Chapter 14:

“We want to be known as the best mini golf experience in existence.”

That’s what the client told me as we began a process to streamline their training program for their frontline staff.  Until that point, when new employees arrived, they were trained on how to use the register, given an overview of the course and given an employee handbook, and then they put on their uniform and got to work.  It was an efficient training program, but it lacked the elements of the service culture that the owners strived for, and genuinely believed in.  They recognized this gap and indicated that they wanted to be the Chick-Fil-A of miniature golf, which is an ambitious goal considering the high bar that they needed to reach.  The employee handbook included a lot of valuable information for new employees, such as their spirit of hospitality and the company’s core values, but getting these concepts to stick was the bigger challenge, especially as they owned and operated multiple locations.  They had a proven business model that had been working for decades, and now they saw the opportunity to take it to the next level.

In order to bring their staff up to the standard that the owners desired, we took the core messages from their employee handbook, merged it with the strategy of The Hospitality Mentality, and created a new training program that new employees would go through before putting on their uniform and serving guests.  Additionally, all existing employees went through it too so that they could see where we were going.  It changed their viewpoint on their role with the company, as well as the role they played in the lives of their guests.  Yes, all of this surrounding a $12 game of miniature golf.

This began by emphasizing the philosophy that guests don’t need to visit, and the team was asked to define who they considered a competitor - starting with direct competitors, then indirect competitors, and then everything else.  The remainder of the training focused on how to achieve the strategy presented here that would ultimately lead to guests wanting to come back and play another round of mini-golf and share the experience with others, which would drive new guests to each of their courses.  Once the staff fully embraced the strategy, they left the training energized and eager for the remainder of their training - which included the functional mechanics of their job, such as where to park, how to use the cash register, and what happens during a thunderstorm.  Before getting to the tactics of how to do their job, they needed to know how to strategically think about The Hospitality Mentality.  Most companies might see this as excessive training that is too costly to justify, but the expense came back in droves as more guests began taking part in ancillary experiences that increased their spending, purchased additional rounds of mini-golf, and the owners watched their online review ratings and rankings start to climb.  The best mini golf experience in existence is more than their incredible facilities - it’s driven by the staff who embrace The Hospitality Mentality.

Once the philosophy that is presented in Chapter 13 resonates amongst your team, strategy can now be built, rebuilt, enhanced, or turbocharged in a way that will increase guest satisfaction and ultimately generate stronger loyalty to your brand and business.  Your strategy is the targeted approach to how your philosophy is woven throughout your business model and service culture.  Each chapter in the book highlights interconnected segments of your strategy that are all guided by the philosophy.

Since the philosophy is condensed to a couple of sentences, it must be extrapolated into a strategy to make it more palatable, and therefore more actionable.  When you unpack the philosophy, you find that it is built up of strategies that are all related to one another and they all make the philosophy come to fruition.  To determine the strategy, look no further than the core messages presented at the end of each chapter in the book.

Your strategy for implementing The Hospitality Mentality can be defined as follows:

1. We treat everyone who visits as a guest, rather than a customer, because they are more valuable than the transaction.

2. We acknowledge that true loyalty is a result of the guest experience, not loyalty programs, and therefore is driven largely by the service that we provide.

3. We recognize that our guests do not need to visit us, and they could do anything else with their time and money, and we appreciate that they chose to spend it with us.

4. We seek to meet expectations before we exceed them and keep the promises that we’ve made.

5. We aim to deliver a personalized experience at every possible opportunity, where the guest feels that they are the only one who matters, even if only for a brief moment.

6. We are even more enthusiastic than our guests, and we do not let the novelty factor wear off or become redundant.

7. We anticipate our guests’ needs by answering questions they did not know they had, combining our proficiency of the business with awareness of each guest’s unique circumstance.

8. Whenever we can, we create “wow” moments that surprise and delight our guests and go far beyond even their highest expectations.

9. We seek and embrace guest feedback as the driving force for continually improving the experience.

10. We recognize that service failures are a natural part of the business, and we have plans in place to recover when we fail to meet our guests’ expectations.

11. We encourage our satisfied guests to return by providing compelling reasons to visit again, and we recognize that our most satisfied guests are our best marketing for influencing others to visit.

12. We celebrate every guest.

At this moment, how well does your service culture follow this roadmap?  The way you answer this question will help identify where the gaps are that need to be filled.  Do you cover this in onboarding or training?  What about pre-shift meetings or one-on-one sessions with frontline staff and all levels of leadership?  Go back through this list and mark which parts of the strategy are thriving in your business and which need additional work.  Then, identify the specific actions that need to be taken that will help bring it to life.  Using the first point mentioned, your strategy enhancement might look like this:

We treat everyone who visits as a guest, rather than a customer, because they are more valuable than the transaction.

Organizational actions:

• We will remove the word “customer” from our training manual, website, and anywhere else (internal or external) and replace it with guest.

• Management will lead by example by always using the word guest instead of customer, and will politely correct staff members when using the word customer.

• In onboarding and training, we will stress the importance of our guest-centric mindset so new employees are aware of the difference from the start.

These bullet points may be specific to what you aspire, or perhaps to the current landscape of your service culture; however, they are intended to be a starting point that you can take and grow, infusing it with your unique culture.  With that said, take note of these bullet points, because in the next chapter we are going to go even deeper into this component of the strategy.

Your action from this chapter is to take each bullet point of the strategy (influenced by Chapters 1-12) and create a list - just like the one above - that indicates what you will do to improve your overall strategy.  Not only that but, also ensure to include areas where you know your business is excelling so that you know where you want to stay on the current course.  However, you should also intentionally identify areas where opportunities for improvement lie, and what your ideal picture looks like that will execute the strategy in the way that best fits your business and operating model.

Do this exercise for each component of the strategy, indicated by each bullet point.  As your creative juices are flowing, you will find opportunities within each strategy that indicate improvement, and oftentimes this improvement is subtle.  If you feel that your service culture has deteriorated, you may see that this looks like a lot of work ahead of you, but once you define in bullet points the actions that need to be taken or the culture you desire, you will find that taking on this project is manageable - provided you have the support from your colleagues.  For areas that you are confident in, phrase your statements so that they read as what you do in the present tense.  For instance, “We automatically send surveys to every guest that visits so that we can capture as much feedback as possible.”  For the areas that need improvement, phrase your statements in the future tense to indicate that action is necessary.  “We will learn each guest’s name upon arrival so that we can use it in conversation and elevate their experience.”  The reason for this is to show yourself and your team that you might not be starting from scratch, especially if you already have an established service culture that you are seeking to improve.  Alternatively, if you are reading this in the pre-opening stages of your business, then all of your statements will begin with “We will” or a similar tone.