Category Archives: Guest Services

One Word Makes the Difference

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Guest Services in the church is a passion of mine. I want churches to realize that they have a chance – usually a single chance – to make a WOW! first impression on Guests coming to their facility this weekend.

Here’s a challenge for you: a single word will change your mind-set on this topic:

When it comes to ChurchWorld, more often than not we have visitors.

It may be a little thing to you, just a word, but I think it’s actually a powerful first impression that needs to change.

Do you have Visitor parking? Visitor packets? A Visitor’s Center? Do you welcome your visitors during the worship experience? And on and on…

The first step in creating a WOW! Guest Services experience is to remove the word visitor from your vocabulary, never to be used again.

It’s a little thing to be sure. But it’s a mindset change that will really impact how you create the rest of the experience at your church.

You are expecting Guests this weekend.

Guests come to your place, looking for a warm greeting, a smiling face, and an experience designed to make them feel like, well, Guests. Nothing phony, manipulative, or in-your-face; just welcome them as guests with the most sincere, energizing, and loving experiences you can.

Can we agree to start with a simple change that conveys a powerful image, one that will be reflected through your church?

Over the past several years, in conversations with hundreds of church leaders on the topic of Guest Services, that one word has been like a light bulb being turned on – it’s like “Wow – I get it!”

Now that you’ve got it, I want to stretch you a little bit more and plant a seed for future posts:

The magic formula for Guest Services in your church can be broken down into 4 categories:

Product

What business is your church in?

Only you and your leadership team can answer that, but I am suggesting your church is in the people business. Your church doesn’t manufacture and sell an object, but you do seek to produce something: changed lives.

The “raw materials” you start with are the pinnacle of God’s creation – after all, we are made in His image. But even so, we are all in process. Somewhere between birth and death, all of us are on a journey. Your church needs to balance the frailty and possibility of everyone you encounter, and create experiences that accept them where they are, challenge them to move toward where they need to be, and walk with them along the way.

Churches that understand their “product” and create vital, life-changing experiences – those are the churches that are making a difference in our world today.

What are you creating at your church?

Place

Think like a designer – be an environmental architect

Just as an architect asks a number of questions before designing a building, church leaders who want to be environmental architects must ask questions to reveal the function of the space, which in turn determine its design.

If you were to own the architectural responsibility for every environment in your church, you should be asking questions like:

  • What’s the purpose of this environment?
  • Who will use this environment?
  • What do we want people to experience?
  • What do we want people to leave with?
  • Who’s responsible for quality control?

Now just in case you were wondering, this concept of space is not limited to physical place. Environments (the physical kind) matter very much. But a good environmental architect is also creating psychological space in much the same way.

You’re on a journey to create experiences that keep people coming back.

Process

Guest Service leaders need to understand design thinking.

Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.

Just as a product begins with an engineering blueprint and a building with an architectural blueprint, an experience blueprint provides the framework for working out the details of a human interaction, including emotive elements, from beginning to end.

It captures how people travel through an experience in time. Rather than trying to choreograph that journey, its function is to identify the most meaningful points and turn them into opportunities that positively impact the individual. What might be a source of discomfort or pain is now an opportunity for an experience that is distinctive, emotionally gratifying, and memorable.

The experience blueprint is at one and the same time a high-level strategy document and a fine-grained process analysis of the details that matter.

It’s time to create an Experience Blueprint for your Guest Services!

People

You have to have a great team in place first before you can begin to deliver excellent experiences.

In the equation Creating Experiences = Product + Place + Process + People, the most important part, the starting place, the foundation which all else is built on – it’s people.

The experiences that you are attempting to create, the places and spaces in which they are housed – both literally and figuratively – are important. But you don’t get anywhere without the people.

When an organization helps its team members bring pride, excellence, and playfulness to every aspect of their task, those team members literally have the chance to change the lives of those around them.

People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They want to be a part of something that touches their hearts.

Everything matters – but everyone matters more.

 

Intrigued about Guest Services at your church? Look for more information in upcoming posts here, and drop me a quick note and tell me more about what your church does in the Guest Services area.

Have You Checked Your Digital Front Door Lately?

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Recently I was on site at a church conducting a Guest Perspective evaluation. At Auxano, our Guest Perspective starts in the digital world, because that’s where many guests begin their search for information.

Our client is doing a great job on their digital front door:

  • Their website is crisp, easy to navigate, and always current
  • The mobile option for the web site works well
  • They have developed apps for iPhone and Android devices
Taking a cue from our conversations over the past two days, here are five key ingredients that will insure you have a guest-friendly website:
  • Post all necessary information on a guest-specific landing page. This will make it easy for guests to find out service times, locations, and other helpful information.
  • Personalize your site to guest satisfaction; what would you want to know if you were looking at your church for the first time?
  • Perform quick and inexpensive usability tests to ensure ease of use. And when you make changes to the site, perform the tests again.
  • Build credibility by adding the human touch: Let your guests know that there are real people behind your  site. Post the names and pictures of the staff and team members with whom your guests typically interact.
  • Ask your guests for feedback. Answer — and act upon – every response you receive.

