one of those gut-churning e mails. You know the one: “Call Diane Jones. Very upset about massage.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Jones stews in her juices, getting angrier for every hour that passes without some sort of resolution to her issue, when there is a whole team of people who could have taken care of the issue, or simply initiated the service recovery process and given the client a sense that Something was Being Done.
You read the message and shake your head. Why does it always come down to me, you wonder.
What creates the mindset of World Class Service? First and foremost, stellar service is a product of your core values. Not the ones printed on that first page in the employee manual, but the ones expressed by your actions every day.
Great customer service begins with providing great customer service to your employees. Spa employees will choose a positive and supportive working environment over one in which they’re paid top scale and abused, ignored or undervalued. They’ll have a hard time creating an authentic customer service experience when they’re spoken to rudely, harshly or imperiously behind the scenes, or when their requests and needs are ignored or brushed aside.
Just as with your guests, the real test of your internal customer service happens when something doesn’t go right. You “model” customer service behavior every time you interact with a staff member.
The next time you cringe at the way someone handled a customer complaint, think about how you handled that employee’s last complaint to you. Did Jason interrupt you in your office doing e mail to talk about a minor schedule problem that you treated as petty and exasperating? Did Jennifer complain that her treatment room had been left in shambles by a notoriously messy coworker and you avoided dealing with the issue because the mess-maker was a sales superstar?
There may be a striking resemblance. If you’re tired of wondering why no one else can “save the day” like you can, try showing them how, rather than telling them how.
There’s a lot of talk about “fairness” these days, especially when it comes to taxes. Warren Buffett famously commented that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. But there is a huge difference between the tax rate, or percentage, that Uncle Warren pays and the size of the check he writes.
Let’s say he’s paying a 25% effective tax rate (because he’s blending capital gains at 15% and his ordinary income tax rate of 45%.) His secretary is paying 35%. His income is in the millions. Let’s call it $10 million (it’s much more). Her income is probably south of $100,000 (he’s famously cheap), but let’s assume it’s exactly that.
Who’s writing the bigger check? Uncle Warren, of course. Miss Cathcart pays $35,000 in taxes. Uncle Warren pays $2,500,000 in taxes. Does that sound fair? When you look at it in dollars in cents, it probably does.
The notion of percentages haunts the spa industry, too. You’re interviewing Mona, a new and promising massage therapist and you ask her what she would like to make working at your spa.
“50%,” says Mona without hesitation.
“But how much money would you like to make?” you ask.
“50%,” replies Mona, a bit more slowly (poor thing, you probably didn’t understand her the first time.)
“Why 50%?” you finally ask.
“I think that’s fair,” she says.
Ah, there’s that word again: fair. (To be frank, “fair” and “unfair” are two of my red-flag words in a job interview.)
“But you don’t know what we charge for our services and how busy our schedule is,” you say.
“Yeah…um…I want 50%,” says Mona, aware now that you are obviously trying to pull the wool over her eyes. “That’s what they pay at Spa Ajax.”
“But 50% of nothing is nothing,” you point out helpfully, aware that Spa Ajax is about to close its doors.
She blinks.
The spa industry is not dominated by math majors and financial whizzes. But we share something with a large chunk of the American public, including the media (“Communications” majors, they were called when I was in college.) And that something is a spectacular lack of understanding about the way that basic accounting works. This is why we confuse percentages with actual numbers.
To wit: the esthetician who, when hearing that she receives 40% commission on services but “only” 10% commission on retail sales, tells herself that the latter is not worth her time. Despite the fact that it takes virtually no time compared to performing a service.
While I was having a manicure yesterday, one of my nail care specialists, when I mentioned that I was working on securing financing for our expansion, informed me that I was rich. It was sort of cute. Her explanation: “You’ve been doing this for 28 years. You must be very rich.” In her mind, everything that she doesn’t get goes to me.
To free ourselves from the shackles of the past, spa employees must learn how businesses actually work, instead of feeling that it’s “fair” to simply divide everything in half. We learned that from our mom when we were battling with our kid sister over who got the cookies. Business literacy can only be accomplished by something many spa owners are loathe to do, which is open our books periodically and share the real numbers (not just the percentages) with our employees. Believe it or not, this really works.
