The Celebrity Experience: Insider Secrets to Delivering Red Carpet Customer Service

By Donna Cutting

The Celebrity Experience combines the best practices of the business world with those of the celebrity world to create a practical and proactive guide for anyone who wants to bring their business’s internal and external customer service to the level of star treatment. Based on the unique ways celebrities are treated, the book shares techniques you can use to treat your customers to a red-carpet experience, guaranteeing repeat business and stellar word of mouth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9781118039298

Book preview

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The Chicago Pizza Principle

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

—Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally

WHAT DO YOU DO when your customer asks for the seemingly impossible? Laugh? Politely decline the business? Not Scott Graham, CEO of Xtreme Personal Assistant and Concierge Services. When faced with an impossible task, Scott goes to his team and asks one question—How?

Want a private jet at your disposal in the next three hours? Want tickets to the Super Bowl? Need new clothes immediately because the airline lost your luggage? Xtreme Personal Assistant and Concierge Services (XPACS) is the go-to place for celebrities who are looking for someone to make the impossible possible. The following example demonstrates just how far the XPACS team will go to please its customers.

When a celebrity asked Scott to deliver a hot, fresh pepperoni pizza to his flat in London that evening, he didn’t blink. The catch? The pizza was to come from a specific restaurant in Chicago, Illinois. The customer was testing him, and Scott knew it. After all, the XPACS motto is, Anything and everything as long as it’s moral, ethical and legal. Right on the web site it says, If you can imagine it, we can deliver it. Scott and his team put their creativity to work.

If the answer was Yes, then the question was How? It didn’t take the XPACS team long to figure it out. They loaded up a private plane, complete with a concierge and a pizza oven. The prepared pizza was picked up in Chicago and baked as the plane was landing in London. A limo was waiting at the airport and the hot, fresh pepperoni pizza from Chicago was delivered to the customer in London, that evening and on time! If this was a test, XPACS passed. Says Scott, "The client was amazed! He told us, ‘You have a client for life.’ That’s the kind of thing that makes you say, ‘God, I love this job!’ "

It was after hearing this story that I realized the fundamental difference between the rest of us and celebrities. For a celebrity:

Whatever the question, the answer is yes! It’s the job of everyone else to figure out how.

On the other hand, the rest of us are constantly faced with a barrage of no’s.

No, you can’t talk to a real person on the phone.

No, the person you’re talking to can’t answer that question for you and doesn’t know who else can either.

No, you can’t get that service here.

No, they can’t tell you where to get that service.

Wouldn’t you like to hear yes more often? I’ll bet your customers would, too.

True, your customers may not have the same net worth as Scott’s celebrity clients, and may not be able to afford such luxury. However, there is a lesson to be learned from high-octane service people like Scott Graham who cater to those who frequent the red carpet.

The Chicago Pizza Principle: Refrain from Saying No When the Answer Could Be Yes!

What if you could find a way to say yes more frequently?

What if you trained yourself and your team to think creatively when a customer has an unusual request?

What if, instead of saying no, you asked yourself how?

If you did, you’d be on your way to delivering The Celebrity Experience to your customers.

Let me tell you a story that demonstrates exactly how The Chicago Pizza Principle was applied in one of our Celebrity Experience Hall of Fame organizations. It’s an incredible tale of how a team of employees at a health care organization worked tirelessly together to say yes to one of their residents when others might have just said no.

The Trolley Story

"I don’t think Pat would have let us say no," laughs Joyce Ebmeier, the administrator for Tabitha Health Care Services, Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Pat, an elderly resident who lived at the skilled nursing community, had been confined to a wheelchair since she was in her 50s. Pat had taken a lot of different kinds of transportation in that wheelchair, and one day she told Joyce that she didn’t like the Tabitha bus one bit. It was an oversized van into which she had to be backed in and strapped down, and because of all the equipment, she couldn’t even see out the window. Also, Pat wanted to see more people who used wheelchairs getting out into the community, but the bus took only two wheelchairs at a time. Something had to be done.

At this point, most employees of a nonprofit senior living community would have smiled and said they were sorry; it just wasn’t in the budget.

Instead Joyce took the question to her staff and they started brainstorming the possibilities. Someone came up with the idea of a trolley, which Pat just loved.

The next step was to get both the president of Tabitha Health Care Services and the foundation members excited. Joyce knew that the foundation was raising money for a capital project, so most of the work would have to come from her staff.

They held a lunch for the president, the foundation members, and other VIPs of Tabitha Health Care Services. The resident, Pat, made a speech, and someone showed a PowerPoint presentation. To make a long story short, they got the green light to raise money for the trolley.

Joyce and her team, along with Pat, started with a variety of grassroots efforts. They held loose change days when the entire staff would pool its pennies and drop them in a fishbowl in the lobby. Then the poor bus driver would have to take all that change to the bank, chuckles Joyce.

