According to a terrific new study of 1350 spa guests from Coyle Hospitality Group, “people problems” are the predominant issue in every spa. Coyle, the leading mystery shopping firm in the hospitality industry, undertook a survey to determine the most common spoilers of spa experiences.

The summary notes that, “62% of the respondents mentioned ‘People’ as a significant contributor to the bad experience…Nearly two out of every three people that have a bad experience at a spa are talking about staff behavior. This is most interesting because most spa owners feel that the quality of their staff is their most significant competitive advantage.”

This is a bad news/good news situation. As the Coyle report points out, behavioral problems, unlike issues with your plumbing, are usually inexpensive to fix. However, unlike a one-time fix, correcting people problems–and keeping them corrected–requires focus, discipline, and follow-through. It sometimes requires a cultural shift. It sometimes requires more supervision. It always requires training.

Hearing what guests actually experience is an eye-opener. The top complaint in the Coyle study? Over 100 of the respondents indicated that the “staff was not listening, responsive about special needs, or accommodating,” and 100 more felt there was “too much conversation.” 64 guests experienced “unfriendly, impersonal, robotic staff.” Others noted that they were “ignored by staff during treatment; not checked on,” and a significant number encountered, amazingly enough, “offensive, demeaning” staff. (We took pains to include some of these issues in our customer service training DVD, including role play examples of the wrong and right way to handle various conversations.)

If like many spas you’ve been focusing on promotions to get new guests in the door, there’s encouraging news–and perhaps a cautionary tale–in one statistic. “Only a total of 35 out of 1,350 respondents spoke about value…the price paid is not at the heart of the problem” for most dissatisfied guests. This rogues’ gallery of poor communication skills, in short, has more to do with a lack of repeat business than economic conditions.

This is counterintuitive during a major recession, when discretionary spending has shriveled. The new generation of social-networking discount promotion sites, like Groupon, may seem tempting to a spa with lots of empty space on its books. But focusing on quantity over quality will quickly erode any perceived value that remains for your customers. Taking the high road–staying focused on delivering a stellar guest experience–is a healthier strategy for a spa that wants to be in business in 2011.

Your biggest moment of truth in a spa or salon takes place, not in a treatment room or at an employee’s station, but when a client is checking out. This is the moment you must ascertain whether a guest is satisfied, when your guest is invited to reschedule, and when they are invited to make home care purchases. Your challenge? To do all this while checking out guests as quickly and as accurately as possible.

Because your reschedule/retention rate is the most critical metric in business success, this “moment” must consistently ensure the best possible outcome. Being friendly and efficient is important, but it’s only the beginning.

Join us for this webinar, the third in our series for front desk employees and their managers. Presenters Lisa M. Starr and Peggy Wynne Borgman of Wynne business, veteran spa consultants and educators, pack the hour of instruction full of use-it-tomorrow, down to earth content. Jessica Zike of Coyle Hospitality Group, the premier mystery shopping company for the hospitality industry, will kick off the session by providing eye opening real-world performance data from their Mystery Shoppers, as well as anecdotes about front-desk experiences that missed the mark.

Participants will learn:

- The importance of the front desk team in building the business
- The hidden opportunities of checkout
- Who is supposed to do what? Understanding roles and responsibilities in this transitional zone
- Recognizing the guest at checkout; what to do when you don’t know their name
- Creating a smooth “handoff” from a service provider to the front desk
- Creating a smooth transition from the locker room to the front desk
- How to effectively gauge guest satisfaction at checkout
- The most inspiring home care recommendation strategies
- What to do when you’re asked a question you can’t answer!
- How to respond to “objections” such as “I already have something like this at home”
- Building the sale with “bumps”
- The recipe for persuasive invitations to return
- What to say when the guest says, “I need to check my calendar”
- The most neglected step in the checkout process

The webinar includes an hour long presentation and concludes with a 15 minute Q & A session. Participants need a computer and a telephone for the audio portion of the webinar.

Tuition: $99 per registered computer

Visit our Webex site to register and be sure to click on the “upcoming” tab

The evening we arrived, we went to Downtown Disney, a cluster of high-concept restaurants and retail stores outside the park. Our mission: watch the second half of the game, find some dinner, and catch a show at the House of Blues after the game. We had hoped to accomplish this all at HOB.

We began with hostesses outside the venue. While smiling is the law inside Disneyland, the HOB team was clearly under strict orders to project facial expressions consistent with its core theme of “the blues.” Though not as grim and grizzled as true bluesmen, these young ladies were well into mastering Stage One Blues, known to the layperson as “indifference” and “boredom.”

There were no tables available, we learned, but we could drink until something opened up. The ostensible “Superbowl Party” inside, sponsored by JACK FM, featured nothing resembling a large screen TV. A brilliant bit of blues branding, this enabled us to experience a taste of the bitterness and disappointment so popular in the Mississippi delta.

