"Shoe" of Bandon Dunes
When I stepped off the shuttle bus on a recent trip to Oregon’s Bandon Dunes golf resort I immediately realized why it’s ranked as the #1 golf resort in America—its people. Golfers visit from all over the world for the spectacular views and links style challenges on the Oregon coast, but its exceptional customer service keeps them coming back.
The first person we met was Bob “Shoe” Gaspar. Shoe, as everyone calls him, is friendly, personable, committed to creating an exceptional experience, and has an uncanny ability to remember names. He remembers players from years earlier. He remembers your name during your stay. He even shows up several hours before his shift, about 4:00 a.m, to review the day’s guest list. Shoe applied for a job before the resort opened in 1999, but his work history did not fit any open positions at the time. Managers soon realized, however, that Shoe’s personality fit the experience they were trying to achieve. Today he is the first person that guests see upon arriving and the last person to bid them farewell at the end of their stay.
Over the past several years I’ve spent a lot of time with leaders who run some of the world’s most admired customer service brands: Apple Store, Starbucks, The Ritz-Carlton, Virgin, Zappos, and now, in the golf resort category, Bandon Dunes. One of the fundamental keys to elevating the customer experience at each of these brands is the warm, friendly greeting.
In this earlier column, I revealed what I called the Apple’s Store’s ‘secret sauce’— the five steps of service. These are the five steps that each employee is trained to walk a customer through as soon as that customer walks through the door. The first step is “Approach customers with a personalized, warm welcome.” This simply means that a person with a friendly personality approaches the customer with a genuine greeting that makes the customer feel welcome, but not rushed or intimidated. This is such an important role a former Apple Store manager told me he hired people with “a magnetic personality” for that position.
The Apple Store looked to The Ritz-Carlton for inspiration. Not surprisingly, The Ritz-Carlton trains its employees to approach guests with “a warm and sincere greeting.” Ritz-Carlton staff are trained to use the guests’ name whenever possible. People love to hear the sound of their own names. The Apple Store has a simple way of greeting people by name, even though the average store attracts 2,000 visitors a day. When you first enter the store you are greeted by someone holding an iPad. They’ll take down your name and make a note of what you’re wearing. When a sales associate, a “specialist,” later approaches you, they recognize you and know your name. A specialist might walk up to me and say, “Hi Carmine, how are you doing? Let’s take a look at those new MacBooks.” They know who you are and why you’re there.
AT&T Retail has conducted extensive research into the way customers are made to feel when they enter a store. They performed studies with two focus groups. One group of customers walked into a store and waited approximately three minutes to be served by an employee, but they were not greeted. The other group was greeted within ten feet and ten seconds of walking through the door and they were told that an associate would help them “in approximately three minutes.” Each group waited exactly three minutes to be served. The results were clear. Those customers who were not greeted gave much lower scores to the overall experience than those who were greeted warmly. The greeting made a significant difference in the customers’ overall evaluation of the experience. Today “10 feet or 10 seconds” is a key customer service guideline in each of AT&T’s retail stores in North America.
A warm greeting extends to social media, too. Try this the next time you fly Virgin America, another brand admired for its customer service: post something about your trip on Twitter and copy @virginamerica. It’s highly likely that you’ll receive a genuine response from someone on Virgin America’s social media team. They respond to nearly ever Twitter post. I was seated next to a young girl on one Virgin America flight who couldn’t stop giggling as she looked at her smartphone. Her mother asked her why she was laughing. “They [Virgin America] keep talking to me on Twitter.”
Many brands go out of their way to minimize contact between employees and customers. The great customer service brands do the opposite. They know that your experience is based on how employees make you feel and it all starts with a warm welcome.