Follow the guidelines above for your digital doorway and soon you will be welcoming guests at your physical doorway!

Building an Experience Culture

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Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound, and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.

– Tim Brown, Change by Design

And the truth of the above quote is delivered to people by people. An exceptional guest experience starts with the front line team that delivers that experience.

Creating an experience culture requires going beyond the generic to design experiences perceived as uniquely tailored to each guest. In order to do that, your front line team has to know something about the guest they are serving. An experience comes to life when it feels personalized and customized.

Do you know who are you serving? Maybe it’s time to create a persona.

Personas are fictional characters, created out of the insights of research you have conducted, that can exemplify certain attributes. Because they make the potentially abstract concept of “guest” very personal and human, personas enhance your ability to build the empathetic understanding of guests that is at the heart of design thinking.

Using the persona concept will allow you to reveal deeper insights into the various kinds of experiences that your guests are having and to help generate innovative ideas about how to improve those experiences.

Here’s a homework assignment for your guest services leadership this weekend:

  • Create 2 or 3 different personas that represent a cross-section of the guests you are trying to reach; make sure they vary in description
  • Brainstorm the way those personas interact with your church, from the time they approach your campus through the time they depart
  • Note each decision point they have to make and each personal interaction they have with your team
  • Chart those on a big whiteboard

What are those fictional personas revealing about a very real experience?

Nordstrom’s Customer Service Rulebook

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One five by seven index card.

One paragraph.

One rule.

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number-one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

 

What about your organization?

Do your values so permeate your organization that rules are minimized?

Parking is More Than Just Cars

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Yesterday’s post introduced the concept of parking teams and how important they are to welcoming guests, members and attenders to your campus. Today I want to expand the parking concept beyond just cars.

I lead the Guest Services (Parking) Teams at Elevation Church’s Uptown location. As the “first face” of Elevation, my crew and I get weekly opportunities to practice guest services and make a lasting first impression. We don’t just park cars; we also:

  • Sanitize all touch points and spray air freshener in the elevator cabs and stairwells of the parking deck we use
  • Pick up trash along the route from the parking deck to the theater
  • Put up 22 parking signs (3 different types) in a 2 block area around the theater
  • Pull the parking ticket from the dispenser and personally hand it to guests entering the deck and welcome them to Elevation
  • When possible, push the call button so the elevator is waiting for guests to take them from the parking deck levels to the ground floor
  • Hold the door for guests entering and leaving the parking garage elevator lobby
  • Validate parking for all Elevation guests
  • Provide VIP (our first time guests) and family parking right next to the theater
  • Know what’s going on Uptown so we can help any and everyone who has a question (sporting events, concerts, special activities, etc.)
  • Provide umbrellas to guests when it’s raining for the walk from the parking deck to the theater
  • Give a verbal greeting to everyone coming and going – in at least three different locations
  • Be alert to any special needs and radio them ahead to the VIP tent
  • As guests are leaving, we take the validated ticket from them and feed it into the dispenser, giving them a verbal blessing as they head out of the garage

And that’s just the parking team!

Elevation’s audacious Guest Services Team also has Greeters, a First Impressions Team, VIP Tent, and Connections Tent (but that’s another part of the journey).

All this BEFORE a guest has stepped into the theater for worship.

Your church is different from my campus – you probably don’t have a parking garage. But you do have parking lots – and that is an excellent opportunity for you to make a powerful first impression.

Take the principle – Parking is your first opportunity to make an impact on your guests – and apply it to the context of your place. What will you do this week to implement/change/improve your parking team?

Do not underestimate the power and influence of the first impression your parking lot makes!

The First Face of Your Church…

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…should be in the parking lot.

Guests and members coming to your church should see an energetic, welcoming, smiling group of people helping you pull into the parking lot and getting safely to the buildings. I admit my bias: I serve as the Parking Team Coordinator for Elevation Church’s Uptown Campus, so I’m all over this thing called parking.

You should be too, because it’s often the “first impression” your guests receive of your church.

At Elevation Church, our worship experiences begin in the parking lot. You may have thought that church parking lots, and the teams that staff them weekly, were just about cars, orange vests, and two-way radios. We see it differently: we’re the first face of Elevation, and we are connectors to the current of the power of God.

