Tag Archives: Church Guest Experience

9 Principles of Innovative Guest Experiences

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Value-added has long been the service solution for the best-of-class service providers. They take what customers expect and add a little more.

Chip Bell, award-winning author, speaker, and consultant on customer service, thinks its time to up the game:

It’s time for value-unique service.

Value unique is different from value-added. It is not about addition – “they gave me more than I anticipated.” It is about a unique and unexpected creation. If your team members are asked to pleasantly surprise customers by creating unique experiences, they feel prized.     – Chip Bell

Bell’s book The 9½ Principles of Innovative Service is your instruction manual and inspirational guide to providing an experience that causes your Guests to be surprised, smile, and sing your praises to others.

Innovative

 

On the ninth day of Christmas Guest Experiences, your Guest Experience peers give to you:

9 Principles of Innovative Guest Experiences

  1. Put a surprise inside – design Guest experiences that constantly astonish and amaze.
  2. Connect with respect – deliver Guest experiences with an extra helping of sincerity, an enduring act of benevolence, and a genuine interest in making a difference for your Guest.
  3. Elevate the class – create processes and systems for your Guest experiences that ensure red carpet treatment.
  4. Put total sense into service – what should your Guest experience smell like-sound like-feel like-look like-taste like if you wanted to create an experience not easily forgotten?
  5. Before and beyond service – anticipate Guest needs before they arrive.
  6. Hardwire wisdom into service – look for chances in your Guest experience that can be turned into opportunities for learning.
  7. Monogram the moment – display the upbeat attitude you want your Guests to have.
  8. Effort removal squared – examine all Guest experience processes through your Guest’s eyes and find ways to remove angst where needed.
  9. Turn an oops into an opportunity – understand, empathize and mine the Guest’s expectations until a good solution is found.

The more principles you can appropriately build into your Guest’s experience, the more likely it will be experienced as exceptional rather than expected, remarkable rather than routine.     – Chip Bell

inspired by and adapted from The 9½ Principles of Innovative Service by Chip Bell

9 1:2 Principles of Innovative Service

11 Reasons to Smile

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The greatest symbol of a Guest Experience is a smile.

A great deal of research has been done on why smiling matters.  A journey through neuroscience, anthropology, sociology and psychology has helped uncover the untapped powers of the smile.

A smile is a simple and surprisingly powerful way to significantly improve your own life and the lives of others.

Smile

 

On the eleventh day of Christmas Guest Experiences, your Guest Experience peers give to you:

11 Reasons to Smile

A genuine smile:

  1. Makes us more attractive.
  2. Helps us to change our mood.
  3. Makes you look good and feel good.
  4. Helps us stay more positive.
  5. Releases endorphins that act as natural painkillers.
  6. Makes us look younger.
  7. Releases a warmer vocal tone.
  8. Becomes contagious with others.
  9. Relieves our stress.
  10. Triggers certain hormones that lower heart rate and steady breathing.
  11. Eases the tension in a tense moment.

 Having a smile is part of what makes Disney legendary. For years making eye contact and a smile were the first of Disney’s Seven Service Guidelines. Under Disney’s current Service Basics, Smiling is listed as the first way to project a positive image and energy. It’s been a heritage of Disney’s to have their Cast Members greet others with a smile.     – J. Jeff Kober

inspired by and adapted from The Wonderful World of Customer Service at Disney

The Wonderful World of Customer Service at Disney

12 Principles of Guest Experience Leadership

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In a little over two weeks it will be Christmas Eve. Many churches will hold special services, or will be adding to their regular worship on the Sunday before. Often, these services are among the top 3 largest services in the church year – with many new faces of family and friends in the audience.

What have you done to get ready for them?

With a wink and a nod to the holiday classic, here are the 12 Days of Christmas Guest Experiences for your church. Enjoy, yes, but even more importantly – learn. 

12DaysGE1

On the twelfth day of Christmas Guest Experiences, your Guest Experience peers give to you:

12 Principles of Guest Experience Leadership

  1. Provide the quality and value that Guests expect
  2. Focus strategy on the key drivers of Guest satisfaction
  3. Provide the setting that Guests expect
  4. Define and sustain a total Guest culture
  5. Discover and retain people who love to serve
  6. Train your teams, and train them some more
  7. Recognize, motivate, and empower your teams
  8. Glue the Guest experience together with information
  9. Deliver seamless Guest experiences
  10. Pursue perfection relentlessly
  11. Don’t fail the Guest twice
  12. Lead your teams to excel

Organizations that deliver exceptional Guest Experiences understand the fundamental concept that everything the organization does should focus on the Guest. These organizations lead from the outside in by starting with the Guests.

