Page 84 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Never a Customer, Always a Guest 65

orientation, they have complementary group privileges, so they get
the opportunity to stay at any of our properties around the world. In
the trial stay, they complete a rather extensive guest service question-
naire that cites our standards. Then they rate how their experience
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compared to those standards.
And you can be certain that Four Seasons would do anything in its power
to solve a problem that an employee encountered just as they would for a
noncompany guest.
One of the best ways to know for sure if customers really count is to
evaluate how an organization deals with guest problems and complaints. At
one of our Dream Retreats, we learned from a participant whose daughter
manages a Limited, Inc. store location in Arizona that the company will dis-
miss a store manager who receives three unresolved customer complaints.
At first, we were somewhat taken aback by the severity of this practice,
but after a little research into the effects of customer complaints on the bot-
tom line, we realized that the policy makes very good sense. The Technical
Assistance Research Programs Corporation of Washington, D.C., which
publishes statistics on customer complaints, has found that for every cus-
tomer complaint that an organization receives, there are 26 other dissatisfied
customers who will remain silent. Each of the 27 dissatisfied customers will
tell 8 to 16 others about the experience, and 10 percent will tell more than
20 other potential customers. If you do the arithmetic, you will find that
three complaints translate into more than 1,000 potential customers hearing
about the poor service a company provided. No company can afford to drag
its feet when handling customer complaints.
The results of a recent customer service study conducted by Coldwell
Banker indicated “a strong correlation between the quality of a company’s
customer service and its long-term success.” The findings also revealed that a
typical consumer switched businesses they dealt with twice in the past three
years because of “bad service.” When asked to define the differences between
great and poor service, consumers ranked the top characteristics of companies
with “great service” as follows:

■ Resolving questions and problems (66 percent)
■ Knowledge of the product or service (49 percent)
■ Being easy to reach (35 percent)
■ Understanding requirements (35 percent)