Next, a volunteer who used to be a baker for Miller & Paine Department Store stepped up to the plate. He offered to come in once a week and bake the legendary Miller & Paine cinnamon rolls. They called them Trolley Rolls, and each week after he baked them, Pat would sit in the lobby and sell them hot and fresh to staff members and visitors, raising money for her dream.

Once they had raised about half of what was needed for the trolley, the president of Tabitha Health Care Services gave them permission to start a campaign for the rest. That’s when the media got involved. Local television stations, radio shows, and newspapers began running stories about the trolley fund. A church in the community made a donation, and another church matched those funds. Soon, all of Lincoln, Nebraska, was pulling for Pat and her dream.

Finally, they had the money to purchase a used trolley they found in Florida. Second Wind Dreams, a wonderful organization that helps make dreams come true for elders living in nursing homes and assisted-living communities, kicked in the money to help bring the trolley to Nebraska.

On the day of the arrival, Pat and the rest of the residents and staff of Tabitha Health Care Services Nursing and Rehabilitation Center sat outside waiting. As the trolley pulled in, they rang bells that were given to them by Second Wind Dreams. Pat, whose health was failing by this time, was well enough to make a speech. She was the first to ring the bell and the first to ride the trolley.

Now all wheelchair-bound residents of the Tabitha community would be able to comfortably ride around the town, to the bank, and out to lunch. Because the story was in the media, residents of Lincoln, Nebraska, still smile when they see that trolley on city streets. Of course, now the entire community is always buzzing about Tabitha Health Care!

All of these great outcomes happened because some employees had the creativity and the dedication to say yes to a customer’s request and then figure out how!

Saying yes is just part of the Tabitha culture. The people at Tabitha have a tradition of challenging the status quo and responding with innovation. They were:

• The first to offer Meals on Wheels in the state of Nebraska in 1967.

• The first hospice in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1979.

• The first to offer home health care in Nebraska and the sixth in the entire country. The first in Nebraska and the second in the country to open the uniquely designed Green House Project®, a deinstitutionalized environment for skilled long-term care. Many believe this model is the future of nursing homes.

Says President and CEO Keith Fickenscher, The thing about Tabitha is that we are never satisfied. We are always looking for the next thing. Additionally, we’re teaching our 700 employees and 2,000 volunteers not to say no but instead to ask how?

This brings us to a question. How do the innovative people who work for XPACS and Tabitha Health Care Services put The Chicago Pizza Principle to work? It starts with action!

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Take One: Ask

Take Two: Choose Your Customers over Convenience

Take Three: Think Big

Take Four: Partner with Others

Take Five: Own the Problem

Take Six: Refuse to Be Satisfied

Take One: Ask

Usually the best answers come when you ask the best questions. Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself and your team as you prepare to put The Chicago Pizza Principle to work by saying yes more often and then figuring out how.

Ask what if? What if you had unlimited time, money, and resources to spend on problem solving for your customers? Now at this point, you might be thinking, What’s the point of asking that question? I don’t have unlimited time, money, and resources. Maybe not. On the other hand, you don’t know what’s available to you until you ask. Even if the resources aren’t there, by asking this question you are opening your mind up to possibilities you hadn’t thought of yet. You may find yourself with answers to problems for which you thought there were no solutions.

Ask yourself, what if I could create the kind of experience for my customers that would make them feel that anything was possible? What would that look like? How would I communicate it to my customer? What if I could help my customers to feel that nothing they could ask for would be too much?

These are the questions that Maria Motsavage, president and CEO of Ideal Senior Living in Endicott, New York, asked her staff to think about when she returned from a vacation in Florida. While she was in Florida, Maria had a dining experience that changed the entire way she thinks about customer service. She was in a restaurant ordering a salad, the way she usually did—with no dressing, tomatoes, or onions and extra cheese and croutons. Typically, Maria’s request would get responses like, Sorry, the salad is already made up in the kitchen or There’s an extra charge for the cheese. Not from this waiter! Instead, her waiter said, When you are a guest in my house, you can have whatever you want.

Inspired by the waiter’s attitude, and having enjoyed her perfect salad, Maria went back to her staff at Ideal Senior Living pumped up about giving that level of service to their residents. The question she asked, What if we could create the feeling that our residents could have whatever they wanted in their home? sparked a series of new actions and behaviors on the part of the employees of Ideal Senior Living that they call their Red Carpet program. You’ll hear more about the program as you continue to read this book. For now, let me tell you about the results they’ve enjoyed as a company. In one year’s time their overall satisfaction ratings in the skilled nursing center went from 26 percent to 86 percent, and over a period of four or five years employee turnover has dropped from 52 percent to 24.8 percent. This, in an industry where high employee turnover is a given.

What if you asked yourself these questions? What kind of experience could you create for your customer? What kind of results could you see in your customer and employee satisfaction scores?

Ask how? Have you ever come up with a brilliant idea just to be told, It can’t be done, We don’t do things that way here, or the dreaded, We tried that already and it didn’t work? Have you ever found yourself thinking or uttering those words? If you have, then stop! That’s right. The next time you find yourself thinking or speaking those limiting words stop yourself right then and