The parking teams at Elevation have a vision that is the same as the church’s: So that people far from God will be raised to life in Christ. We fulfill that vision by welcoming everyone to our six campuses, giving them the first of several audacious welcomes for the day. We remove every barrier possible so that they can be a part of a powerful worship experience. As a Parking Team Coordinator at one campus, and after surveying our other campus team leaders, here’s why we think parking is a very important part of what happens at Elevation Church. From the first few sections of our parking manual:

Purpose: The Parking Team exists so that people far from God will be filled with life in Christ.

Goal: We will “WOW” every guest by exceeding their expectations.

Strategy: Create and ensure a quick, easy, and stress-free parking experience.

Our priority is to help traffic enter and exit smoothly but more importantly to honor people and get them excited about Elevation.

Our basic parking guidelines are very simple:

  • Make eye contact
  • Smile
  • Wave
  • Go the extra mile to make someone else smile

So are our suggestions for moving traffic:

  • When you move, they move.
  • Keep the main line of entrance traffic flowing the majority of the time.
  • Quickly help those that are stopping to ask questions and get them moving again.
  • Be aware of pedestrian traffic and be considerate of those going the wrong way.
  • Stay visible.
  • Wear your vest and make motions with the entire arm instead of just the forearm

The parking teams may have a single vision, and simple guidelines, but we express them differently at each campus. Even though we are one church in six locations and there are a lot of similarities, there are a lot of differences in the parking lots. For example, consider the locations:

  • Providence and Northwestern – high schools, with limited entrances and exits and multiple lots
  • University City – a YMCA with limited designated parking
  • Matthews – retail shopping center with shared designated parking areas
  • Blakeney – mixed development with five means of egress in multiple lots
  • Uptown – parking garage with two entrances

Our locations alone make a big difference in how we serve as a parking team. Here are some interesting parking factors anyone with a parking team might consider:

  1. Our parking teams have more fun than you can pay for!
  2. We understand the power of a great first impression.
  3. We understand the letdown of a poor first impression.
  4. Safety is at the top of our list; juggling lines of moving cars and walking people is always a balancing act.
  5. Multiple parking lots with many entrances and exits (Blakeney, Matthews, University City, Rock Hill and Providence Campuses) are great-until you try to staff all them at once.
  6. Traffic cones are a wonderful invention (see #5).
  7. People sometimes pay more attention to a traffic cone than a person in a vest directing traffic flow.
  8. Parking teams have to know everything about the church in order to answer guest’s questions.
  9. Sharing parking spaces with retail stores (Blakeney, Matthews Campuses) is a science – and an art.
  10. Checklists help parking teams do it right, every time.
  11. Grace helps the parking team deal with situation when #10 doesn’t work.
  12. Safety orange is everybody’s favorite color!
  13. With large multiple lots, two-way radios help direct traffic flow efficiently
  14. Parking garages (Uptown Campus) are a whole different world, especially when they also serve two very large nightclubs.
  15. When in parking areas with major attractions nearby, the parking team will be asked directions, times, etc. A little knowledge and a great smile make a great first impression even when someone isn’t coming to Elevation.

All Parking Teams do is help guests find spaces to park their cars, right? At Elevation, there’s so much more to being a part of the parking team.

We serve everyone with audacious, radical hospitality – “just” by parking cars!

 

Creating an Experience Blueprint

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The past few posts have given you a basic understanding of some of the foundations of guest services. Now it’s time to go back to school – design school.

Becoming an Experience Architect

One of the game-changing concepts related to guest services comes from Tim Brown’s book “Change by Design”. Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, has challenged my thinking about design in a number of ways: it’s not just for creative industries or people designing products. Design thinking is most powerful when applied to abstract, multifaceted problems that address a wide range of issues and concerns.

Problems that the typical church encounters every day!

Here’s a great example from one chapter on the design of experience:

Design has the power to enrich our lives by engaging our emotions through image, form, texture, color, sound and smell. The intrinsically human-centered nature of design thinking points to the next step: we can use our empathy and understanding of people to design experiences that create opportunities for active engagement and participation.

Wow-that’s a lot to think about! In the world of serving the church where I work and live, the concepts of designing for experience are so important, yet so often totally overlooked. Brown goes on to talk about 3 “themes” of the design of experiences:

  • The experience economy – people have shifted from passive consumption to active participation
  • Best experiences are not scripted at corporate headquarters but decided on the spot by service professionals who create an authentic, genuine, and compelling experience
  • Implementation is everything-an experience must be as finely crafted and precision-engineered as any other product

Just as a product begins with an engineering blueprint and a building with an architectural blueprint, an experience blueprint provides the framework for working out the details of a human interaction, including emotive elements, from beginning to end.

It captures how people travel through an experience in time. Rather than trying to choreograph that journey, its function is to identify the most meaningful points and turn them into opportunities to positively impact the individual. What might be a source of discomfort or pain is now an opportunity for an experience that is distinctive, emotionally gratifying, and memorable.

