For this week’s blog, let’s take a look at Danny Meyer’s outlook on the art of hospitality. Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, which oversees the Gramercy Tavern in New York City, which in turn is a restaurant that is often voted #1 in any given year of the Zagat survey.
The video opens with Meyer saying, “I think hospitality is the single most powerful business strategy that doesn’t get taught nearly enough in business school.” He goes on to explain that service and hospitality are “completely different topics,” and that hospitality is actually a dialogue. If the customer feels like the employee (or the business) is on their side, doing things for them, or customizing their experience in some way, that’s hospitality. No matter how technically skilled the employees are, how the customers are made to feel is what they will remember.
He explains that the way to achieve long-term success is to reject the longstanding mantra that the customer is number one, or that the customer is always right. Meyer tells us to place customers second. The true number one should be your employees, whose happiness will help to create the best customer experience. Every manager or business owner should ask him or herself, are my employees focused on their work and having fun with each other? Customers are very sensitive to this.
When it comes to finding the right employees, Meyer doesn’t believe technical proficiency is the most important. In fact, he would rate it as being 49% of what makes for great employees; the other 51% are their emotional skills. Those skills add up to a high hospitality quotient, meaning that they’ll be an employee whose greatest pleasure isn’t about seeking perfection but in making others feel better.
To that end, Meyer suggests that the six most important emotional qualities every employee should have are kindness, optimism, work ethic, curious intelligence, empathy, self-awareness, and integrity. These skills combined with all of the information most businesses collect about their customers (e.g. last time they dined there, what they ordered, what they were celebrating, etc.) allows your business to create a customized experience. Meyer describes this as “collecting dots to connect dots.” Institutional memory is key.
But in the end, it’s not about being the best, objectively speaking. That will always be up for debate. Instead, your business should seek to be your customers’ favorite, which is inarguable. It’s all about the emotional connection, edging out even the importance of execution. As he admits, there are competitors with higher food scores, and some even have higher service scores (with incredible performances done tableside by the servers). However, despite all that, Gramercy Tavern remains a frequent favorite in the Zagat guide. The sum of performance plus hospitality equals experience, and that’s what really leads to customers saying there’s nowhere else they’d rather go.
While innovation remains a crucial component of keeping your business’s edge, novelty has a limited shelf life due to the Internet. Great ideas get copied. So yes, keep innovating and performing at a high level, but the individual connection you forge with each customer cannot be copied. That’s what every business should double-down on.
Simply put, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling: food, cars, produce, whatever. You’re really selling happiness.
The Brandt Group champions the customer experience, which is the sum total of everything from your product quality, to your customer service, to your employees’ performance, to the relationships you develop with your clientele. Through our world-class mystery shopping, our partners continually hone their customer experiences to ensure strong customer loyalty, employee fulfillment, and enhanced profits for years to come. Let’s talk today about what steps your business is going to take to become your customers’ favorite.
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