In the throes of our own personal blues, we abandoned the HOB and sought Superbowl solace in the arms of the Jazz Kitchen nearby. There we were seated with great enthusiasm by a young lady who seemed to have been waiting all her life to serve us. Though the television facilities in the Jazz Kitchen were, if anything, a bit worse, the atmosphere in the room where the Superbowl Party was taking place was heady. There was a buffet of deep fried everything; heartfelt, inebriated shouts of “Who Dat!” and Mardi Gras beads passed out whenever the Saints scored. Bosomy older ladies in oversize football jerseys jumped to their feet with every play. Our earnest young server brought everything with ceremony, effused over the offerings on the menu, and managed to bring me the cryogenically cold martini I always order and never receive.

When my spouse returned briefly to the HOB to inquire when the music would be starting, the hostesses informed him with absolute certainty that there was no music that evening. In fact, they added, there would be no blues at the house of blues for almost a week. My husband was in a mild panic, since we were there specifically to see our favorite tribute band, Platinum Rock Stars.

“Honey, are you sure this is the right House of Blues?” hubby asked doubtfully. (Given the dishevelment of my perimenopausal brain, he’s right to be worried.)

I texted the band manager.

“We’re setting up now,” he assured me. Fueled with righteous indignation and a bit of Grey Goose, I marched back to the HOB hostess stand to inform them of their grievous error. PInetop Perkins or Honeyboy Edwards would have admired their near-total indifference, not forged by years of hard luck, hard liquor and disappointment, but freshly minted somewhere in Orange County.

Saints triumphant, we headed back to the House of Blues. Wristbands were affixed to prove our ability to drink. (Later we would learn that they ran out of wristbands and stopped admitting people to the show, ensuring that the venue remained half empty–like the bluesman’s proverbial glass.)

In her book “Branded Customer Service,” Janelle Barlow argues persuasively that the ultimate expression of a corporate brand is the people who work on the front lines. House of Blues has taken this deeply to heart. We encountered a scowling female bartender and a sound crew whose dedication to their job rivaled that of a prison trusty.

After rocking out to blazing micro-sets of Led Zeppelin, Boston, Def Leppard, Van Halen, and Bon Jovi, we were ready to head back to the hotel. Outside the HOB, David Victor, the band’s charismatic lead singer, who impersonates Robert Plant and David Lee Roth with equal ease, chatted amiably with some of the show’s attendees, including an 8 year old boy. (Whether or not this was branded behavior for a Platinum Rock Star is debatable.)

Little Jacob was a “Rock Star” video game afficionado, who’d we’d observed singing passionately along to virtually every song while his mom looked on proudly. She told us that it was his first live show, and then he and his sister had their pictures taken with David, much to their delight.

Walt Disney would have been proud. Pinetop Perkins, maybe not so much.

• Are you confident in your employees’ ability to resolve guest complaints?
• Do they know how to handle the inevitable issues that arise in a busy spa operation?
• Are you certain that guests leave your spa satisfied?
• When was the last time they received training in complaint resolution?

A great reputation has always been the best way to market a spa. But the internet has made superior customer service a crucial survival skill.

Web search is one of your top marketing modalities, and negative reviews can cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

We are delighted to announce that our employee training webinar, “Moments of Truth: Mastering Complaint Resolution and Service Recovery” is coming up on Tuesday,
February 23rd, giving you a chance to economically and quickly get your team up to speed for the busier months ahead.

Don’t let another month pass without inoculating your front line team against mediocre customer service, and common errors. If three employees attend this online training, your cost per person to train them is less than $35. (That’s about one third the cost of one comp’d massage or facial.)

They’ll learn:

• How to resolve complaints without “giving away the store”
• How to maintain composure while dealing with a client who’s upset
• How to turn a complaining customer into one of your biggest fans
• What to say to a client who is “venting”
• What NOT to say to a client who is “venting”
• How to discern an angry client from an abusive one, and what to do about it
• The five steps to effective service recovery/complaint resolution

The webinar is co-sponsored by Coyle Hospitality Group, the leading mystery shopping and quality management organization in the hotel, spa, restaurant and cruise industries.

Please go to our WebEx training center now to register. Simply click on the “upcoming” tab and select the webinar title you’re interested in.

“See” you in our virtual classroom.

We’re constantly asked what the successful spas have done, are doing, to strengthen their operations. I’ve been happy to hear how many companies whose top line plummeted still posted a substantially better bottom line than in 2008. Our own Preston Wynne spa is a good example. Sales were off 22% in our Silicon Valley day spa in 2009, but the bottom line was 500% better. That didn’t happen by accident, of course–the survival instinct is a great motivator.