These organizations study their Guests endlessly; they know what they want, need, value, expect, and actually do. Having understood their Guests, these organizations can focus everyone on how to do a better job of exceeding Guest expectations.

inspired by and adapted from Managing Quality Service in Hospitality

Managing Quality Service in Hospitality

The 12 Days of Christmas Guest Experiences

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The Twelve Days of Christmas is an English carol that has its origins in the tradition of continuing to celebrate Christmas for 12 days after the day itself.

With a little Guestology license, I want to borrow the concept and turn it into 12 helpful reminders for church leaders and their Guest Services teams as they make final preparations for their Christmas worship services.

12DaysGE1

Two weeks from Sunday will be the Sunday before Christmas. Many churches will be adding to their regular worship on that Sunday, or will be holding special services on Christmas Eve. Often, these services are among the top 3 largest services in the church year – with many new faces of family and friends in the audience.

What have you done to get ready for them?

With a wink and a nod to the holiday classic, beginning Monday December 8: 12 Days of Christmas Guest Experiences for your church.

Enjoy, yes, but even more importantly – learn. 

The 5th Discipline of Guest Experiences: Governance

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Organizations that want to produce a high-quality Guest experience need to perform a set of sound, standard practices. Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, in their book Outside In, have developed six high-level disciplines which can be translated into Guest experiences: strategy, Guest understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture.

An overview of all six Disciplines can be found here. These disciplines represent the areas where organizations that are consistently great at Guest experiences excel.

If you want to deliver a great Guest Experience, these disciplines are where you need to focus, too.  

Governance

The word governance may bring to mind images of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. Senior decision makers are important part of governance at many organizations, but governance isn’t about a committee that hands out edicts from the top floor.

In reality, governance models are as varied as the organizations they support.  Governance practices will help you drive accountability by assigning specific Guest Experience management tasks to specific people within your organization.

You need to use your insights and metrics to identify Guest Experience improvement opportunities and, as you put new programs into place, keep tabs on the progress of those initiatives.

Measurement Practices

  • Define a consistent set of Guest Experience standards across the organization
  • Include alignment with the Guest Experience strategy as a criterion for evaluating project funding and prioritization decisions
  • Include impact to Guest Experience as a criterion for organizational decisions about policies, processes, technology, and communications
  • Maintain a dedicated queue of Guest Experience improvement projects
  • Review Guest Experience program status and metrics regularly to monitor progress toward organizational goals, adjusting tactics or resource allocations if needed
  • Assign role-specific Guest Experience management tasks to team members as a requirement of their positions
  • Evaluate team member performance against role-specific Guest Experience metrics
  • Facilitate the necessary coordination across groups that share responsibility for a given experience
  • Whenever a change is approved to a policy, organizational process, or other system that affects the Guest Experience, proactively redesign that experience to reflect the change

The Guest Experience governance discipline is designed to help you adhere to practices that will consistently deliver a great Guest Experience. Your job is to decide the rules of your own game – the right Guest Experience governance model and policies for your organization.

Application to ChurchWorld

  1. Make Guest Experience Governance part of basic job responsibilities
  2. Find and fix Guest Experience problems
  3. Keep Guest Experience problems from happening in the first place
  4. Define a consistent set of Guest Experience standards

The governance discipline is all about intentional management and oversight.

I will be happy to discuss Guest Experience initiatives for your church and partner with you to design a WOW! Guest Experience.

Next: To help reinforce the rationale behind your governance practices and make sure team members actually adopt them, you’ll need to develop a Guest-centric culture.

Want to know more about the Guest Experience in your church?

  • Learn why the Guest Experience matters here
  • Contact me here
  • Read up a little here

The 4th Discipline of Guest Experiences: Measurement

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Organizations that want to produce a high-quality Guest experience need to perform a set of sound, standard practices. Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, in their book Outside In, have developed six high-level disciplines which can be translated into Guest experiences: strategy, Guest understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture.

An overview of all six Disciplines can be found here. These disciplines represent the areas where organizations that are consistently great at Guest experiences excel.

If you want to deliver a great Guest Experience, these disciplines are where you need to focus, too. 

Measurement 

As the saying goes, “What gets measured matters.” Measurement practices take the guesswork out of managing your Guest Experience. It does this by capturing what actually happens in a Guest Experience, how the Guest felt during the interaction, and whether the Guest is willing to recommend your organization to others afterward. Measurements tell your team what’s going right (or wrong), what, if anything to do about it, and what impact your organization can expect as a result.