Another technique we’ve used is to translate the profit and loss statement into a play, “Mrs. Hunnert Goes to the Spa.” Mrs. Hunnert (so named for the ‘hunnert’ dollars she has in her purse) walks through an entire spa service experience, handing out dimes and dollars as she goes along, for various expenses. For example, at check in, Mrs. Hunnert is asked by the helpful receptionist to proffer ten dollars for her wages. During her facial, she is asked to proffer four dollars and sixty cents for the supplies used on her (which equates to 4.6% of total revenues on your P & L). She is asked for money for rent, utilities, etc. and at the end, usually has little, if anything to spare. It’s a comic way of demonstrating “where the money goes.” In Mona’s mind, that other 50%, minus rent and utilities, has gone right into your pocket.
As to whether it is “fair” to tax the fruits of investing your money at a lower rate than the fruits of your labor, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about that before this November.
Woody Allen said that 80% of success is showing up. He didn’t say that the goal is 80% effort, he said that you were 80% of the way there if you showed up.
As letter grade, 80% gets you an A-. Anything in the A family is considered good performance (unless you’re trying to get into Stanford. Sorry.)
In a five star rating system like Yelp, 80% translates into four stars. Yaaawn.
If you’re trying to pick a doctor, a car dealer, a restaurant, an esthetician or a massage therapist, four stars is merely the price of entry. An A- player is not a solid A player or an A+ player. It’s not likely that an A- esthetician will get a client excited enough to make a personal endorsement. That privilege belongs to the solid A or A+ esthetician.
If you’re a spa that’s trying to achieve a solid A, you need solid A Players on your team. A Players do what it takes to be successful. They make sure that they make their contribution–not to make their spa director or owner, happy–but because it’s who they are.
If being an A Player means they need to show up for 80% of the staff meetings (an attendance standard used in most successful spas, as well as our own) they do it. Because that’s who they are as a professional.
A Players want to be surrounded by other A Players. To be an employee in Good Standing in our spa means respecting the contributions of others, too. If you are an A Player, you don’t just show up to a staff meeting to learn, or participate. You show up to respect the others who are showing up, including team mates, vendors, educators.
There are a thousand reasons why it’s inconvenient to attend a staff meeting. And everyone who attends a staff meeting has overcome at least one or two of those reasons to get there. An A Player, facing inconvenience, distraction, minor emergencies, car trouble, will find a way to be there. Because that’s who they are. They don’t want to be left out. They don’t want to miss something that they may need to know.
When a new employee begins their job at Preston Wynne, we have a discussion about the responsibilities of the job. One of those is attending our meetings. We take our meetings seriously, larding them heavily with education and avoiding the tedious scolding that characterize so many spa staff meetings.
A Players who come to our spa from other companies often mention how positive, useful, and (yes) even fun our staff meetings are. We make some attendance exceptions for students and very part time or on-call employees. But there’s a tradeoff: their opportunities may be limited too.
In an industry where fair play is a real, living value, I’m always surprised that an employee would believe it is fair to give someone who has not met the attendance standard that they agreed to the same rights and privileges of an employee who has made the effort and met the standard.
More often that not, when I hear an employee say, “No one ever told me that,” it is someone who missed the meeting in which we Told Them That. Likewise the person who grouses, “No one knows what’s going on around here.”
Success is not simply about your attitude. It’s about your actions. It’s not about shooting for 80%, which guarantees you’ll miss even that goal, but shooting for 100% and nearly succeeding.
That’s what makes Preston Wynne Spa special, different and better.
It used to be a treat when a business asked for your feedback. Now it’s a burden.
Is it any coincidence that customers would rather rant spontaneously on Yelp than fill out your “quick online survey”? I don’t think so.
“Would you be willing to take part in a quick assessment of my customer service?” asks the cheery phone rep from the company whose subscription I just cancelled by phone, and I say yes. She was really nice, and I want to be nice in return. Yet connecting the “assessment” and the “service delivery” so closely makes the whole thing feel contrived. Like when the previously blasé waiter turns on the charm for the last five minutes before delivering your dinner check (“Where’d that guy come from?” you wonder.)
Everywhere you turn, a business is asking for your opinion, your evaluation, or your rating. I’m frankly sick of it. It’s become a new part time job for consumers.
Don’t get me wrong. At our spa, we collect customer opinions too. We ask guests to complete a quick “how was it?” card at checkout, based on the Net Promoter Score.
