5/11/20

Lately, shop-guru Mary Portas has talked about the Kindness Economy; an idea she feels is becoming increasingly important to business, particularly toward customer service industries like retail and hospitality. Kindness to customers, pleasure to patrons -  you must make your guests feel wanted, valued and even, dare to say it, loved.  

As Maya Angelou observed, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Now many people will have discovered this: a creeping sense of being under siege is an unfortunate side effect of Covid-19.

“Yes you can”

“No you can’t”

“Stand there”

“Wait here”

“Wear this”

Perhaps an antidote to this is a metaphorical hug.  

Give your customers and patrons affection and smiles. Show them real appreciation for coming. Let them know that you’ve missed them, as they have missed you.

Remember they’re fed-up of all the stop/start madness too, the uncertainty.

So when you can, give certainty – that they will be looked after, guided and listened to.

Inevitably, restrictive practices will continue, so try to ensure that these are as unobtrusive as can be; just part of normality, barely worth a mention. 

In the US the Ritz-Carlton hotel group operates a leadership centre that holds symposiums and training days for ‘service excellence’ and has advised all kinds of global organisations, including Apple, who introduced a hyper-customer-focused experience in their stores on the back of the programme. 

Ritz-Carlton believe the transactional economy is coming to an end and there is a need to make changes toward new rules of engagement.  In America the future of customer service is being rethought in response to social change and technology.

As valuable as technology is, it still can’t compete with human instinct and emotion. Smartphones can give you information, algorithms can predict your tastes, but they can never outdo human intuition.

Therefore staff need to learn to adapt to the individual customer, to observe and then second-guess their unexpressed wishes. We all know that first impressions count, but according to experts it is the first three seconds that matter most. 

In the Covid era a feeling of wellbeing is more important than ever. And wellbeing comes from a lack of worry, and worries diminish with order, predictability and attention to detail. 

That’s why it’s key to promote consistency and familiarity as components in your business to help soothe and comfort nervous guests.

People love to travel, they like to arrive and more often than not they like to know what’s there when they do arrive. So give that to them, that thing you do best, the thing they know and love you for.

As for Covid, perhaps we should turn to the wisdom of George Harrison:

“But it's not always going to be this grey. All things must pass.”