Measurement Practices

  • Define a Guest Experience quality framework that aligns with how Guests judge and experience and is consistent across the organization
  • Define the subsets of Guest Experience metrics that show how each group, role, and individual contributes to Guest Experience quality
  • Measure how Guests perceive their experiences with the organization based on the criteria in the Guest Experience quality framework
  • Collect descriptive metrics about each experience that provide context for Guest perceptions
  • Analyze Guest Experience metrics to determine differences in experience quality among key Guest segments, tasks,  or aspects of the experience
  • Model the relationship between drivers of Guest Experience quality, Guest perceptions of their experiences, and desired outcomes
  • Share Guest Experience metrics and models with all team members

The foundation of your measurements is creating a Guest Experience Framework. This framework strings together cause, effect, and outcomes into a coherent story for your organization. It’s a tool that helps you decide what to measure, how to measure it, and what your findings mean to your organization.

Your framework is structured around two tiers. The first tier will give you the big picture, a broad view of your overall Guest Experience. The second tier will capture perceptions of discrete, end-to-end Guest journeys – giving you details about the Guest’s specific experiences with individual touch points they encounter along the way.

Picking the Guest Experiences that you want to measure is half the battle. The second half of the battle is deciding how to measure those experiences. There are three types of metrics to use:

  1. Perception metrics measure Guest perceptions that exist only in the minds of your Guests
  2. Descriptive metrics consist of operational data about your Guests’ interactions
  3. Outcome metrics tell you what Guests intend to do – or actually did – after interacting with your organization

All effective measurement programs model the relationships between Guest Experience quality, the factors that drive it, and results.

The measurement discipline isn’t as glamorous as strategy or design, but it’s like rocket fuel for all your Guest Experience initiatives.

  • It drives interest in your programs by demonstrating results
  • It keeps people on track by connecting them to hard data about their effectiveness
  • It provides a reality check for the other Guest Experience disciplines

By identifying the things that matter most from the perspective of your Guests – and then identifying them systematically over time – you’ll know whether your strategy is on track, whether your Guest understanding is accurate, and how well the experience you designed is resonating with Guests.

Application to ChurchWorld

  • Measurement keeps Guest Experiences on track
  • Connect the dots across your measurement framework
  • Let measurement power your Guest Experience efforts

Want to know more? I will be happy to discuss Guest Experience initiatives for your church and partner with you to design a WOW! Guest Experience.

Next: How can your organization act on the insights you gained through measurement? The answer to that question is governance.

 

Want to know more about the Guest Experience in your church?

  • Learn why the Guest Experience matters here
  • Contact me here
  • Read up a little here

The 2nd Discipline of Guest Experiences: Guest Understanding

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Organizations that want to produce a high-quality Guest experience need to perform a set of sound, standard practices. Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine, in their book Outside In, have developed six high-level disciplines which can be translated into Guest experiences: strategy, Guest understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture.

An overview of all six Disciplines can be found here. These disciplines represent the areas where organizations that are consistently great at Guest experiences excel.

If you want to deliver a great Guest Experience, these disciplines are where you need to focus, too. 

Guest Understanding

You need a set of practices that create a consistent shared understanding of who Guests are, what they want and need, and how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your organization today. This discipline includes research practices, analyzing the information you’ve collected, and documenting your findings. Guest Understanding provides a foundational level of insight that guides the rest of the disciplines.

Guest Understanding Practices

  • Solicit feedback from Guests about their experiences with your organization (through surveys or interviews)
  • Collect unsolicited feedback from Guests about their experiences with your organization (through mining calls, email, or social media posts)
  • Gather input from team members about their experiences with Guests and their role in delivering the Guest Experience
  • Conduct observational research studies in Guests’ natural environments
  • Analyze Guest insight drawn from across research techniques and organizational boundaries to identify key Guest pain points and opportunities
  • Document Guest Understanding in a way that is easy for team members to understand and use (through the use of personas, Guest Journey maps, etc.)
  • Share Guest understanding with all team members

Thinking you know what Guests want is risky. Knowing what they want leads to Guest Experience improvements that matter.

Guest Survey from Pearland Vineyard, Pearland, TX

Most organizations neglect to build a foundation of Guest understanding before they develop their service and experience strategies – and then proceed with costly initiatives. Where do most organizations miss the boat on understanding their guests?

