Great customer service transcends the transactional, the scripted, the rote.  Great customer service appears to flow naturally, with the service professional sincerely, willingly, and stylishly taking care of the served. In a word, it is genuine.
Below, I share opinions on the subject of genuine customer service from three experts–coupled, as always, with my own opinionated opining on the subject.
“We don’t want an imitation of a waiter. We want the genuine article.”
Patrick O’Connell’s Inn At Little Washington is a Double Five Star, Double Five Diamond establishment where a meal for two, even without drinks, is likely to run in the mid three figures. The Inn continues to thrive in the face of changing dining trends in part because O’Connell pushes back against the preconceived notion of a “fancy” restaurant: “We actively work against this, at least where it feels false and insincere to us. So, for example, we attempt to use no French terminology here, simply because: 1) we’re not a French restaurant and 2) we’re attempting to ensure there’s no level of intimidation or lack of clarity. If there’s a French culinary term, we’ll define it in English, whenever possible.”
Nonetheless, O’Connell tells me with an amused twinkle, the new employees who come to his restaurant often haven’t gotten this memo about how service style has changed:
Because we’re perceived as a ‘fancy’ restaurant, otherwise-talented employees come to us and start putting on airs.
Often if waiters arrive here from having worked previously at another restaurant, for the first hour or so, they strut around and they’ve got the towel over the arm, and you want to say to them, ‘Which bad movie did you see? Was it from the ‘50s?’ You don’t need to do that here. What you do need to do is put people at ease and take care of people and make people comfortable in how you act and in the language that you use. Your ‘French’ or ‘fancy’ airs that might have been cool at your last gig aren’t cool here, because they’re silly and artificial. We don’t want an imitation of a waiter. We want the genuine article
Photographer and Rights Credit: Mark Graham/Bloomberg
“You have to practice an awful lot to come across as completely unscripted”
Sara Kearney from Hyatt some time ago shared with me what has to be my favorite sound bite on this subject: “You have to practice an awful lot to come across as completely unscripted.” (“But,” she quickly added, ”it’s worth it.”) Kearney went on to elaborate at the time: “While we don’t script, we definitely do a lot of role-plays and a lot of dress rehearsals to help people understand their role in bringing the brand experience to life.”
More recently, I had a chance to speak again with Kearney, and she continued the sentiment: “If we’re trying hard to hire people who display a lot of personality as applicants, why would we then want to train that personality right out of them starting the day they’re hired, along the lines of, ‘We like you, we love your personality, we feel a real connection with you, but now, we’re going to give you a script and we’re going to change your behavior and we’re going to put you in uniform and essentially suck the life out of what we liked about you in the first place’?”
“What hospitality isn’t is formula or scripting”
I’m going to give the last word here to Doug Carr, an Executive VP at FRHI (Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissotel), who has closely-aligned thoughts to share on great customer service and hospitality:
For me, what hospitality isn’t is formula or scripting. Think of it this way: When you open the front door of your home, do you always say the same thing to every visitor you’re welcoming in, or do you adjust and customize it based on who they are? If it’s a long-time friend, you might say, ‘How the hell are ya?’ but if it’s a family with kids arriving, you’re not going to use swear words. Hospitality requires this same ability to adjust, depending on the situation and the guest. Which means the most valuable thing, other than hiring, is to provide employees with training and tips on how to find the factors that should lead them to adjust their approach. For just one simple example, if someone appears to be hard of hearing, what are some of the things you could do to make life easier for them? If someone has a limp or a hard time walking, maybe when you seat them at a table, don’t take them to an area of the restaurant where they have to go up or down stairs, even if you’ve been instructed that the best practice is to seat the tables in section X at this time.