Don't Hate the Playa
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Companies in the high-end service industry often do much more than turn a blind eye to the extramarital escapades of their guests. "[T]he owners and managers of the world's most exclusive restaurants and hotels pull out all the stops to make sure their best customers can conduct their affairs there with ease," says Sara Reistad-Long at The Daily Beast.
You might disapprove of such active collaboration in a client's infidelity, but there's still something to be learned from their fanatical devotion to premium customer service:
- They make it their business to know their clients' business. "To this day," notes Reistad-Long, "Julian Niccolini, the co-owner of New York's Four Seasons restaurant, spends his mornings scouring, clipping, and saving newspaper articles containing information that might be relevant to his top clients' behaviors."
- They encourage repeat business with a treasured commodity—absolute discretion. "[A]t the LAB Bar in London," Jamie Gordon told her, "one of the first tenets we were taught was to never, under any circumstances whatsoever, greet a patron with even a hint of familiarity unless you were first acknowledged in said fashion."
- They don't assume their staff will know how to provide the service customers expect. Rebecca Martino, general manager of New York's One if By Land, Two if By Sea, has advised her staff to remember that many men take their girlfriends to dinner the evening before Valentine's Day, then return with their wives on the actual holiday.
The Po!nt: These establishments make themselves indispensable by adroitly anticipating and addressing their customers' needs. How can you do that for your customers?
Source: The Daily Beast. Click here for the full post.
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Comments
of all the tremendous examples of attention to customer service you could print, you chose this.
I am disappointed in your lack of integrity and class.
If promoting infidelity is Marketing Professional's idea of superior customer service, then I want no part of them. I have opted out of receiving your newsletter and will suggest those with whom I work do the same. The level of disgust I felt in reading this article is off the scale. I also liked the way the writer tried to add credence to this type of behavior by prefacing it with "People in the HIGH-END services industry..." alluding to the fact that only people on the "low end" would possibly object to promoting extra-marital affairs. In my book you can get no lower than aiding and abetting infidelity. High-end? No. Low class? Yes. Goodbye Mark Prof!
It is incumbent on us to raise and maintain high standards in our lives and expect and promote the same to those around us. This article takes it in the wrong direction.
You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig...
I can't believe Marketing Prof's thinks that this crap qualifies as useful information to a marketer... all it does is magnify everything that is wrong with capitalism, rather than focus on how we can raise the bar in our marketing efforts.
Dear Marketing-Profs-Person-Who-Reads-These-Comments:
Oops. Clipping from this "Daily Beast" post was boneheaded by any measure. Surely you understand that the context for the "Po!nt" we're supposed to get from this is patently offensive to the vast majority of your readers.
But hey, you're not sharing posts like this all the time...maybe this one slipped by someone who should have caught it but didn't check "this one time." Maybe you've got a new person scanning blogs and they were tweeting on their iPhone during the meeting where you explained the brand standards. I dunno...but someone screwed up.
But now... what a fantastic "teachable moment" fate has brought you! For now you can show us what a marketer should do when they step in it like this...show us how to turn this around. Since we're all capable of blowing it once and awhile, I can't wait to learn from your example. Lead on!