And a customer relationship management system we use, DemandForce, a bolt-on to our Millenium software, solicits online reviews from clients after their appointments. We look at those numbers weekly in our management meetings.
Yes, I’ve exhorted you to make it “easy for customers to complain.” Technology (and anonymity) has made it easier to get inside the minds of customers, but is it making customers any happier? Is it actually making businesses much better at what they do?
Does knowing that we scored a 94.1 satisfaction rating last month and 94.9 this month tell a business enough about what we need to do? Do we get ourselves wrapped around the axle by one customer’s negative comments, reacting frantically to address a problem that might only be a problem for her?
In a perfect world, our businesses would deliver outstanding customer service, and that would be it. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to have a conversation about it. The fact that we are being asked to talk incessantly about it speaks to the fact that businesses have lost sight of the real goal: delighting customers, not collecting data that confirms that customers have been delighted. It’s like being asked to provide detailed feedback each time you make love.
When you’re over-solicited for your opinion, you realize that it’s no longer all about you. That is, if you’re a well-adjusted human being.
By swamping us all with requests for feedback, businesses are discouraging “normal” customer feedback. At the same time, online review sites like Yelp breed a virulent form of “abnormal” customer feedback. What’s a business to do? If we have an increasingly silent majority at one end, and obsessive, wonky, idiosyncratic “experts” at the other, how does that help us improve our customer care?
Every strength taken to an extreme becomes a weakness. In the new world of customer hyper-focus, we may be killing the goose that laid the golden opinion.
The “Experience Economy” is taking it on the chin.
Consumers are continuously adapting to the recession, and one of the ways they’re expressing their new priorities is by purchasing items that will last. In the pre-recession years, luxury consumers said that purchasing experiences gave them more satisfaction than purchasing luxury goods. But a recent Wall Street Journal story says that this is changing. The story gave an example of a woman cutting back on her haircuts in order to afford a long-term investment purchase, a new bed.
Electronics are leading the pack this holiday season, driven by tablet computers. Where does that leave the perennial favorite, the spa gift card? In very uncertain territory. The holiday selling season is just beginning, but in only a month, the people will have spoken.
Mass discounting has undermined the value proposition for spas, which are a favorite target for coupon marketing. Why buy a full price gift card when you can double your money on a Groupon? Chilling.
One major impact of buying experiences over things: experiences are “made locally,” while increasingly, things are made in other countries. For consumers who want their purchases to stimulate the American economy and create the most jobs, services give the most bang for the buck.
How can you ensure that the experiences you’re selling this holiday season are going to win out over an ipad? Take a page from Apple itself. Visit one of its stores and see how smartly staffed, perfectly merchandised and vibrant it is. Who wouldn’t want to step inside? Apple is giving an experience to people who think they’re buying things.
By the way, Clarisonic is positioned beautifully to ride this trend, with both its mainstay brushes and the new Opal.
If the Experience Economy is to continue its growth, we Experience-sellers need to recognize this shift in consumer priorities. If we want to sell more “things,” though, it’s time to rethink the way we merchandise our spas. The front desk barrier has to be broken down. Where is the point of sale in an Apple store? Everywhere.
If consumers now want to “invest” in something important, something that matters for the long term, spas are offering the best investment of all: in health and well-being. It’s time to tell that story more persuasively.
Which of your long term clients have the best self-care stories? Find out if they’ll share them with others. Personal endorsements, like personal referrals, are still one of the most powerful marketing modalities for spas. The “thing” we’re selling is better health and better quality of life. The experience is the package it comes in.
Imagine my shock this week to read that Groupon’s stock is plummeting and its IPO is looking shakier by the minute.
After being sloppy-kissed for months by analysts and investors, the discount juggernaut lost its luster. Why? For all the reasons that you and I know too well.
There are no barriers to entry because Groupon does not add value. Even by pimp standards it’s second rate.
Discounting is a zero sum game. It always has been, and it always will be. As we say around here, there is always someone out there who’s more crazy or more stupid than you. To attract “new customers” into their business, they’ll pour gasoline on their head and light it on fire.
That’s the difference between morbid fascination and serious interest. Morbid fascination is what makes people rubberneck on the freeway. They may slow down for a minute to gawk, but they’ll be on their way soon.
Serious interest is what makes people get married. You want customers who want to tie the knot (and not around your neck!)
