Page 156 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 3: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU
from our view it is not world class.” Ritz-Carlton uses the monthly
customer surveys conducted by Gallup to energize staff and also
to highlight hotels in need of additional attention.
Leadership at Ritz-Carlton made the bold decision to clearly
place their hotels as red, yellow, and green performers, and in so
doing, they manage against the expectations of the customers
and not an arbitrary goal. That process created a burning plat-
form within the organization. In the early classifications, about
18 Ritz-Carlton hotels were in the red zone. Calling a hotel
“red” was a tremendous motivating force for the staff to find
ways to drive guest engagement. Even with increasing numbers
of hotels, Ritz-Carlton now averages only four hotels in the red.
In some of those cases, the hotels are not making the brand
marker because they are going through capital improvement.
But even in those cases, the red categorization forces considera-
tion of issues such as the need for capital investment to improve
the hotel’s performance on the functional aspects of a guest’s
stay. The general managers at these hotels ensure that their staff
members have the training and tools needed and also have par-
ticipated personally in the improvement process. They challenge
the quality improvement teams to identify the root cause rather
than fix the symptoms.
The lessons drawn from Ritz-Carlton’s journey to customer
engagement metrics are many. They include distilling the wis-
dom of consultant partners, systematically listening to guests,
linking performance on customer data to brand-specific stan-
dards, and managing to the standards already set. John H. Flem-
ing, Ph.D., chief scientist and principal of Gallup, anchors all of
these lessons back to the Ritz-Carlton culture: “Unlike the vast
majority of other companies we work with, the Ritz-Carlton has
established a foundation that makes this kind of program ex-
tremely effective. It generates results because of all the procedures
that it built from the day the company was founded to commu-
nicate, discuss, and encourage dialogue around both customer
and guest issues as well as the issues of the Ladies and Gentle-

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