We also had a blowout gift season during the holidays, with the final tally showing our sales up 16% from the previous year. That was the result of aggressive promotion, deals that encouraged larger purchases (we gave a $50 services gift certificate, which expires in 90 days, for every $200 in gift cards purchased.) Another spa in our Northern California Spa Leadership Round Table became, in her words, “her own Spa Finder” selling a limited number of gift cards at a substantial discount. While we are not a fan of discounting, the limited-edition approach is a great way to protect perceived value. (We used this same “only x available at this price” approach this month to sell costly cellulite therapy packages. We had a stunning response.)

Here are some of our key observations, looking back at the Year from Hell.

Cost cutting was a way of life, but we saw the limitations of that approach in hotel spas especially. There’s only so much you can cut before folks start to question your price point.

One trend we noted is that hotel spas are being given more voice in the way they market to day and past guests. Hotels have stopped “tolerating” their day guest segment and started actively courting a local market. Results-oriented and wellness-driven programming (though not too far off the beaten path of stress reduction and de-aging) has helped resort and hotel offerings increase their appeal to affluent locals, who are willing to pay a premium, but not for a “fluff and buff.”

Isolated destination spas were hit much harder than facilities near population areas.

Day spas were generally more resilient, in part because of their ability to “run and shoot,” as opposed to having more entrenched and institutionalized ways of doing business. If you were a large, lumbering property in 2009 you were in a world of hurt. We didn’t see a lot of creative, guerilla-marketing ideas emerging from that sector of the spa industry. Defensive cutbacks, again, don’t take you very far.

Salon spas performed the best. Clients still need their regular maintenance. Skin care services have outperformed massage, because massage is being commodotized in many areas by budget operations like Massage Envy. (If I need a kink rubbed out of my shoulder, I may be willing to let a stranger to do that, but I’m not going to play around when it comes to my face–I’m going to my trusted esthetician.) That is not to say that higher end massage services are being outmoded–it means that you need to offer a real experience to get people to pay the premium. None of this “phoning it in” business that we still see in so many hotels and resorts.

Retail has been hit hard, but retail-focused, spa-flavored operations (i.e. CVS Pharmacies’ new Beauty 360, et al) are on the rise. The spa channel needs to get much more creative to win back its share of consumer beauty spending. Part of the challenge is structural. Visit most any spa and see if it feels like a place a passer by or browser can go shopping. Spa design has focused more on grand architectural “entry statements” than engaging customers with shopping and buying cues and good retail design–which can be grand in itself. (Want ideas? Attend the GlobalShop expo in Las Vegas this March.)

Expecting all our retail to come as the result of services is an outmoded idea. Retail must be more experiential, going beyond the tired boutique approach. We must embrace the idea that some of our clients are going to be retail, rather than service, clients, and if we didn’t insist on making service the price of entry, we’d have many more customers who just want to shop with us. Some Successful Survivors have this “retail first” attitude, not making it the cherry on top of their revenue, but making it the tail that wags their spa dog.

Those big retailers sniffing around the spa world aren’t stupid…they know that there are higher sales per square foot in a retail store than a spa. A token spa presence (sometimes one treatment room) is enough to give them the spa cachet and win that customer. Spa purists may cringe, but Successful Survivors shrug it off as industry evolution. They “follow the money.”

Exclusive and unique products are vital to customer loyalty. Successful survivors use private branding in their retail mix, though it is not always obvious as such. Fewer and fewer sophisticated operations just slap the spa name on a private label product–they’re actually creating brands.

Events and parties are surprisingly strong. This is a very supportive trend for resort and day spas, and those who have *unique environments* are finding there is a steady demand for social events. Spas have become a mainstream venue for entertaining. Successful Survivors are reaching out to their marketplace to make sure that there is awareness of their event and party capabilities.

Successful Survivors were creative with their marketing mix, but they didn’t drop everything to start Tweeting. Facebook Fan Pages were a favorite way to build community and get the word out about events.

I often heard old media like the Yellow Pages kicked around. However, YellowPages.com is now the 17th ranked site in the world, and the only way you get in there is to have a presence in the book. Though it’s fairly expensive as a per-click program (we paid about $1.95 per click last year) the Yellow Pages customer, online or not, is on a mission, not wandering. AT & T just added a new direct mail postcard program that we’re trying too–no minimums, incredible targeting capabilities, about $1.00 per card, all in (though there is a base subscription of $200 per month). I’ll let you know how that works.

