Special Features & Illustrations

for Readers of High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service

Page 80: Core Values

Make them (your core values) the focus of orientation. That way, if safety is one of your core values and you stress this at orientation, on day two, when the new employee’s coworker tells him ‘‘In this restaurant, we stack the high chairs in front of the emergency exit when we need more room to do our prepwork,’’ [This is a real-life example—see photo] he’ll experience cognitive dissonance and work on a way to align the actions of the company with the core values they’re supposed to reflect.

Pp 125-126: Wynn Some

When visiting Vegas to give a speech to a hospitality organization on a beautiful June day, I saw a huge ceramic trash can at the front entrance of The Wynn that seemed to be blocking the push switch for disabled access. However, on closer inspection, I saw the disabled-access switch was apparently motion activated, with an indication on it reading ‘‘Wave to open.’’ Curious, I gave a little wave of my hand from where I was standing—eight feet away. The technology worked like magic: no need to struggle to move the clearly unmovable trash can, no need to wonder if a clunky old mechanical push button was broken (as they often are), no need to exert the arm strength sometimes unreasonably asked of those in wheelchairs.

Pp 139-140: The specific medium is the message—and its only chance of getting through

To call or text or not to call or text a customer’s mobile is a rather easy
decision to work out for each customer. But there are more technologically complex ones as well. These come down to finding out specifically how your customer likes to receive alerts: HTML, standard mobile formatting (a stripped down version that works well on a smartphone such as an Android-compatible phone or iPhone), or text-formatted, which is handy for an old-school BlackBerry and important for the visually impaired.

Platinum Hotel Las Vegas handles this quite well (see screenshots on the left of how Platinum does it). The hotel sends out automated alerts prior to a guest’s arrival, checking that all details on the reservation and in the guest’s preference file are correct.

Each alert features a simple view-switching selection at the top— ‘‘view: HTML–Mobile–Text’’—allowing the guest to switch the way information is displayed, regardless of what the guest may have initially indicated as a preference.

I recommend you consider offering this format-switching functionality front and center like Platinum does, because customers are nothing if not fickle. Anticipate that, too.