CUSTOMER SERVICE: Walking the True Walk
by Randall A. Fine
December 1, 2010
An MGM Mirage housekeeper
Building a culture takes commitment … So are you committed?
I am obsessed
with the “waver” at Barona Resort & Casino. Obsessed. I never knew such a
job existed, and now that I do, I’m amazed at those individuals who can
actually do it.
What is a “waver”? At the entrance to Barona’s ranch-like property
outside San Diego there is a sort of guardhouse that is staffed 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, 52 weeks a year with an employee whose sole job is to smile
and wave at cars as they enter. There is no gate at this guardhouse, no reason
to stop or slow down, but on each and every visit you can be assured that
someone will be there, smiling and waving. Whether you show up a 2 p.m. or 2
a.m. Whether it is sunny or rainy. In winter and summer. Smiling and
waving.
Did I already mention I’m obsessed with this?
Why does Barona spend hundreds of thousands a year to staff a
position a half-mile away from the closest slot machine? Because they are a
property that embraces outstanding service at their core and recognize that the
first interaction — a happy member of their team smiling and waving to a
customer as they enter the “Barona Experience” — sets a service tone and
standard they hope will carry through the entire visit. Barona, as much as any
facility I have ever visited, walks the walk of providing great
service.
Yet if you were to compare Barona’s public statements about
service to that of just about any other casino you will find they generally
read the same. Virtually every casino describes the quality of their customer
service as one of their key strengths. The fact is, it is easy to say that you
care about service, it is far harder to actually provide it. I could make up
some cheesy acronym about how to do it, full of platitudes about smiling and
using guest names three times per interaction, etc., etc. Instead I’d like to
share a counter-intuitive model that cuts through the baloney of providing
great service and isolates on those, like Barona, that actually do.
PRINCIPLE 1: We Aren’t in Business To Make our Customers Happy
Amazing
statement to make, isn’t it? Let me be clear, the inverse is not true either, we
aren’t in business to make our customers unhappy.
Then what are we in business for? To
make money for our states that tax us and our tribes and shareholders that own
us. Period. Making customers happy
is a necessary input in order to make money.
It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Why the distinction? Because if the end were
to make customers happy we would do my
favorite all-time promotional idea for every customer every day — let
them run through the cage with a brown paper bag.
This distinction is important because in many other industries
making the customer happy and maximizing profitability are not at
loggerheads.
So what makes gaming different?
Our business is often compared to the hotel business, so let’s use
them as an example. And within that industry few are as respected as service
providers as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. When one purchases the Four
Seasons product the transaction is straightforward — you fork over somewhere in
the neighborhood of $400 per night in the expectation that you will have a
beautiful room, fantastic amenities and, of course, bespoke service. And 99
times out of 100 that is exactly what you get. Both sides of the transaction
are happy. The customer got what they paid for, the company made a profit, and,
best of all, the customer will be back.
So why shouldn’t we expect the same in our
business? Gaming operates without clear-cut, transparent prices. In fact, quite
the opposite. A customer in our business shows up to buy $400 of our product
and expects to walk out with $1,000. You don’t need a Harvard MBA to theorize
that if you expect to lose you won’t visit a casino. Yet in at least two out of
every three visits the customer leaves with less money than they came in with
and sometimes none of it. Now they may have had friendly service, a free meal
and some great entertainment, but their expectation of the experience — walk in
with some money, walk out with more — was not met. This explains why gaming
customers are among the most disloyal and why there is such overlap in gaming
data bases. After you get beat a certain number of times, no matter how great
the service, you are going to seek out a new place to “try your luck”. As a
result, we have to be realistic about what great service can do for us. It may
extend a three-trip losing streak into a four-trip streak. But, in the end, if
we continually compare ourselves to the Four Seasons of the world we are just
going to be disappointed.
To get back to the key principle — because unlike Four Seasons we
cannot always deliver what the customer wants — we have to accept that our goal
must be to make the customer as happy as we can. Once we accept our unique
limitations we can begin to build the foundation of a service culture.
PRINCIPLE 2: Shut Up and Deliver
The concept here is
that there are some things that you can speak about credibly and others that
have to be seen to be believed. Service is something that we experience, it
isn’t something you can show in an advertisement. In the same way that the guy
who brags about all his dates is the one least likely to have a girlfriend, he
who brags the most about service is least likely to provide it. Talk is easy,
delivering takes commitment.
