"Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your customer interactions." — Betsy Sanders, Author The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: Legendary service is about excellence and consistency. It’s about passion and really living customer service and not just pretending you care. You cannot give great service one day and be in a bad mood the next day. You have to deliver first-class service at all times, and everyone in your organization has to embrace this same standard of excellence. When service is done right and from the heart, your organization can leave a lasting impression with customers. The Ritz-Carlton realizes that if our guests stay with us for one night, one weekend or a just a few hours - we have the opportunity to stay with them long after they leave. ∞ The Blog Post Inspired Thinking: Living Customer Service appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

Dear Ritz-Carlton: How do you handle lying customers? Answer from Diana Oreck, Vice President at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: Your customer lying puts you in a very awkward and uncomfortable position. You must handle this delicately. As a refined professional, you never want to come right out and say to your customer, "we know you are lying!" Use phrases such as: - "Our research shows us the following." - "After speaking to the people who saw or heard the event, they understand the situation differently." - "Do you believe there could possibly be a different explanation?" Hopefully, at this point the customer will realize that in your mind their story is suspect and will retreat from the situation. If not, and the customer wants a refund or compensation, you have two choices. If it is a small amount or item, you might decide it is not worth the time or emotional investment and give in. If it is a much more complex and expensive situation, you can respectfully explain to the customer that due to the facts you disagree and will not be honoring the request. ∞ On Monday, April 13, 2015, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center presents "Your Journey to Service Excellence," The Ritz-Carlton approach to legendary service, employee engagement and a customer-centric culture. Learn more about the keynote speaker, the presentation speakers, and the members of The Ritz-Carlton Executive Panel. The Blog Post Dear Ritz-Carlton: Lying customers? appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

In 2014, Money magazine cited banking as an industry that is "regularly bashed for not putting customers’ needs first on the agenda," and the 2014 J.D. Power study on U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction found that poor customer service was the number one reason customers switched banks. Banks and financial institutions need to offer consistent customer service in order to earn customer loyalty and trust. Customers do not want to feel like just another transaction, and they do not want to be shuffled from person-to-person. Banks and financial advisors must ensure customers feel safe and valued. Whether your financial institution is worldwide or local, there are several customer service strategies you can employ to earn the good favor of customers. 1) Little "Things" Matter Finance is an industry where relationships are everything and in most cases will be the reason why a client chooses one advisor or bank over another. Focus on the small details that the client provides—his or her preferences and favorite things—and commit a random act of kindness to follow-up with those details. For example, if your customer goes through the drive-through teller window with a dog in his/her car, you might include a dog treat with his/her transaction. Show your client that you genuinely care about him/her. After the post office bumped up the price of stamps again, one financial advisor sent all his clients a roll of penny stamps to make up the difference until his clients got used to the new rate. Small gestures like this can be very powerful and meaningful. Part of The Ritz-Carlton Credo pledges that "The Ritz-Carlton experience … fulfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests." Each thoughtful act contributes to a sense of genuine caring and fosters loyalty. 2) Emphasize Security With all the recent hacking of sensitive information, customers need to be reassured of their privacy and security. At The Ritz-Carlton, one of our service values is "I protect the security and privacy of our guests, my fellow employees and the company’s confidential information and assets." This is important for any business, but obviously, this is paramount for financial institutions. Clients want to believe, feel and know that their money is safe. When Home Depot credit card and debit card numbers were hacked, banks had to decide the best way to respond. Many banks charged customers for replacement cards, but several banks—such as Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh—reissued 100 percent of the cards that were impacted. PNC Bank communicated with customers as they determined the right step and ultimately chose to replace debit cards for all customers. Taking extra measures to ensure your customers are safe leaves the impression that you are looking out for them. 3) Connect with Community One of the perceptions of financial institutions is that they charge too many fees and are greedy. To combat this viewpoint, organizations should consider becoming involved with their communities. In 2014, Illinois National Bank celebrated its 15th anniversary  with 15 acts of charity, and Chelsea Groton Bank commemorated its 160th anniversary by completing 160 acts of kindness. These are two great examples of community outreach by local banks. However, global financial institutions can embrace local communities as well. Hervé Humler, President and Chief Operations Officer at The Ritz-Carlton, notes that "our global company is aligned around the issues that are important to the communities where we operate." Each Ritz-Carlton hotel around the world connects with their local communities through our Corporate Social Responsibility program, known as Community Footprints®. When your employees invest their time and energy in the local community, they are demonstrating that your organization is altruistic and genuinely caring. 4) Make Technology a Helpful Tool Technology is often needed for efficiencies and convenient access. Many of your customers don’t have time to actually get to know anyone at the bank or in the loan department, and sometimes a financial institution is too large to give single point-of-contact service. This means your customers are either visiting your website to obtain information, or they are at the mercy of the dreaded 1-800 service center. However, if these resources are managed correctly, they can be useful assets and add to the customer experience. To discover if technology is helping or frustrating your customer, consider these questions: If a customer calls in at 7 pm West Coast time to find out information, is someone there to answer that call? Can customers get help outside of normal business hours? Are your account notes diligently updated? Will an online customer service representative have access to the information needed in order to have an intelligent conversation with your customer Is your staff empowered and knowledgeable? Are employees willing and able to involve managers when needed? Or do customers have to recognize when additional assistance is needed? Are your processes tight and trained to? Would everyone give customers basically the same answer and have about the same solutions? Customer Service Strategies for Banks & Finance Customer service is not the job of a few people. Everyone in your organization should be customer-centric, and you should embed a customer service mindset in your organization’s culture. Ray Davis, the CEO of Umpqua Bank, commented in a recent article "Banking executives always ask, ‘How do you get your people to do that?’ It’s the culture we’ve built over the last 10 years. It doesn’t just happen. You don’t wake up one day and say, gee, look at this great culture we’ve got here. Our culture is our single biggest asset, hands down." Remember, along with having a great culture, you need to have adequate staffing and systems to support your culture like easy-to-navigate ATM machines and online banking that is fast and easy to navigate. When your financial institution focuses on providing excellent and genuine customer service, you will differentiate yourself from your competition, improve your brand’s reputation and create customer loyalty and trust. Aren’t these long-term dividends worth your time and investment? ∞ On Monday, April 13, 2015, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center presents "Your Journey to Service Excellence," The Ritz-Carlton approach to legendary service, employee engagement and a customer-centric culture. Learn more about the keynote speaker, the presentation speakers and the members of The Ritz-Carlton Executive Panel.   The Blog Post Customer Service Strategies for Banks and Financial Services appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

"Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new. … If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low." — Seth Godin, marketer and author The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: Focusing exclusively on cost effectiveness and efficiency eliminates the possibility of creating joy. If your employees must adhere to specific policies, if you have set them up to tell customers "There’s nothing I can do," then you have lost the chance to earn long-term customer loyalty. You have to establish a culture that puts the customers’ need first, but more than that, you have to ensure that your workforce embraces your purpose. Your employees are the ones building meaningful, long-lasting relationships with your customers, and they must have the flexibility to create moments of surprise and joy by going above and beyond. The Ritz-Carlton believes in empowering our Ladies and Gentlemen to serve our guests completely. We build relationships, we strive to amaze customers, we create Ritz-Carlton guests for life. ∞ The Blog Post Inspired Thinking: Amaze Customers appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

Dear Ritz-Carlton: I’ve heard the term "systems behind the smiles." What are some of the systems that need to be in place to support customer service excellence? Answer from Diana Oreck, Vice President at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: The Ritz-Carlton is famous for its deep-rooted culture and consistent level of service at its properties around the globe. Having a wonderful organizational culture that inspires pride and passion is extremely important. However, your organizational culture is only part of the equation. In order to "live" your organizational culture you must also have what we refer to as "systems behind the smiles." Your employees must have robust processes they can rely on in order to deliver your brand promise. Some of these "systems behind the smiles" include but are not limited to: Websites that are fast and easy to navigate A talent selection process that allows you to hire the right talent and fit for your organization Written empowerment guidelines so employees do not have to run and get a manager every time there is an opportunity to wow a customer or resolve a problem Adequate staffing so that your employees can give your customers their undivided attention. For example, your phones will be answered within three rings If you have systems and processes in place that support your culture, your employees are enabled to provide unique, memorable and personal service! ∞ On Monday, April 13, 2015, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center presents "Your Journey to Service Excellence," The Ritz-Carlton approach to legendary service, employee engagement and a customer-centric culture. Learn more about the keynote speaker, the presentation speakers, and the members of The Ritz-Carlton Executive Panel. The Blog Post Dear Ritz-Carlton: What are the systems behind the smiles? appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

