This is a special excerpt from The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets, by author Micah Solomon, a hospitality and customer service consultant, keynote speaker, and trainer. This excerpt is © 2024, Four Aces Inc, and is exclusively provided to Today’s Hotelier.
Delivering Authentic, Empowered Service at a Hyatt House, an Extended-Stay Property
At a Hyatt House extended-stay hotel near Washington, D.C., out of nowhere, a dog bounds up to the reception desk, clearly on a mission. The front desk agent leans over and tosses a rolled newspaper into the dog’s waiting mouth. With this stage of his mission accomplished, the dog walks away with his tail wagging, and the agent goes back to work processing paperwork for the next guest.
A COLLEAGUE AND A COLLIE
Has Hyatt House resorted to employing bell staff of the four-legged variety? Actually, this dog is a guest, of sorts. “His owner had just sold her home after 40 years of living there and, like many of our guests at Hyatt House, is in a bit of limbo before moving into her first apartment space as an empty nester,” explains a Hyatt SVP. “My colleague at the front desk [at this point in the interview I had to confirm that she had said “colleague,” not “collie”]has been trying to help this guest maintain some semblance of her routine from her previous life. So each morning her dog pads down the hall to the front desk, gets the newspaper just like he did when they lived at home, and carries it back to the guest room where his master awaits.”
Hospitality guests are by definition dislocated. They’re not eating at home, not sleeping at home – they’re away. Though this displacement is no doubt voluntary at a resort location or a trip to a restaurant, at an extended-stay property like Hyatt House, the dislocation is likely to be the result of an awkward and possibly painful situation. Guests here include the recently divorced, those enduring job assignments away from their families, and those whose houses have sold before they’ve settled on a new one. These are situations where the psychological realities of a guest’s life can be weighing heavily on their perception of the goods and services you’re providing. And it’s a situation where true service – hospitality – can shine.
YOU CAN’T ACHIEVE AUTHENTIC SERVICE BY ONLY REWARDING CONFORMITY
But true service – hospitality – can’t shine when delivered in an assembly-line fashion. It needs to be focused on one guest at a time. What Hyatt House was doing for this guest was specific to her, and, therefore, meaningful. That’s the crux of the matter – the opportunity and challenge. Treating a guest as your only guest, focusing on what your guest needs beyond a secure lock on the door, an appropriate room rate, a reliable bath, and so forth, is where you’ll find the opportunity to distinguish yourself – to build an advantage that competitors will find extremely hard to imitate and knock off.
As Hyatt President and CEO Mark Hoplamazian explains, “We want to achieve authentic service, we want to enlist people to show up and be themselves, to engage in an empathetic way. It’s not [just]about perfection. Authentic service beats out perfection every time.”
THE BUBL METHOD FOR ATTENTIVE-BUT-NOT-INTRUSIVE SERVICE
Let’s head north, and several price points higher up, to The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park, specifically to the hotel’s Club Level, where guests enjoy four daily food presentations and the service of a dedicated concierge and a team of attendants
The Club Level at the Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park
Club-level employees here aren’t serving carefully timed courses that need to arrive concurrently or consecutively in correct succession. They’re not checking in guests at a peak entry period. Instead, they’re at their guests’ service throughout the day in whatever capacity may be useful, a loosely defined role whose success hinges on whether they manage to provide that service in a way that will be appreciated, rather than coming across as an interruption.
So, as I hunch over my laptop in The Ritz-Carlton Club Level Lounge working on this very chapter, at first it’s what doesn’t happen that is so impressive. The well-dressed, smiling club attendant doesn’t come over to ask me if I want my coffee warmed up. Does this mean she’s being inattentive? Quite the opposite. She sees that I am intently hammering out these very sentences and that it’s a bad time to ask me anything. She remains ever observant, however, and is back and ready to serve as soon as I end the paragraph and lean back in my chair to ponder my next linguistic move.
In my consulting and training practice, I’ve developed a framework for delivering this kind of ultra-attentive service and codified as the BUBL method (pronounced “bubble,” by the way). The basis of BUBL, and the reason for the name, is the concept that each of your guests is surrounded by an individual, invisible, protective bubble. To be able to provide exceptional guest service, your team needs to be aware of this phenomenon and be conscious of the extent to which a guest’s individual protective shell is open or closed at any particular moment.
Employees need to learn to recognize when it’s okay to venture near and into the guest’s protective bubble within which the guest has expectations of solitude and how to interact with the guest while that bubble is open. This is what the well-trained attendant at The Ritz-Carlton club lounge is doing when she discreetly avoids interrupting me mid-thought, and it’s also what she’s doing when she reverses course and provides me with service as soon as it’s clear to her that she won’t be interrupting.
The four steps of the BUBL method
B: Begin immediately
U: Un-code the guest’s messages and pacing
B: Break your schedule
L: Leave room for more interaction
Let’s take these one by one.
■ Begin immediately: The guest expects service to begin the exact moment that she comes into contact with the employee, so deciphering whether or not the guest actually considers meaningful contact to have been made is an important part of this step. For example, if a guest catches a server’s eye, it may be merely accidental, but if the guest holds the server’s gaze, it usually means that the guest’s expecting to be offered assistance. (At busy times, the “begin immediately” step may need to be accomplished even if the employee’s busy speaking with another customer. This requires learning to work with one customer while visually acknowledging the presence of a new arrival.)
