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1-Page Summary of Be Our Guest
Overview
The Walt Disney Company has a reputation for great customer service. It’s also the subject of a book called Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (2011) by Disney Institute and Theodore Kinni, which outlines strategies that businesses can use to improve their own customer service practices. The book describes how companies like GoDaddy, JetBlue Airways, and Marriott have used these techniques to improve their services.
The Walt Disney Company is known for creating magical customer experiences. They do this by training their employees to deliver Quality Service, which can be summed up as “making the customer happy.” This has made them one of the largest media companies in the world.
To provide quality service, a company must go beyond the customer’s expectations. The Quality Service Compass is a model that helps companies understand how to deliver this level of service. This model helps companies identify common goals and standards for employees and processes so they can use them to achieve their purpose.
Guestology is a way to understand customers by using demographic data and information about their needs, wants, preconceived notions, and emotions. Guestology helps businesses identify a purpose that they share with their customers. For Disney, this purpose is creating happiness through entertainment for people of all ages everywhere. A common purpose creates the foundation for every decision an organization makes.
Organizations need to establish quality standards so they can define the actions necessary for achieving their purpose. The priority of those standards will vary by organization, but Disney’s are safety, courtesy, show and efficiency. That means that safety comes before speed when it comes to boarding a ride at a theme park.
Every organization needs three systems to deliver service: employees, physical assets, and processes. To ensure quality service is delivered, these elements should be aligned with the organization’s standards. The Disney Institute provides a tool called the Integration Matrix that can be used by organizations or individuals to align their cast (employees), setting (physical assets), and process (processes).
The Disney Company’s approach to customer service is applicable to other organizations, but it was created by Walt Disney. The company has grown into a multibillion-dollar business since its founder’s death in 1966. It continues to provide happiness through entertainment, just as its founder had envisioned.
Key Point 1: All organizations are in the customer service business.
Disney Institute has been training business leaders from all over the world since 1986. All these participants have a common goal of serving their customers, regardless of industry or organization size.
All businesses are service-oriented. Service is the most important factor in the success of a business. Companies that provide excellent customer service will be successful, even if they aren’t selling anything special. For example, PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay provides good customer service and has achieved great success with their potato chips and tortilla chips because people prefer to buy them over other brands.
In their book In Search of Excellence, Robert Waterman and Tom Peters attribute Frito-Lay’s success to its “99.5 percent service level” commitment. The company strives for that standard in fulfilling orders 99.5 percent of the time, which empowers its sales force to make decisions that are not cost-effective in the short term. For example, a truck might be sent to restock a store with an order valued at $60 but only worth $50 if it were shipped directly there from the factory—a loss of hundreds of dollars. However, this approach has helped Frito-Lay build up robust sales and maintain market share over many years; thus demonstrating how attention to service can benefit a product-based business like theirs.
