Page 288 - The New Gold Standard

Notes
and The Ritz-Carlton Rank Highest in Customer Satisfaction
among Hotels in Japan,” January 25, 2008.

Chapter 8.
Wow: The Ultimate Guest Experience

166 “‘This is pretty scary news for businesses in all arenas. Even if you
have a perfect track record of accuracy, meeting delivery deadlines,
product quality, and service with a smile, your customers won’t be
loyal to you. Apparently, we’ve moved beyond the era of ‘delighting’
customers and are now in an era where much more is expected. Be-
yond adequate service, consumers today want to be thrilled, to feel a
rush of extraordinary satisfaction by getting much more value, at-
tention, or enjoyment than they expected’”: Jeanette McMurtry,
“Creating Memorable Experiences More Critical Than Delivering
Excellent Service,” Advertising and Marketing Review, www.ad-mkt-
review.com, September 2007.
171–172 “‘Human nature being what it is, organizations often run into
trouble at the boundary between business units or between depart-
ments. The trouble is that most tasks which need to get done in
order to actually service the customer or produce a product require
communication to happen across these boundaries’”: Operational
Dynamics Web site www.operationaldynamics.com, “Improve cross-
departmental communication.”
173 “‘Our everyday lives are typically involved with serving others. If you
are an employee, you are most likely serving your supervisor and cus-
tomers. If you are a homemaker, you are probably serving the needs
of your family. If you are a business traveler, your journeys are stren-
uous enough with long daily meetings in a new city each day, as well
as being away from the comforts of family and home. We all work
hard in whatever field of endeavor we have chosen, and so it is vital
to reward ourselves whenever we have the opportunity. I have found
luxury travel to be a well-deserved reward for hard work’”: Joel
Widzer, The Penny Pincher’s Passport to Luxury Travel: The Art of Cul-
tivating Preferred Customer Status (Publishers Group West, Berkeley,
Calif., 2004).
175 “Research conducted by professors Laurette Dubé and Leo Re-
naghan . . . validates the universal importance of ‘attentiveness’
among hotel staff.”: Laurette Dubé and Leo Renaghan, “Building
Customer Loyalty—Guests” Perspectives on the Lodging Industry’s
Functional Best Practices (Part 1),” Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Ad-
ministration Quarterly, October 1999.

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