■ Un-code: (The word, I know, should be “Decode,” but that leaves us with an acronym of “BDBL,” which, though fun to try to pronounce, isn’t as memorable a mnemonic device as “BUBL.”) Decipher the messages the customer is giving you about her desired pacing of service, as well as her level of happiness or distress and other emotions and adjust appropriately. (Such cues aren’t only detectable in person, by the way; they can be discerned on the phone, in online chat, via videoconferencing, etc.)
■ Break your schedule: Your customer has let you into her bubble, her “meditation chapel,” for the moment. Drop what you’re doing and work on what she needs. True service can never be a slave to checking things off in a predetermined order. Attending properly to a customer means adhering to the customer’s schedule, not your own. This means, for example, waiting for a natural break in conversation before asking how a meal is tasting, rather than barging in when your guest is in animated discourse or mid-bite into a juicy burger, just because she’s next in the order you had in mind as you started your rounds, and you don’t want to be delayed.
■ Leave room for more: Is this really goodbye? Check before you conclude the interaction. It’s the service professional’s responsibility to ask if anything additional is needed and, if it isn’t, to graciously thank the customer before leaving her to her solitary sanctuary.
AT THE CENTER OF THE CUSTOMER’S UNIVERSE
The reason that such subtle aspects of service make a difference is because a guest wants to feel like they’re at the center of your world. And, as a service provider, there’s a lot of power in creating this impression. In a sense, this will have to be an illusion that you’re creating, because in reality you have – I’m making some assumptions here – a life of your own and more than one guest to support. But it’s an extremely powerful, business-building illusion for the hospitality professional who can successfully bring it to life.
Double Five-Star Service Secrets from the Inn at Little Washington
Let’s head south again to one of the most acclaimed and awarded small hotels and restaurants in the United States, Patrick O’Connell’s The Inn at Little Washington, a double Five Star (per Forbes), double Five Diamond (per AAA) and, uniquely in its market, Michelin Three Star property in the rural county of Rappahannock, home to only 7,000 full-time human residents as well as a significant number of sheep, cattle, and, for some obscure reason, ostriches.
The Inn at Little Washington, A Double Five Star, Triple Michelin Star Hotel and Restaurant in Rural Virginia
Of course, there are a lot of different pieces that go into creating the double Five Star (24 years straight with the Forbes/Mobil Travel Guide) double Five Diamond (twenty-five years straight with AAA) gem that is The Inn at Little Washington: The kitchen. The training. The décor by London stage designer Joyce Evans. Exclusive farm and sourcing resources. The gentle comedy of Faira, the cow on wheels that brings the cheese course around the dining room, her tableside arrival announced by the ringing tones of her cowbell.
And, of course, hotelier and chef Patrick O’Connell, a longtime President of Relais & Chateaux North America, himself. But the one facet that O’Connell says has to shine beyond all others is focus – a complete focus on the guest, one person at a time.
“The heart of hospitality, for me, is the ability to focus completely and totally on one person, even if only for a matter of seconds, yet long enough that you’ve got a clear connection. It’s the ability to focus so intently on a guest that the rest of the world ceases to exist. It might sound, as I tell you this, that this type of focus takes a lot of time, but it doesn’t; it just requires your full and complete attention at a given moment. You have to develop the discipline of momentarily blotting out the rest of the world. Believe me: your guest will know immediately when you’ve succeeded.”
O’Connell offers an example of his approach to connecting with guests:
“A woman recently ate in our dining room by herself, reading her book through the course of the meal. I asked my staff, ‘Did you interact with her?’ They told me, ‘We tried, of course, but she’s somewhat reserved and hasn’t given us much information to work with.’ Because we were at a bit of a loss for how to make a connection, at the end of the meal her waiter invited her back to the kitchen to visit with us. She came in, still carrying her book. As it turned out, I had read the same book, so I was able to make a comment or two about it. Immediately, she opened up and said that she was there celebrating her husband’s birthday. He had died the year before at a very young age, and it [The Inn at Little Washington] was always a place they had planned to come together, so she was making the visit herself in his memory. I thought to myself: ‘Imagine if she had come all the way out here and not had an opportunity to share that information!’ Being able to do so made it much more of a complete experience for her.”
“Customers are always giving you cues that are specific to that customer, and you have to be paying attention, every single time. Customers want you to be a “participant observer,” someone who will share the experience with them. They want someone else to know the significance of the experience. They’re often looking for someone with whom they can faithfully share information, and if they ever sense that you’re uninterested or too busy, they won’t.”
Patrick O’Connell has been in the business for decades – ever since 1978 when O’Connell opened his fledgling operation on the location of a former garage. Yet he and his staff still put the concept of single-guest focus into practice every day.
Working with great hotels at all (or almost all!) price points, from select-service to Five Star (Forbes-rated) properties, I find the above methodologies and mindsets to be supremely useful, and I make sure to include them in my customer service trainings, brand standards, and culture-building efforts. I hope you will consider doing the same.
We’ve covered at fair amount of ground here, and I hope you’ve enjoyed and benefited from the time you’ve spent reading this excerpt from The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets by Micah Solomon, a customer service and hospitality consultant, trainer, training designer, and keynote speaker.
Micah Solomon is the author of The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets. He’s a customer service and hospitality keynote speaker, trainer/training designer, and consultant. His book shows you step by step how to create (and sustain) a level of service so memorable that it becomes a defining part of your brand and an unbeatable competitive advantage. To reach Micah directly and discuss applying these insights more specifically to your situation: [email protected] or (484)343-5881, or via his website, micahsolomon.com.
