Page 87 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

68 The Disney Way

We Give the Personal Touch
■ Treat each guest as a special individual.
■ One personal experience, good or bad, can make the greatest impres-
sion.
■ Use the guest’s name whenever possible.
We Know the Answers
■ Any question, find the answer.
■ Do not send guests in circles.
■ Eliminate call transfers when possible.
We Know Our Roles
■ All associates understand and strive to achieve their natural work
group goals.
■ Maintain uncompromising levels of cleanliness of our facilities.
■ Record each incident of guest dissatisfaction.
■ Every associate is empowered to resolve a problem of guest dissat-
isfaction and prevent a repeat occurrence.
We Make Our Facilities Clean and Safe
■ Provide a safe environment for guests and associates.
■ Notify the appropriate supervisor immediately of hazardous situa-
tions or injuries.
■ Protect our assets. This is the responsibility of all associates.
We Are a Team
■ We believe that our atmosphere needs to be friendly and informal.
■ We take our jobs seriously, not ourselves. We create fun in our
roles, which creates fun for our guests.
■ We communicate openly; we do not promote barriers between
people.

No examination of extraordinary attention to customer complaints would
be complete without a story about Nordstrom, the Seattle-based department
store chain that wrote the book on making customers happy. As the following
anecdote illustrates, the slightest dissatisfaction is taken quite seriously.
Bruce Nordstrom, cochairman, was leaving one of the stores on his way
to a meeting when he overheard a woman say to her companion, “I’ve never
been so disappointed in all my life.” Nordstrom beckoned to a sales associate
and asked her to find out why the woman was disappointed. The sales associate