Tag Archives: Micah Solomon

Great Guest Experience Teams Pay Attention to What’s Out of Sight

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…at least, out of their line of sight.

Spatial awareness and quick reactions aren’t just characteristics of great athletes – they are absolutely necessary to exceeding your Guest’s expectations.

I recently read a great post by Micah Solomon on developing effective customer service leadership. Solomon always has great advice – both in a regular column at Forbes.com and his books Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit and High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service.

But it was a single phrase that caught my attention:

The waiter with no peripheral vision

PeripheralVision

Solomon goes on to explain that in comparing two team members with equal skills and service standards, the one who exhibits peripheral vision will be the more successful one, and, surprisingly, attributes peripheral vision to understanding the difference between Purpose and Function.

Could that be true in your Guest Experience Teams as well?

Here’s how Solomon differentiated the two:

Every team member has a job function, and a purpose in (and of) the organization. The function is what’s written, in detail, on the team member’s job description. It’s the technical side of the job.

A team member’s purpose is something different. The purpose is the reason you’re doing all the technical things, and sometimes stepping out of your technical role to do whatever it takes.

That’s peripheral vision – seeing beyond the obvious, noticing what’s outside the very center of your gaze.

  • It’s a Parking Team member noticing steam coming out from under the hood of a parked car – and volunteering to repair the cracked hose while the family attends the worship experience.
  • It’s a Greeter noticing a young mother struggling with an active toddler while trying to maneuver an infant stroller through the crowd – and asks if he can push the stroller for the mother.
  • It’s an Usher being sensitive to the unspoken request of a worship attender – and seating them to accommodate a special need.

When your Guest Experience Team members exhibit peripheral vision, they are going beyond their “job” and serving the people out of a sense of purpose and mission that undergirds all they do.

Is it time for your Guest Experience Teams to have a “vision check?”

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The 4 Principles of Guest Satisfaction

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…illustrated by parking cars…

…for a church…

…meeting in a rented facility.

Translate “customer” into Guest and you have a real opportunity for learning how to deliver WOW! Guest Services at your church.

A Perfect Product

Customers want defect-free products and services. You need to design your product or service so that it can be expected to function perfectly within foreseeable boundaries.

At Elevation Church’s Uptown campus, we meet in a rented theater – the former First Baptist Charlotte’s sanctuary, purchased by the city in the 70’s and turned into a performance venue. It’s a beautiful, intimate setting for our worship experiences – but it has no parking, other than a few spots along the street. Practically everyone attending drives from all over the city, so we have to provide parking to accommodate them. Our solution? We rent 2 adjacent lots for VIPs (our term for first time guests) and families with small children, a parking deck 1 1/2 blocks away for attendees, and a small lot about 3 blocks away for volunteers. All parking is free for people attending our services; we put up signage in a 1 block radius around the facility to direct traffic to the right place; we have friendly parking teams to provide the human touch; and our web site has a campus welcome page that includes video of where to park.

Application: Design the product (in this case, a service system) to get people from point A to point B, foreseeing all that is foreseeable. It’s just parking, right? But when you’re averaging over 50 new guests every Sunday, along with 1,100 other attenders, all coming into the same 2 block area in a short amount of time, you’ve got to remove as many barriers as possible. We drove and walked through the process of getting to campus, and designed  systems to get people into the garage or lot, up the sidewalks, and into the theater. Once there, the rest of the amazing team of Guest Services (VIP team, Greeters, Ushers, and First Impressions) takes over – each with their own unique system of providing an audacious welcome to guests and attendees. It’s an ongoing process, reviewed constantly to adjust to lessons learned.

Delivered by Caring People

Your perfect product now requires caring, friendly people to deliver it.

At the Uptown Campus, parking is concentrated into 2 primary areas, with the majority of that being in one parking garage – with only 2 entrances/exits. That simplifies the Parking Team a little bit (one of our other campus locations is in a mixed use environment, and has 5 surface lots, each with multiple entrances – but that’s another story!). With an optimum team size of 5 people, it’s our job to smile and wave at each car entering the lot, personally greet everyone, be visible inside the deck on multiple levels, and take the validated ticket as the car leaves.

Application: An interaction with just a single, caring, friendly team member can make a guest feel good about being there in the first place, and sets the stage through a powerful first impression about what’s in store for the rest of the morning. We’re the first face of Elevation – we take that responsibility very seriously.

In a Timely Fashion

In this fast paced world of instant results, our customers (guests) decide what is and isn’t an appropriate timeline. A perfect product delivered late by friendly, caring people is the equivalent of a defective one. Ouch!

Application: Learn your own customer’s definition of “on time” – and structure the process to meet that definition, not your own. I don’t know about your church, but at Elevation’s Uptown campus the intensity and volume of traffic increases incrementally the closer the worship experience start time approaches. For the 9:30 start time, traffic trickles in beginning at 9, picks up the pace around 9:20, and by 9:30 it’s cars lined up the street waiting to get in. We move the cars through as fast as possible, and encourage those in a long line to drive around the block and use the other entrance. As we greet, we remind drivers of the second entrance. In between services, we open two exit lanes, allowing the deck to empty quicker. For the 11:15 worship experience, it’s more of the same, only worse – the rush comes from 11:15 – 11:25. Our team is always brainstorming ways to make it flow quicker and smoother. Valet parking? Nah, just kidding! Would it be easier for everyone if they came earlier and weren’t as rushed? Sure – but it’s not going to happen.

With the Support of an Effective Problem Resolution Process

Everything described so far is great – in theory. But like most things in life, there’s reality. Sometimes we are short-handed on our teams. Occasionally we have equipment malfunctions with the gates or ticket machines, or our validator in the lobby isn’t working right. An occasional Uptown event (a Panther’s or Bobcats game, the circus, a big convention) sometimes creates more traffic on a Sunday morning. We’ve even arrived to find the main entrance closed, along with the first floor of parking, due to maintenance that we weren’t notified about. When these unexpected surprises occur, effective problem resolution is measured not when we have restored the situation to the status quo, but when we have restored customer satisfaction.

Application: Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see us fully strut our service. It’s almost become a game among our parking team to brainstorm what could go wrong with the process, and then come up with a solution to use when it happens. Main entrance blocked? No problem – in 5 minutes we can shift all the signage and personnel to redirect traffic down the block, around the corner, and into the rear entrance. Ticket validated but not working? We have pre-validated tickets to get out guests out and on their way. Lost ticket? Ditto. Guest have a flat tire, potentially blocking the whole deck? Pull off our best impression of a NASCAR pit stop to get them on their way. A guest wants to grab a quick cup of coffee or meal? We have a map of nearby coffee shops and restaurants. Someone pulls up wanting to know when the Children’s library opens? Our team leader has the schedules of nearby venues to give information as requested. Here’s the real goal: Resolve a service problem effectively and your guest is more likely to become loyal than if they had never run into a problem in the first place.

Want to learn how to provide extraordinary, loyalty-building customer service to your guests? The first step, as outlined above, is to learn what makes them satisfied. Customer satisfaction is based on the four predictable factors above. I’ve used just one part of the Guest Services practices of Elevation Church to illustrate the principles. Take these four factors, apply them in the context of your own place, and watch amazing things happen.

Check out Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon for more big ideas you can put to use as you build a five-star service organization.