Each month, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center (RCLC) features an interview with an employee — a Lady or Gentleman of The Ritz-Carlton — in order to share an insider’s view of the organization. This month’s interview is with Janet Souter, Vice President, Quality at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C. RCLC: Describe what your role is as Vice President of Quality for The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. Ms. Souter: My team and I conduct research to learn how we can provide resources and tools for our hotels. Our findings tell us our customers’ wants, needs and desires. We share those insights with General Managers so our team can help facilitate problem-solving or possibly change a process. RCLC: Describe what that looks like at the hotel level. Ms. Souter: Our team acts like consultants gathering data. For example, if there’s a water line break in a hotel, they prompt the engineers to ask, "Why is this happening?" They don’t solve the problem, they lead employees to help them find the solution. Throughout that entire process we’re focused on operational excellence. RCLC: When it comes to customer service, how does The Ritz-Carlton culture of caring for employees translate into exceptional guest experiences? Ms. Souter: As we care for our employees, we empower our employees. We let them know, "We didn’t hire you just to do a task. We hired you for a purpose; for your brain and your heart. You’re important to us." That makes a difference to our Ladies and Gentlemen. They take that message and it impacts the service they deliver. Each interaction our Ladies and Gentlemen have with a guest makes or breaks the experience. RCLC: How do you gather data from your guests? Ms. Souter: We use a "Report Card," or guest feedback card, via an email survey. Our survey questions are based on The Ritz-Carlton Credo. RCLC: How do you help employees use the information from the surveys to ensure the guest experience is consistent across the brand? Ms. Souter: We work on the processes everywhere. We measure the level at which guests are engaged. We ask questions like, "What are the key drivers of guest engagement?" and "How can we deliver The Ritz-Carlton Credo if we’re doing something that doesn’t align with it?" We don’t only ask for feedback from our guests; we talk with our Ladies and Gentlemen, too. We’re not asking anyone to do anything different than deliver on The Credo. Even the greatest people in the world can’t be effective unless they are working from the same set of values and standards. RCLC: Would you share an example of how your work impacts guests? Ms. Souter: We discovered that our hotel guests who were staying as part of a group had lower engagement scores than any other segment of our business. We conducted focus groups with group attendees to understand their specific needs and desires when staying at the hotel. We also interviewed the internal Ladies and Gentlemen to learn what they thought the group attendee wanted. The findings showed two things: Our Ladies and Gentlemen were disconnected from what the group attendees actually expected from their stay. The group attendees wanted the same level of personalized service when staying as an individual guest but gave different examples of how that could be brought to life. The solution was that we studied the best practices taking place in our top performing hotels and shared those practices among all of the hotels, enabling our Ladies and Gentlemen to deliver first-class service to every guest regardless of whether they were traveling as a group attendee or individual traveler. RCLC: Employees of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company recognize the company "Gold Standards" as foundational to their success. Which Gold Standard in particular resonates with you and why? Ms. Souter: My favorite is Service Value 9: "I’m involved in the planning of the work that affects me." This Service Value helps our Ladies and Gentlemen know what they’re facing. If we involve them in the conversation, we can solve anything. ∞ On Monday, April 13, Ms. Janet Souter will be a member of The Ritz-Carlton Executive Panel at the Symposium: Your Journey to Service Excellence in Dallas.  The Blog Post Our Ladies and Gentlemen: Janet Souter appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

"Service standards keep rising. As competitors render better and better service, customers become more demanding. Their expectations grow. When every company’s service is shoddy, doing a few things well can earn you a reputation as the customer’s savior. But when a competitor emerges from the pack as a service leader, you have to do a lot of things right. Suddenly achieving service leadership costs more and takes longer. It may even be impossible if the competition has too much of a head start. The longer you wait, the harder it is to produce outstanding service." — William H. Davidow, Author, Marketer, Venture Capitalist The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center: Standards are constantly evolving—company standards, employee standards and customer standards. Your organization must adapt and change in order to stay in business. However, raising the bar to meet the latest standards is not the same thing as taking the extra step to separate your brand from the "noise." The winners are those who can not only perform the standards consistently, but also do the unexpected—going "above and beyond" for their customers. As Mr. Davidow points out, creating a reputation for outstanding service does not happen overnight. Leadership must value the customer experience and see it as a day-to-day priority as well as a long-term investment. Organizations like Amazon, Rackspace, Umpqua Bank and The Ritz-Carlton have created a service culture that puts the customer front and center at all times. The Ritz-Carlton takes great pride in servicing guests. Our Ladies and Gentlemen—our employees—know they are empowered and expected to take that extra step and create unique, memorable and personal moments. What does your organization need to change in order to differentiate itself from the competition and rise above the "noise"? ∞ The Blog Post Inspired Thinking: Service Leadership appeared first on The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center.

