The Inspector
Most entrepreneurs believe that their companies are the best at what they do. But, as CEO Norm Brodsky examines, being the best doesn't mean you can't get even better.
Published November 1999
EMAIL THIS ARTICLE
PRINTER FRIENDLY
COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEStreet Smarts
People often tell you that you shouldn't let pride get in your way, but that's exactly what you need to do if you want to harness the most powerful force in business
I've always believed that the service my company provides is the best around, the best it could possibly be -- and, as owners go, I don't think I'm alone. My guess is that most entrepreneurs feel the same way about their company's service and products.
Why? Because as an entrepreneur you have to believe in your company, or it won't succeed. You have to feel confident that, by being in business, you're helping your customers in some way. Maybe you're allowing them to save money or making their lives better or giving them something they couldn't get anywhere else. Whatever you're offering, you want it to be not just good but the best possible. And so you naturally tend to believe it is the best possible.
Well, if you think your service is the best it can be, there's a lesson you can learn from my brother-in-law, Michael, and his wife, Marianne -- one they taught me.
Michael and Marianne own an inn in upstate New York and have always prided themselves on providing an exceptional level of service, hospitality, and cleanliness. Their customers seemed to agree that they did: approximately 96% of them gave the highest service ratings to the inn on guest-response cards.
So when Michael and Marianne were invited, in May 1998, to apply for membership in an exclusive innkeepers' association, they thought they had a decent chance of being accepted. Membership, in this case, is a big deal. For one thing, it's an honor to be part of the association; there are only about 300 members nationwide. Honor aside, membership gets you a listing in the association's guidebook and referrals from other member inns, which tend to attract an affluent clientele. So you enlarge your customer base, and you can probably charge a little more as well.
The catch is that it's hard to get into the association, even with an invitation. First you have to be accepted by the other members in your region, and then you have to be approved at the national level. That means passing an incredibly rigorous test conducted anonymously by an inspector from the association who comes and stays at your inn as one of your guests. An inn can "flunk" the test for tiny, tiny things, and you have no idea which guest is conducting it or when. You find out who the inspector is only at the moment when he or she checks out.
Michael and Marianne submitted their application, and it sailed through the first stage of the process. They also had a meeting with their staff of 12 people and told them what was going on.
Michael explained to them what a great opportunity membership in the association would be and the importance of the inspection, which he'd been told would occur sometime before September 1. He then went over a kind of score sheet that he'd received from the association. In addition, there was a list of the 39 most common oversights -- such as "slow greeting on arrival" and "hairs on bathroom floor."
"This guy is going to be real persnickety," Michael said, "and we'll be rated on everything that happens from the moment the inspector picks up the phone to call us for a reservation."
To make sure the place was up to snuff, Michael and Marianne put together a schedule of additional housekeeping duties to be done on certain days of the week. On Mondays, for example, the staff examined shower curtains. On Tuesdays they looked for spiders. And each day, the staff tackled one "room du jour," scrubbing down everything in it and checking it with a fine-tooth comb.
Michael and Marianne pitched right in. They went looking for dust along with everyone else. They gave the housekeepers new ideas for cleaning. They showed everybody how to greet a guest, suggested what to say, and talked about how to deal with special requests.
June came and went with no inspection, but by then the employees were getting into it. There was an air of excitement, expectation. They decided that they had to treat every guest as if he or she were the inspector. At the same time they tried to pick out the real inspector among the people who'd made reservations or who'd arrived the night before. When employees came in after a day off, the first thing they'd ask was, "What's happened? Where do we stand?"
By the end of July, Michael and Marianne knew that something amazing was happening. They were seeing clear signs of improvement in areas of service that they hadn't believed could get any better. Housekeepers were finding places to clean that Michael had never even thought to look in: behind the toilet paper in the bathrooms, around the brackets of the shelves in the closets. Tips for the housekeepers doubled and, in some cases, tripled, and service ratings on the guest-response cards went up in every category.