In general, the Successful Survivors group shared these traits:
- they worked hard on building value for customers, taking nothing for granted
- they aggressively managed utilization but segmented their customers so they were not bombarding their entire customer base with special offers
- Instead of relying on discounting, they created lower-price point services (45 minute format, for example) that still enabled them to protect their value proposition but offered customers the opportunity to “spa” for less
- they reduced overhead expenses continuously, but protected expenditures that had high perceived value for customers. In our spa we call this law “If it touches the customer, it has to be perfect.”
- they reduced the richness of compensation plans
- they suspended paid time off benefits, and this year, are partially restoring them as a perk for employees who meet their sales goals
- they got their managers out of their offices and onto the floor
- they communicated continuously and were open about their financial health with their team
- they cadged clever ideas from other industries
- they used inexpensive marketing tools, including social media, to talk to their clients and build business
- they improved and/or paid close attention to their web presence
- they set goals, coached, and “touched” their team members every month

I am pretty confident that 2010 will be nearly as challenging as 2009. It’s hard not to feel fatigued by this record-setting recession as it drags on, bumping along the bottom. One thing is certain: sharing strategies with other spas is a great way to increase your business intelligence. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again–form a round table with your peers (non competitive spas in your region) and get together every other month to share what’s worked and what hasn’t. It’s free and it’s fantastic.

Be sure to join the Wynne Business group on Linked In, where such sharing is highly encouraged!

We’d love it if you’d post your best marketing idea from 2009 here as a comment.

Wynne Business Q1 Marketing Round Table

Give us an hour and we’ll kick start your marketing plan with our stimulating online Marketing Round Table. During this Wynne Business web conference, you’re invited to share your best ideas from 2009 and your plans for the New Year. This is a rare chance to find out from other smart, savvy spa operators from all over North America what’s working for them.

This fast, fun, peer-to-peer learning event is moderated by Peggy Wynne Borgman and Lisa Starr of Wynne Business, as well as guest panelist David Victor from Accelerator Enterprise Technologies, our resident web marketing expert.

To register, visit the Wynne Business Webex Training Center and click on the “upcoming” tab.

But, just when things get rolling–and some really fantastic ideas come rolling in–time’s up.

No topic has been hotter in our real-world, Northern California Spa Leadership Round Table this year than sales and marketing. So we decided to create a free, live marketing round table for all our subscribers, on Tuesday, January 18, at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern. We’ll start with a very short overview and then open the floor to you–soliciting your best ideas, your questions, even your worst marketing nightmares. This is a no-holds-barred discussion, designed to draw out the collective wisdom of our savvy community of spa professionals.

The round table will be moderated by Lisa Starr and me. You can also contribute by online chat if you don’t feel like opening your mouth.

For a little bit of left brain action, we’ve Lisa and I will be joined by David Victor of Accelerator Enterprise Technologies, whose company creates websites (including Preston Wynne Spa’s, and the recently relaunched Wynne Business site) as well as online marketing programs for spa and beauty businesses.

Visit our training center to register today. Space is limited.

Back in the Black webinar audio recording

Though the retail sector is not rebounding, and prominent companies are still vanishing from the landscape, the gift card story is last year’s news, and the media needs fresh new scares to stoke the engines of holiday panic. Thus gift card retailers, your services as enemies of the state are no longer required!

Long before the holiday season, we began noticing a distinct thaw in gift card sales. Most spas I’ve talked with say theirs began in October. In our own Preston Wynne Spa, we finished November with gift sales up 22% above last year.

Certainly, spas love and need the cash flow from gift cards. But 2009 was the first year that most spas redeemed more gift cards than they sold, which somewhat soured the love affair. Accustomed to (and adoring) the notion that “20% of them are never redeemed,” spas were rudely shocked.

But more important, we think, is that gift sales are a leading indicator. Gift redemptions closely track sales in general. In other words, when few gift cards are being redeemed, business in general is slow. When gift cards are being redeemed at a brisk pace, business is booming.

Numbers are funny things–they can tell vivid stories, but not always the ones you expect them to. Gift redemptions as a percentage of sales is a key number that I’ve observed for years. I like it to hover around 17-20% of total sales volume. If it drops below that, and especially below 15%, we’ve got a demand problem. If it rages above 25%, we’re churning a lot of new guests and not retaining enough of them. (Sure, in January you can expect to see these overheated numbers. But the holiday lump passes through the snake pretty swiftly.)

We just concluded our holiday client appreciation party and gift card preview. We threw a truly shameless “gift with purchase” at our clients this year–a gift certificate (expirable in 90 days, as promotional gifts are) for a $75 “Small Indulgence” treatment for every $150 in gift cards purchased. These are 45 minute treatments, and include a massage, body scrub, facial and a deluxe 75 minute pedicure.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as this was our richest offer ever, we sold 70% more gift cards than last year. Like most of you, I look forward to a time (a long way off, no doubt) when our clients no longer need spectacular promotions to get them to take action. But like most of you, I am delighted that they are taking action at all.

So, if our generally higher gift card sales are saying what we hope they are, 2010 may finally show growth. (Join us for our first webinar of the New Year, “Back in the Black,” and we’ll talk about what to do in the meantime.)

Have a very prosperous gift selling season, and please share your favorite promotions!