Maintaining learner engagement is the covenant of instructional design. John Keller’s ARCS Model of Motivational Design suggests a 4-step process for establishing and maintaining motivation by directly addressing learner attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction. I find the ARCS model most useful when I correlate each step to an intended "state of mind." In other words, by how I want to influence the internal dialogue the learner is having with the instructional experience. In the table below, each step corresponds to a learner state of mind: Don’t think of the ARCS model as an establishing event of instruction, but rather as an ongoing series of interventions. There is no one-and-done to maintaining attention and motivation. Beyond plenitudes of distractions, learner concentration naturally wanes over time. In his book Brain Rules, John Medina presents the 10-minute attention span rule. Accordingly, learner attention must be re-engaged in regular time intervals. Learner attention and motivation are lost without ongoing support. Instructional designers must uphold the covenant. The ARCS Model of Motivation provides a starting point to this quest.

Baseball has been eliminated from the 2012 Olympics, making it the first sport to be voted out of the Olympics since polo in 1936. This is a crime. The only way I know to protest this move is to write a baseball-themed post on Enspire’s blog. Take that, IOC! Here we go… Baseball and instructional design… what’s the connection?… I got it… Ahem… An interview with Charles McDowell in Ken Burn’s Baseball sums up game balancing perfectly. He reflects on the distance between home plate and first base in baseball by saying: "That’s so interesting that that would come out 90 feet. That somebody sat down, Mr. Cartwright [the father of baseball] or whoever said "Hey it oughta be 90 feet, it just sounds like a logical number." The fact of the matter is, in retrospect if it was 88 feet the game would be very different. Think of the plays at first base. Think of the double plays that wouldn’t be completed on an 88 feet first base, and second base. If it were 94 feet we’d be throwing people out all over the place. Batting averages would drop remarkably." I imagine that the first games of baseball were not played with first base placed 90 feet from home plate. In fact, the players probably experimented with distances until they landed at 90 feet. It would be too difficult to arrive at that distance without playtesting. As McDowell said, "So if 90 feet was something somebody said, "Hey that’s a good number" that was a pick from heaven." Designing educational games is no different. Playtests are the key. We recently designed an in-person game for a workshop on matrix management structures. The game involved throwing paper objects at a target, including airplanes and footballs, and negotiating with other teams for resources. During our playtests, we discovered that it was too easy for teams to negotiate themselves into a tie. That is, if they cooperated too much, they lost. That was not our goal. So, we added an additional "bonus throw" that served to break the tie and increase the importance of players’ negotiations. Every subsequent playtest resulted in a close match that was determined by the final bonus throw at the end of the game. The point is, whether you’re designing a national pastime or an educational game, you have to playtest. It’s impossible to design a game without playing it first. Also, an Olympics without baseball ain’t right.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AUSTIN, Texas - Aug. 2, 2012 - Enspire Learning, a leading provider of leadership development simulations and custom learning solutions, announced updates today to its premier leadership simulation, Executive Challenge. First released in 2006, Executive Challenge has been run over 200 times worldwide in corporate and university classrooms. Executive Challenge is a simulation-based leadership development program designed to develop leadership, communication, and teamwork skills in a competitive marketplace. Within the past 12 months, the multiplayer online simulation has been converted to HTML5, allowing Executive Challenge to be played on a larger variety of devices, including tablets. The simulation can now also be run wirelessly and the interface has been updated to be more modern and user friendly. More than 6,500 people have played the simulation in more than 50 companies around the world. Due to global demand for Executive Challenge, the simulation had been translated into eight languages: Dutch, French, German, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The simulation experience includes unexpected adverse events which occur during gameplay to test players’ decision-making abilities. Enspire has added several new events to the pool of standard events so that clients can closely tailor the the learning objectives of their program. Adverse events are based on difficult situations that players often face in the real world including a hiring freeze, FDA regulations, change management, and layoffs. Enspire has also developed a new tool for clients that maps each of the Executive Challenge learning competencies to the corresponding debrief session and adverse event. This tool will help clients create a targeted leadership development program that fits their specific learning and development goals.