Five Star Service and Attention to Detail: The Benefits to Your Practice with Bruce Himelstein

See the image of the iPhone lightning cable?

It tells a remarkable service story.

One our guest this week knows all too well.

Recognized as “One of The Top 25 Most Extraordinary Minds in Sales & Marketing” by The Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI), Mr. Himelstein has transformed multi-billion-dollar companies into game-changing industry innovators.

During his illustrious career, Bruce Himelstein has been credited with leading some of the travel/hospitality industry’s most prestigious brands into the new era, including Loews Hotels, The Ritz-Carlton, and Oceana Cruises.

As Corporate Vice President of Sales and Marketing for The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, he successfully implemented the renewal and transformation of the trusted luxury brand, with his groundbreaking “Blow The Dust Off The Lion and Crown” campaign.

This campaign effectively reinforced the hotel’s prestigious appeal to longtime clientele while opening up a whole new market by attracting a new generation of guests to the global brand. Mr. Himelstein and this campaign are featured prominently in Joseph Michelli’s New York Times bestseller, The New Gold Standard.

Customer Service IS Your Brand!
the truth about branding from a former Ritz-Carlton executive

A recent edition of my local newspaper carried the following headline: “Chipotle co-CEO to focus on customer service.” The body of the article reported, “Now that the Denver-based company is satisfied with its new safety protocols, it’s turning its attention to better customer service.”

While I applaud the company’s efforts, focus on customer service is not a box to be checked or some static goal that can be marked “complete.” Customer service is the very DNA of a customer-centric culture. For years, when I was chief marketing officer at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, attention to our guests was the undeniable brand. It still is.

In the hotel industry, it takes only a checkbook to be competitive. The great differentiator, however – the factor that sets one competitor above another – is how the customer is treated. Animating your brand with the tenets of world-class service starts with the CEO and permeates throughout the organization. Anticipating customers’ needs and delivering on them must always take priority. These tenets are non-negotiables; they simply must not be stripped down or cut out during the budget process.

Along with being non-negotiable, customer service should be nonproprietary inside the organization’s walls. In other words, accountability for outstanding service doesn’t belong to any one person or department but rather to every employee, associate, and department.

Now, allow me to make the distinction here: the word “nonproprietary” applies to customer service across all departments – they all share in delivering. But when the discussion shifts to trends across an entire industry, by all means strive to make your company’s customer service proprietary. Own it. Stand out from competitors in how your organization delivers. By the way, when a brand gets this right, it allows pricing power because we know that from the customers’ perspective the cost of switching to a competitor just spiked higher.

There are three things to keep in mind about customer service and branding:

1. Customer service is one of few things over which organizations have complete control. 

2. Providing better customer service than your competition raises the switching costs.

3. The way to win in any market is to make customer service the foundation of your brand.

During my tenure at Ritz-Carlton, a major airline’s flight attendant group approached us. They were interested in raising their level of service – commendable for sure. When asked if their CEO knew they were meeting with us, their response was no.  In fact, no other department within the airline was present or had plans to follow this group’s service-improvement journey. The fact is they would have failed because their organization didn’t consider it a priority. Customer service–fueled brand identity should begin at the top and spread to every department like – well, like planes dispatched from hub cities span the continent. It seems like kind of an automatic metaphor, one would think.

So, kudos to Chipotle’s executives for recognizing the corporation has an issue. However, the company’s future would be better served if its execs realized that customer service cannot be the Flavor of the Month.

Written by Bruce Himelstein