  1. Team members often fall into the seductive trap of assuming that what they want is what Guests want
  2. Many organizations view Guests only through a numerical lens
  3. Many Guests use qualitative research methods inappropriately

The good news is that you can avoid these pitfalls by using techniques that will help you to understand who your Guests are, how they perceive the interactions they are having with you today, and what they want and need from you tomorrow.

If you want to harness the power of delivering a WOW! Guest Experience, you have to start with a complete picture of who they are and what they want from you. This picture will come into focus as you begin to analyze Guest data that spans multiple research techniques and organizational boundaries.

While you may have the in-house know-how to do some of these activities, you will likely need to partner with outside experts. They will be able to help you set up studies, ask the right questions, collect the right data, and synthesize the results into meaningful insights.

I would be happy to talk with you about how you can begin the journey to understanding and delivering  a WOW! Guest Experience every week at your church.

If you try to skimp on this part of the process – by continuing with assumptions about what you think Guests need and want – you’ll not only fail to create true Guest understanding, you will also put the rest of your Guest Experience practices at risk.

Guest insights ultimately drive your Guest Experience strategies.

Application to ChurchWorld

  1. What you think you know about your Guests is probably wrong
  2. You won’t find all your answers in a survey
  3. Document your findings in easy to understand formats
  4. Share your Guest insights early and often

Guest Understanding should become the foundation of all your Guest Experience efforts.

Next in the series: How understanding your Guests becomes the primary input into your Guest Experience design process.

 

Want to know more about the Guest Experience in your church?

  • Learn why the Guest Experience matters here
  • Contact me here
  • Read up a little here

Guest Experiences Focus on People

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No matter how you look at Guest Experiences in a church setting, the people element is first and foremost.

A person or persons come to your place because they were invited, or just curious, or they are in a crisis in their own lives.

This person or persons encounter people at your place who extend to them a genuine, warm welcome.

Everything in the previous nine posts of this series is important, but in a true “saving the best for last,” people hold the key to Guest Experiences.

>> Your Guests

Creating personas and taking them through your Guest journey map is an important part of creating a WOW! Guest Experience, but never forget that the Guest who comes to your church is a real person with real feelings and emotions. Their perceptions are their reality. The Guest Experience you are creating will be their first impression of your church. It will also be a lasting impression.

>> Your Leaders

WOW! Guest Experiences will be achieved best when a compassionate leader with a passion for creating an extraordinary experience is tasked with leading all Guest experience efforts across the entire organization. The Guest Experience leader is a catalyst who will ignite the various components (people, place, and process) into a unified whole that will strive for consistent delivery of a WOW! Guest experience. The Guest Experience Leader is a 360-degree individual, exerting influence above, around, and below.

>> Your Teams

What kind of person serves on a Guest Services team?

Danny Meyer, founder and co-owner of eleven successful restaurants in New York City, writes the following about his staff:

The idea of someone giving 110 percent is about as realistic as working to achieve the twenty-six hour day. At our restaurants, we are hoping to develop 100 percent employees whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence. These are 51 percenters.

A 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. If your team has these skills, you can be champions at the team sport of Guest Experiences. They are:

  • Optimistic warmth – genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full
  • Intelligence – not just “smarts”, but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning
  • Work ethic – a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done
  • Empathy – an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel
  • Self-awareness and integrity – an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment

Your Guest Experience team members may not operate under the same pressures as the staff in a highly regarded restaurant. But if the CEO of a restaurant recognizes that the human beings who animate his restaurants have far more impact on whether they succeed than the food, the decor, or the location, I would say that is a lesson worth learning – and applying – at your church.

That’s a quick review of the People part of the Guest Experience at your church.

Bottom line: when in doubt, always default to people.

Outside In has been a great source of inspiration for my personal passion of Guest Experiences in ChurchWorld. Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine and the great team at Forrester Research are to be commended for their ongoing excellence in the world of customer experience.

However, this series has just been an introduction to their concepts as translated to ChurchWorld. I plan to revisit the 6 Disciplines of Guest Experiences in depth very soon!

 

Part 10 of a series based on the book Outside In

Outside In

These posts “translate” the world of customer experience to the language and setting of Guest Experiences in the church.

Guest Experience Transformation Priorities

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In the prior 8 posts of this series, I have been “translating” the work of Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine’s book “Outside In” from the business world of customer experience to the church world of Guest Experiences.

Along the way, I hope you have seen that this is not a one-shot quick-fix deal, but a journey to excellence. The key element – the 6 disciplines of Guest Experiences – must be embedded in all your Guest experience practices.

