Professor Robert Johnston -
Designing the Customer Experience

Tues 6th Feb 2007
10am – 1pm

Key Messages
• Designing and enhancing the customer experiences you offer
• Creating a service excellence reputation

Bob is passionate about excellence in customer service and the benefits that this brings to businesses. His effective strategies in service excellence lie in his ability to challenge the traditional approach adopted by many businesses. Inferior service may be “designed in”, albeit inadvertently, and organisations often unknowingly disappoint their customers. By inverting this, the process can successfully be designed from the customers’ point of view.

Bob explored the nature of the customer experience, the importance of emotions and in particular how some leading-edge organisations are designing their customer experience and delivering through their front line staff.

Bob Johnston is Professor of Operations Management at Warwick Business School and one of the leading authorities in service operations management. He is also vice-president of the Institute of Customer Service.

Bob certainly inspired us all to think beyond your current vision of customer service and provide recommendations for action with his lively and amusing presentation.

You can view Bob's presentation again by clicking on the icon below. You may need to save the document to your computer first before it will open.

Best Practice Seminar - Success in Service Excellence

Tues 6th Feb 2007
2pm – 4pm

Guest speakers:
Nancy Chambers – Brunel's ss Great Britain
Julie Baugh – Thurlestone Hotel
Paul Sadler – Calcot Manor

The customer experience master class has provided you with the knowledge to be able to succeed in service excellence.

How do I achieve this in my business?

This extremely rewarding afternoon showed us how individuals representing a wide range of tourism and hospitality businesses, large and small, have successfully designed excellence into their service experience.

The speakers were hand picked from businesses within the industry that have been recognised for their achievements in service.

The speakers shared their experiences, focusing on how and why they chose to place such importance on customer service and how they have brought their staff along with them on the journey to success. They explored the practices adopted, the benefits gained from embracing change and the challenges they have faced throughout the transition.

Richard Wyatt-Haines - Post Event Thoughts

Exposure, exposure, exposure

This was the theme that was common to all the presentations and discussions that made the second session of the Tourism Skills Network Executive programme such a success. It didn't matter if it was the exposure of owners, directors or staff; the clear message was that people must get much closer to their customers, put themselves in the shoes of their customers, and see and feel what their customers are experiencing.

In the morning, Bob Johnston from Warwick Business School challenged us all to bring a real service focus to our businesses. He said that we must:
- Be explicit about the service that you are seeking to deliver
- Identify and target the specific emotions that you are trying to trigger in your customers hearts and minds.

Once you are clear about these objectives you need to:
- Help your staff to understand what they mean
- Win the commitment of your staff to deliver them
- Be clear about exactly what you are going to do to stimulate the targeted emotions in your customers.

Bob showed us how we can easily assess our own performance in different parts of our service by using a simple analysis tool; I feel sure that we will be doing more of this in our own businesses in the coming weeks.

In the afternoon, Nancy Chambers from Brunel's ss Great Britain showed us that the only real limitation in the opportunities available to us is the limitations of our own thinking. By very clever design her team had turned ‘a one-hour stroll round a ship’ into a four hour activity adventure which could be repeated a number of times with different experiences. The result of this innovative and purposeful thinking was increased visitor numbers and repeat visits.

Along the way Nancy showed us the value of very effective market segmentation; not just in terms segmenting visitors, but also in terms of thinking about the other family members who were involved in making the decision to visit.

Down at the Thurlestone Hotel in Knightsbridge, Julie Baugh showed us that the focus on staff and staff retention was central to the service offering. Happy, long serving staff possess the experience and ongoing relationships with guests which results in a 73% repeat customer visit rate. Staff retention comes about only because of a wide range of connected activities: the owner’s support and commitment, Julie’s determination to ‘walk the talk’, skilled management teams who put people first, flexible and empowered staff, and an open mind.

Lastly, Paul Sadler from Calcot Manor showed us how to have a massive impact on the service we offer by clearly articulating and embedding some key service principles which he calls “The Seven Golden Rules of Hospitality”. These have become the way things are done at Calcot Manor and have been committed to by everyone who works there. The short form version ‘ Sparkling’ is a shortened adaptation which has been created in order to brief staff who are only on-site briefly, so that they can contribute to the impact Paul and his team are trying to deliver. Centrally, at Calcot Manor the service principles are clearly explicit and not just assumed.

And then there were the views of the delegates who just before lunch identified that the key issues they needed to focus on were:

- Provide a clear message to customers about the service you provide and how to access it
- Improve the physical accessibility of the business, in particular regarding internal and external signage
- Achieve consistency in service through staff knowledge and understanding
- Recognise the customers' emotions, identify and target them
- Ensure that first impressions are consistent with your service concept
- Recognition and engagement of the customer, including binding memories upon leaving
- Exceed customer expectations by “designing in” emotion to the service provided
- Improve communication – internal exposure to other roles may provide increased understanding and sensitivity
- Create a WOW factor through a confident service and a great welcome

Earlier in the day, I played back some of the comments from delegates about the impact from the first event with Humphrey Walters and Damian Hughes. Delegates said they had learnt to:
- Believe in themselves
- Inspire their people to do something special
- Focus on what is important

And as a result, people were doing the following:
- Aiming high
- Giving much greater focus to their teams
- Making clear the priorities of the business

Overall, it was a great day with lots learnt, both in terms of principles and specific actions that we could each take. From me, a few things stood out:

- We have to be very clear about what we want to achieve
- It is our duty to create a stage on which our actors (staff) can perform to the best of their ability
- Keep it simple and do the little things right
- Do what you promise
- Recover well when things go wrong
- And expose yourself to your customers, their feelings and their experiences.

I look forward to seeing you all again at the John McCarthy event on the 20th of March where we will be joined in the afternoon by Gaynor Coley, the managing director of the Eden Project and Janet East, the owner of Yellingham Farm who has a fascinating story to tell about overcoming challenges and turning a seasonal business into an all year round success.

In the meantime don't forget the Aspiring Managers programme; details can be obtained from Annabel 01275 370911 or email admin@tsnsw.org.uk.

Richard Wyatt-Haines

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