I have discovered one exception to this rule, developed and
executed by none other than the inventor of the “waver”— Barona Resort &
Casino. Barona has for a number of years now won the J.D. Power award for
service in their local gaming market. So when Barona advertises the fact that
they have won these awards it is not simply talk but an external validation by
someone who theoretically has already experienced the service. Barona takes it
one step further. The first thing you see after entering the casino and passing
a “greeter” (yes, that is in addition to the “waver”) is their J.D. Power
trophies sitting in a glass case.
PRINCIPLE 3: CEOs Provide Service too
Every CEO talks about
service, but few actually realize that their decisions affect the way service
is delivered. The CEO’s impact on the delivery of service, and more importantly
the culture of service, is more important than anyone
else’s.
In brief, senior management can’t expect to
treat their employees one way and expect them to treat customers a different
way. Let me use a specific (though nameless) example. One of the larger gaming
companies, one that loves to talk about its service (see Principle 2),
conducted a series of layoffs among its line-level staff. Layoffs are always
going to stress service delivery capabilities, but this company handled it
terribly. They made the cardinal sin of continually telling employees, “This is
the last round of layoffs,” and then launching another round. Even worse,
instead of rallying the survivors to step up to fill the void, they required
substantial pay cuts from each.
Assuming these draconian measures were needed, a smart CEO would
have relaxed the service talk for a period of time, recognizing that holding
feet to the fire on service would be hypocritical after massive reductions in
the resources required to provide it. But not here. In this instance, employees
were told services levels could not be lowered one iota, further angering and
demoralizing those so critical to providing service. I didn’t discover the
notion that happy employees create happy customers, but I do understand that
the reverse can be true as well. So when CEOs start talking the talk about
providing great service, hold them accountable for providing the tools to get
the job done.
PRINCIPLE 4: Comment Cards Are Worthless
Burn them, shred them,
or for those who think sustainability initiatives are a way to excite your
employees, recycle them — but get rid of comment cards because they are
absolutely, positively worthless.
We work with clients every day to ensure that robust quantitative
analysis drives decision-making, whether it is on marketing initiatives, slot
floor optimization, labor and staffing or, yes, customer service. You can only
control what you can measure, and without rigorous customer-service surveying
programs, base-lining and analysis you have neither measurement nor
control.
There are numerous companies, including ours,
that can help you design a quantitative service measurement program, deploy it
and track the results both month to month and year over year to ensure that
your service levels constantly improve. Which brings me back to the evil that
is the comment card. Comment cards are purely anecdotal data collectors. You
only hear from the most vocal “haters” or, rarely, the vocal “fawners”. And
while the comments they contain may include some nuggets that bear follow-up,
they do not provide the depth or breadth to give yourself an overall grade for
service, or, more importantly, to allow you to see whether or not you are
moving in the right direction.
So save some paper and invest some time in a system that truly
benchmarks your performance and allows you to set measurable goals for your
front-line staff.
These four principles are by no means an
exhaustive solution to providing world-class service, but they do achieve the
following: First, they allow us to
understand the limitations to providing service that are inherent in our
product. Second, they stress the importance of actions over words and
demonstrate that the actions of the senior-most executives can have monumental
impact on the performance of front-line staff. Third, they ask us to shift the
way we measure service from the anecdotal to the quantitative. They lay the
foundation for transformative service experiences as we improve what we measure
and we value what we experience.
It is a long journey from these principles to being willing to
spend money on the “waver”. But even Barona had to start that journey
somewhere.
So can you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Randall
A. Fine is the founder and managing director of The Fine Point
Group, a leading gaming industry strategy consultancy and management company. A
former senior executive with Harrah’s Entertainment and Carl Icahn’s gaming
holdings, Fine has served clients in 18 U.S. jurisdictions, including Station
Casinos, Seminole Hard Rock, Greektown Casino Hotel, Isle of Capri Casinos and
Barona Resort & Casino. He can be reached at rfine@thefinepointgroup.com.
Randall A. Fine
rfine@thefinepointgroup.com
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