Discounting is not differentiated. Look in your in-box. Consumers, even recession-battered ones, are getting bored of the endless “deals”. Now it’s just another form of spam. 60% off something I don’t need, offered by someone I don’t care about? Hmmm.
Here’s the good news. By definition, it’s impossible for customers to get tired of differentiation. Why? Because it’s different.
The laws of business gravity still apply.
In Preston Wynne Spa, one of our core values is “Build and protect a fun and harmonious work environment.” That second word, protect, is about dealing with bad apples.
Spa folk are even more sensitive to the “baddies” than the average employee. They’re tuned in to the emotional wavelength, which is why they’re good at what they do. Spa teams are highly dependent and interactive. Spa employees usually seek harmony, but when disharmony occurs, they can quickly succumb. This is an environment where “contagion” from bad attitudes spreads like wildfire.
THREE CLASSIC BAD APPLES TO GET OUT OF YOUR SPA
DIVAS are employees whose talent and popularity with clients seem to give them license to be rude and condescending to co-workers. They may be top producers that you’re afraid to let go, or even discipline. When your employees see you put sales before ethics, morale plummets. The Wall Street Journal relates a case where a company fired a top producing bad apple salesman; though none of the remaining employees individually sold as much as he had, “the store’s total sales shot up by nearly 30%.” We’ve seen this happen time in again in spas where owners or managers think they “can’t afford” to get rid of a diva. As soon as they do, everyone’s performance leaps.
PROFESSIONAL VICTIMS are the back-room commiserators, trying to get everyone on their personal misery train with complaints and grievances. They’re the ones that will tell you, “Everyone feels this way” because someone nodded their head while they were bitching at the break table.
SLACKERS AND PIGLETS don’t pull their own weight. They create burdens for others. They may be “nice” folks, but they are disrespectful to their co-workers. When they leave treatment rooms and work or break areas a mess or don’t fulfill their team responsibilities, they’re really saying “I don’t care about anyone else.” Some can be reformed, but how much of your time do you want to spend policing them? 20% of your staff will require 80% of your management energy.
Our surveys show us time and again that the #1 reason spa employees enjoy their jobs is positive and fun interactions with co-workers and clients. If you take that away, suddenly their entire employment experience darkens. Make them work with bad apples, they won’t think their compensation is fair.
Bad apples are expensive.
What was the last truly significant innovation in the spa world? The last new business model? The last big industry-wide treatment trend?
I hate to say it, but I think it was the introduction of budget spas to the industry–Massage Envy. And while ME has done a good job of democratizing the spa experience by reducing the complexity of the business model and the price of the product, if you’re competing by offering a lower price and greater operational simplicity, well, it’s “everybody into the pool.” And that’s not a Blue Ocean strategy.
We’re not technology driven–there’s a good reason for that. But it’s technology that drives big changes. In the wake of Steve Job’s passing, we’ve seen Apple’s astonishing game-changers recounted over and over in the media. Not just things done a bit better, but things done completely…different (Steve, a bona fide genius, could be forgiven for shunning adverbs.)
What would you do “different” if you could? Not just the next whiz-bang Experience Shower, but something that radically shifts the way people think about spas and spa-going? Something that gets a lot more people to become spa goers?
Maybe we need to spend a bit more time thinking “different” instead of simply refining a twenty year old business model.
The Wall Street Journal Headline reads, “Retailer Turns in Loss on Increase in Markdowns.” They’re referring to Talbots, which over the past three years re-imagined its famously frowsy fashion label. Despite some high profile successes in 2010–Michelle Obama wore a flowered Talbots dress, reportedly spurring catfights over the item in stores–the Chief Creative Officer has left the company.
The WSJ item goes on to explain that Trudy Sullivan, the company’s president and chief executive will “take over creative duties” (love that phrase!) while a search is carried out. Ms. Sullivan has a long history in the middle-of-the-road fashion business.
“While we have made progress in executing our brand vision and product design, customer acceptance needs to improve,” Sullivan is quoted as saying in this piece. If there was ever a quote that epitomized corporate cluelnessness, that has to be it. Our problem is that “customer acceptance needs to improve,” rather than “no one wants to buy our stuff.” Customers, did you hear that? Get with the program!