The decision you face next is what to tackle first, second, or third, not what to do or not to do.trash can

Transformation of any type is not as simple as a one-size-fits-all prescription. I’ve found that the only place one-size-fits-all is the trashcan!

Instead, here are two overarching approaches for setting priorities. The first is to build out one or more disciplines where you’re already strong, and the second is to shore up the disciplines where you’re weakest.

Build on Strengths

When deciding to build on strengths, realize that “strengths” is a relative term. Because each of the 6 disciplines consists of multiple practices, it’s unlikely that you’re systematic or even repeatable (remember the 4 adoption levels?) at every practice in any discipline. But if you see that you are systematic – or close to it – for most of the practices in a discipline, you have an opportunity: Press into that discipline and master it, and then use it as a lever to move your organization toward adoption of the other disciplines.

Shore Up Weaknesses

Instead of capitalizing on one or two relatively mature disciplines, you may choose to develop one or two exceptionally week ( or non-existent) disciplines that hold back your other efforts.

Even a single weak discipline can hold you back because there are natural dependencies among the disciplines. For example, Guest experience strategy sets the overall direction for everything else you do. If you’re at the Missing or Ad Hoc levels for the four practices in the strategy discipline, you’re just wasting effort everywhere else.

Transforming your organization from its current level to one of WOW! Guest Experiences is a major undertaking. It will take a long time to reach the Sustain phase – and even then, you’re not “finished”. As shown in the Reinvent phase, improving Guest experiences is a constant journey, not a project. The people you are trying to reach – your Guests – are a work in process, and they are constantly changing as well.

Moving to WOW! Guest Experiences at your church is a journey that has a beginning but not an end.

That journey is made possible by the last post of this series – the people you have serving on your teams.

 

Part 9 of a series based on the book Outside In

Outside In

These posts “translate” the world of customer experience to the language and setting of Guest Experiences in the church.

>> Part 8

The 4 Adoption Levels of Guest Experience Disciplines

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To proceed up the levels of Guest Experience maturity without mishaps, you need to understand your starting point. Specifically, you need a realistic assessment of your current adoption level of reach of the Guest experience disciplines.

You can think of adoption levels this way: the phases of maturity (Improve, Transform, Sustain, Reinvent) are like grade levels in school. Guest experience disciplines are like the courses you have to master in order to advance to the next grade, and adoption levels are like the marks you get for each of those courses.

It’s a rough analogy because your adoption level is a measure of how consistently you perform each discipline, not necessarily how well you perform it. To gauge how consistently your organization performs each practice on a continuum from not at all to all of the time, you’ll need to determine whether each discipline is Missing, Ad Hoc, Repeatable, or Systematic.

  • Missing – your organization doesn’t perform this discipline at all. If a practice is at this level it’s either because not enough people considered it important enough to do or no one thought of doing it in the first place. Regardless – it’s just not happening.
  • Ad Hoc – your organization performs this discipline sporadically. There is no defined process that specifies when it should be performed, how, or by whom. If you see the discipline performed, it’s because some people realize that it’s important enough to do at least some of the time.
  • Repeatable – your organization has a defined process that specifies when this discipline should be performed, how, and by whom. Your organization even follows the process most of the time. That means that people in your organization could perform the discipline consistently all of the time – they just don’t.
  • Systematic – your organization has a defined process that specifies when this practice should be performed, how, and by whom. The organization follows that process all of the time. There are some things that organizations do the same way every time to produce consistently high-quality results – just not very often in the realm of Guest experiences. You can get to this level with your Guest experience disciplines – you just have to want it badly enough.

Once you understand the four levels above, you need to establish your baseline level of adoption for each of the six disciplines. You’ve got two options for determining your adoption levels. You can take a top-down approach by conducting interviews and fact-finding workshops with the people who should be performing the disciplines. Or you can take a bottom-up approach by surveying your organization and asking their opinions on adoption levels. The top-down approach will give you more actionable results, but will also cost you more in time and money (assuming you use outside help – which you should).

Ultimately you want your entire organization to perform the same disciplines, the same way, every time. But when you first “grade” your adoption level you should do it by function – and when you get the results, expect to find that different areas of your organization will be at different levels of maturity.

Whatever you find when you determine your baseline levels of adoption, you’ll be able to set your priorities for moving forward – which is what the next post is all about.

Part 8 of a multi-part series based on the book Outside In

Outside In

These posts “translate” the world of customer experience to the language and setting of Guest Experiences in the church.

>> Part 7