As Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association chief executive officer, Tom Kern had a professional interest in ensuring that tourists love Steamboat Springs, a resort town in Colorado. For this reason, the visitor survey results he received in late fall last year concerned him.
The small-business community’s preliminary Net Promoter Score — a rating derived by asking customers: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” — came in at 70 of a possible 100 (the final tally was 68), meaning that, while visitors liked the town, many were not excited enough to spread the word. Worse, the score had dropped seven points from the previous survey in 2010.
“How could we be a 70?” Kern asked himself. “We’re such a friendly town.”
Illustration: Yusha
Looking deeper into the results, he saw growing numbers of negative comments about the service at stores and restaurants. He knew there had been chatter for years that the town’s growth might be diluting its Western friendliness. Was this a sign?
Kern did not panic. Annual growth in sales tax collection — one measure of business health — was up about 7 percent last year, putting it ahead of other local resorts like Aspen and Crested Butte, but behind Vail and Telluride. Yet competition among resorts is brutal, and Kern concluded that Steamboat Springs had to differentiate itself.
“Anybody who comes to the west can go mountain biking or road biking, or hiking in Telluride or Aspen or wherever,” he said.
So Kern and a group of business owners made an unusual decision — to give the whole town customer-service training. In part, the decision was inspired by the town’s dominant mountain resort, Steamboat Ski & Resort Corp, which several years earlier had brought in a consultant to improve the conversion rate for incoming sales calls. The consultant, Ed Eppley, from Dublin, Ohio, taught telephone agents to connect with potential clients through personal conversation and to use the information learned to offer vacation packages that fit the caller. Following this program, the telephone sales “batting average” rose to 22 percent from 18 percent.
With this success, the emphasis on connecting with customers spread around the resort, and soon people in the town began to notice a difference. Even the notoriously cranky lift operators began to ask skiers their name and how they were doing in their few seconds together.
“It was like they hired a bunch of grumpy old men to manage that position,” said Rex Brice, who owns five restaurants in the town. “Now it’s like the same old men, but they’re friendly.”
Kern called Eppley and asked him to prepare a training program for two pilot groups of restaurateurs, small-business owners and municipal employees. Eppley agreed to give the training at a steep discount. Over four four-hour sessions spread over a month last spring, he briefed the 25 students in current customer-service thinking. Pointing to Disney as an example of excellence, he talked about going the extra mile, for example, by walking a lost visitor to a location instead of just pointing in the right direction.
“You’re trying to exceed expectations a little bit in each interaction,” said Kerry Shea, who owns McKnights Irish Pub and Loft in Steamboat Springs and is board president of the town’s Chamber of Commerce. “It’s not about becoming BFFs [‘Best Friends Forever’] with each person who comes in right out of the gate, but moving the needle a little.”
Eppley then taught something he calls “the connection stack,” a system meant to help employees find common ground with customers. In this system, employees choose from pictogram cards that ask five questions: Where are you from? What do you do? Where did you go to school? Where do you travel? What are your hobbies?
The idea is to improve the customer’s experience — and encourage loyalty — by teaching workers how to form a warm connection with clients and use the knowledge they glean from this connection.
“We teach people how to have that proper conversation with a guest or client,” said Eppley, who then described an ideal interaction at a hardware store. “You talk me through a project and in the process maybe you find out that I have two kids and we both like golf, and you’re calling me by name,” he said.
First, Eppley and Kern had to overcome the resistance of some business owners who were not convinced they needed help.
“I was pretty skeptical of Ed’s program when I was invited,” said Kelly Landers, 44, who owns the town’s Creekside Cafe and took the training. “I thought: ‘We already have great customer service. Why do I need to involve my employees?’”
However, after learning the system, the pilot students returned to their businesses and repeated the training for their employees. Those employees took it to the frontline, where some say they found the connection stack was an easy way to get closer to customers.
“It’s fun. It’s more like socializing than work,” said Bethany Clendennen, 27, a bartender at McKnights. “We find that people are a lot happier in this atmosphere. I’ve seen a big difference in tips and in myself too. You can use it to meet people.”
Of course, if used poorly, the suggested questions can come across like bad pickup lines, rehearsed and insincere.
“I said to my staff: ‘Do not go down this list of questions in order,’” said Landers, who now counts herself as an enthusiastic supporter. “Because the last thing table one wants to hear is you ask table two the same thing. Then you’re just a robot.”
Having the right employees is essential, Babson College’s Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program founder and faculty director Joseph Weintraub said, adding that he had not heard of another town taking a similar approach.
“Disney takes a long time to hire people,” he said. “They do testing, they look at values — because it’s hard to keep that smiling face and be genuine if that’s not who you are.”
It is a point Eppley drove home when he told the restaurateurs they should always ask potential hires, point-blank: “Are you friendly?”
However, some visitors might not want to be best friends with their waiters or to be walked to their destination. Barbara Kahn, director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, recalls being annoyed once when an older Ritz Carlton butler led her, very slowly, to the gym — instead of just giving her directions.
Ultimately, Steamboat Springs’ initiative is going to be judged on whether it creates more loyal guests and increases business. The town’s hotels had 12 percent more guests this summer, and Landers said Creekside Cafe’s business was up 15 percent — though it is impossible to know if the increases were caused by the training or by the improved economy. At McKnights, Shea said credit card tips are up 2 percent since the training.
However, the most recent customer service survey was inconclusive. The portion of visitors giving the friendliness of the town’s people a perfect 10 points rose to 53 percent from 47 percent last year. Yet in the latest Net Promoter Score survey, the town’s score slipped further to 67.
Kern, who resigned from the Steamboat Chamber last month to take care of his aging parents in Michigan, said it was too early to draw conclusions. The town plans to continue training restaurant workers and expand into the retail sector next year.
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