Meanwhile, yesterday’s WSJ described the ascendancy of Tori Burch, a brand that seems to get it right, to the tune of $500 million in annual sales. There, “creative duties” seem to be much more of the former and much less the latter. Significantly, that company is still helmed by Ms. Burch, who showed her first collection to a Bergdorf’s buyer in her living room.
It’s hard for real creativity to thrive in corporate America, which is enslaved to focus groups and testing, ensuring that we get endless iterations of the Same Stuff, sold by the Same Stores, the usual suspects of retailing. Take a risk? Why, that would be a disservice to our shareholders. (Tori Burch is still a private company.)
It’s hard for an economy to recover without creativity, too. Can you clamber out of a deep hole without risking falling back in? If you could just step out of it, you wouldn’t be in trouble in the first place. Yet our marketplace is filled with depressing crap that looks like last year’s depressing crap, with a detail or two changed. I walked through a Macy’s recently and was overwhelmed by the awful, petroleum stink of its cheap Chinese-made merchandise. The salespeople looked depressed. The customers looked depressed. There wasn’t a lick of creativity anywhere. There wasn’t a frisson of fun.
Apple is a weird, wonderful exception. Pricy iphones fly off the shelves in the middle of the Decession. The stores are always jammed with rapt shoppers, heads bent in benediction over tables covered with sleek and lovely devices.
Do you think Apple trumpets its “customer acceptance”? Of course not. The only acceptable response to Apple’s products is love, pure and simple.
An article in the San Jose Mercury News today sniped about the shape of Apple’s new building, an enormous ring whose diameter surpasses the height of the Empire State Building. So big you would never know it was a big circle, unless you flew over it in an airplane. This, the article concluded, was ridiculous and wasteful–why bother building a round building if you can’t tell, from standing next to it, or being in it, that it’s round?
I suppose Apple should have built something incrementally better than today’s corporate headquarters, perhaps a “progressive” design with some new features and benefits that could be bullet-pointed in a press release. But I can’t wait to read about how amazing the new building looks from the air. Creativity may look wasteful at times, but in the end, it’s the only thing that makes a difference. Incremental change simply can’t save our bacon. We have a duty to be creative.
Well, we’ve decided to dance with the devil and start a paid listing for our 27 year old Bay Area day spa on Yelp.
After our first month, the preliminary results are…uh…in. My representative, a very affable and informed young woman named Ali, forwarded the stats to me today. Views of Preston Wynne Spa’s listing are up by 25 this month, she reported. Good news, right?
Well, I paid $300 for my listing this month. That’s $12 an impression.
Yelp is facing a serious challenge–Google has decided to move from being an aggregator of reviews from other sites such as Yahoo, Yelp and Citysearch to fielding a review site of their own. If anyone can give Yelp a run for its money, it’s Google.
On Google’s list of “Things Not to Do Like Yelp,” I would include the ridiculous practice of deep-sixing user’s one-off reviews. Yelp is so enamored with the idea of its community of “yelpers” that it forgets that not everyone has the time and bandwidth to write frequent reviews. But occasionally, something really extraordinary gets to us (good, or bad) and we have to say something about it. Is that person’s opinion necessarily any less valid than the self-styled amateur reviewer who fancies themselves an authority on everything? Google, having a more democratic and straightforward business model (and probably, more mad scientists working on algorithms that will accurately sniff out fake reviews) doesn’t need to create a cult around their review site. They just need to be what they are. Omnipresent and convenient.
The bigger the sample, the more accurate and fair the ratings will be.
We use a product called DemandForce that helps us with CRM. It’s a bolt-on product that works in tandem with our Millenium software. Among other things, DemandForce sends an e mail to everyone who visits the spa for an appointment and asks them for a review. Because DemandForce is tied into Millenium, we know that these are legitimate, real customers who have visited the spa.
The ratings on DemandForce and the ratings on Yelp are different. DemandForce uses a percentage rating, and Yelp uses stars. So five Yelp stars is the equivalent of a 100% approval rating in DemandForce.
We currently have a four star rating on Yelp (80% approval) and a 95% rating on DemandForce. That 15% disparity is huge. It is the difference between being an “A” spa and a “B” spa. And that’s simply the result of the type of person who reviews on Yelp–or more accurately, the type of person that Yelp wants to write its reviews.
Yelp, you’re going to have to do a lot better if you’re going to create a value proposition for both businesses and users.