The experience blueprint is at one and the same time a high-level strategy document and a fine-grained analysis of the details that matter.

It’s time to create an Experience Blueprint for your Guest Services!

Guest Services: Making Your First Impressions LAST!

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Can the church learn anything from Walt Disney, Starbucks, Nordstrom’s, and the Ritz-Carlton?

My answer is a resounding YES!

Over the past four years I’ve been working on a project exploring the world of hospitality, looking for key principles that have application to the church world I live and work in. Early motivation for this effort came from great guest experiences over consecutive days from two establishments at opposite ends of the dining spectrum: Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and Taco Bell. In both instances, the staff went beyond the expectations to deliver exemplary service. You expect it at one, but are surprised at the other, right? Why should price be any indicator of the level of service delivered? What about a place with no “price” at all – the church?

The companies I named in the opening sentence have been my primary research targets, but you could say that the hospitality industry in general is my field of research. My proposition is that the world of restaurants, coffee shops, fine hotels, and the ultimate in customer expectation and experience – Disney – can provide tangible and beneficial principles for the church to adapt in welcoming guests and members alike.

Along the way, I’ve supplemented my research with practical application in my own church: I lead one of the Guest Services (Parking) Teams at Elevation Church’s Uptown location. As the “first face” of Elevation, my crew and I get weekly opportunities to practice guest services and make a lasting first impression.

We don’t just park cars; we:

• Sanitize all touch points and spray air freshener in the elevator cabs and stairwells of the parking garage we use

• Pick up trash along the route from the garage to the theater

• Put up 22 parking signs along the entrances

• Man the elevator lobbies to call elevators for guests

• Hold the parking deck door for guests coming and going

• Pull the parking ticket and personally hand it to guests

• Validate parking for all Elevation guests

• Provide VIP (our first time guests) and family parking right next to the theater

• Know what’s going on Uptown so we can help any and everyone who has a question (sporting events, concerts, special activities, etc.)

• Provide umbrellas to guests in the rain

• Give a verbal greeting to everyone coming and going

And that’s just the parking crew! Elevation’s audacious Guest Services team also has Greeters, a First Impressions Team, VIP Tent, and Connections Tent. All this BEFORE a guest has stepped into the theater for worship.

You might say Guest Services is a big deal.

I think it is – and you should too.

Your Church has Competition…

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…and it’s not the church down the street.

Like it or not, we live in a consumer-driven society, and the people who come to our church – you and me – and the people we are trying to reach are consumers. With consumers comes competition. If your church is going to be effective in its mission, you must beat the competition.

Pretty strong words by Mark Waltz, author of “First Impressions.” But dead on accurate.

The good news is that our “competition” is not the other churches in your town. As a matter of fact, they’re on your team. So who is your competition?

Here is how Waltz sees it: Your competition, the rival that will keep people away from your church, is any business, services, or experience your guests have encountered in the past few weeks.

That competition includes restaurants, malls, golf courses, amusement parks, movie theaters, sporting events, and so on.

Bottom line: the competition for your guests began when they were wowed in another environment. Your guests have high expectations that are formed every day from new encounters with excellence and conscientious care. Although too much of their world is merely adequate, they know excellence, and they return to place where they experience it.

Bottom bottom line: Will your guests’ experience in your church be worth getting out of bed?

Thanks, Mark, for a challenging word on the critical importance of understanding who our competition is.

Now it’s time to do something about it.

Making Your First Impression a Lasting Impression

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Mark Waltz, author of “First Impressions,” suggests the following word-association exercise: Look at the following list, and jot down your first thought about each place. Don’t spend a lot of time on this – just write the first thought that comes to mind.

  • McDonald’s
  • Your last hotel stay (not the name of the hotel, but your impression of it)
  • Your last airline experience (again, not the name of the company)
  • Your bank
  • Your local church
  • Starbucks

Now take a moment to evaluate the impressions you jotted down. Which reflect your feelings from initial encounter, and which ones describe your thoughts at the end of your experience with that organization? What does this tell you about the impressions we retain?

Organizations that understand the lasting nature of first impressions also understand that people matter. When people matter, guests are wowed. And when guests are wowed, they know they matter.

What kind of lasting impression is your first impression making?

Want to know more about Church Guest Services? The single best resource for Guest Services available today is the book “First Impressions” by Mark Waltz, Connections Pastor at Granger Community Church near South Bend, IN, and campus pastor of their Elkhart campus. If you want to know about Guest Services, get a copy of this book today!

Another helpful resource: “Customer Satisfaction is Worthless; Customer Loyalty is Priceless” by Jeffrey Gitomer, a sales and customer service expert. His primary market is the business world, but I’ve found dozens of applications to ChurchWorld in his writings.

Looking Ahead: Who is your competition? and Turn the Ordinary into EXTRAORDINARY!