Hey Square Readers,
We’re almost at the end of Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, and so far we’ve talked about your experiences with hospitality, then how to provide it to your customers, and empowering your team to provide it. Today we’re pulling it all together in talking about how to scale it by finding realistic ways to be able to provide an exceptional experience to each and every customer.
“People often confuse hospitality with luxury… Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful.”
Unreasonable Hospitality is not about providing a mind-blowing experience to some customers, it’s about elevating your service to provide an incredible experience to each and every customer. To do that, it needs to be scalable, repeatable, realistic, and affordable. Giving your customers an experience and a story that they’ll carry with them forever doesn’t have to be expensive, and can be done simply by attention to detail, like adjusting lighting and music, or your greetings and stationary choices. This shows customers you care, and when you pay attention to the little things, you end up paying even closer attention to the big things.
The author recommends being in the pursuit of making a genuine connection, and taking the experience from transactional to relational. He cautions to avoid burnout, making sure that adding a new element doesn’t lead to sacrificing in other places. The key is to systematize your experience by preparing for the recurring moments you know your customers come to you for, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Make things repeatable like keeping a stock of birthday and anniversary cards, giving out dog treats or $0.25 kids toys; anything that shows that you’re listening, paying attention, and anticipating your customers’ needs.
So let’s dive into sharing ideas of how you can make your unreasonable hospitality just a little bit more reasonable and doable for your business.
Comment below to:
- Share your 1-3 ideas of how you can provide exceptional customer service (feel free to use ones from our brainstorming discussion).
- How can you systematize these ideas to be able to give that to everyone, and make it repeatable, affordable, and realistic on a day to day basis?
- What have you tried in the past, and what will you try moving forward?
If you’re not sure or stuck, ask for help in the comments! And feel free to respond to other members to share your perspective and ideas, too.
Don’t forget to:
Happy reading,
Pesso
I'm a visual artist. I either sell products featuring my artwork or I license my designs to be featured on products by other companies. Ages ago when I sold something online and had to ship, I used a tissue paper I designed with one of my pinecone drawings to wrap the order in so the order arrives wrapped as if it's a gift. On average, the physical cost to do this was pennies. Mostly it was my time to cleverly wrap the order so it presented well. I never got any feedback about it. I assumed either no one noticed or it was an insignificant gesture. I kept doing it until just recently when I ran out of the tissue paper. I'm on the fence as to whether to keep doing it with a new design or let that idea sunset.
When I started selling in person at my local farmer's markets during and after the pandemic, duplicating the effort proved to be next to impossible because the highly variable weather conditions were not a match for tissue paper, plus it was far too time-consuming for the pace of sales at the markets so I had to scrap that idea for in-person markets.
Not one to give up, I created a "thank you" note to give out with each sale. On the front was my website and QR code. I would scribble on the front something like "Enjoy!" and sign my first name. On the back, I had drawn out visual instructions (in the theme of IKEA's assembly instructions) for how to fold it into a paper airplane. I could see that made people smile when they saw what it was.
Reading this book made me think it's time to up my game. This year I decided to fold miniature paper airplanes so everyone who buys something from me gets one. No, I'm not stuck on the airplane theme. It's just a fun childhood memory that I'm sharing with everyone. I bought a pile of small precut origami papers with random splashes of color to experiment with. I fold them while I'm talking on the phone so I'm not having to dedicate blocks of time to fold piles of them. The cost to me is .01 cents each. I have three hundred little pieces of paper to fold so I have time to find out if it was worth the effort or not.
I have a couple more ideas to work through to see how viable they would be. They are slightly more labor-intensive so being a company of one, I need to test them to see if they are worth pursuing.
This is a big challenge for us, and I would love any input. I think we do a fairly good job of creating an experience they will never forget (one of most repeated review terms), and we constantly endeavour to provide en-masse hospitality (being event based, it is very much feast or famine).
- Share your 1-3 ideas of how you can provide exceptional customer service (feel free to use ones from our brainstorming discussion).
- Keep being happy and positive when we are being used as a Visitor Information Centre or Customers that aren't actually spending. So many customers seem apprehensive about asking us questions, as I think they get treated pourly sometimes by other venues. If we are treating "non-customers" well and making them feel special, hopefully the "good customers" are getting even better service
- Try and keep our staff capabilities/skills in customer service to the highest level possible, even when we are under the pump. So many venues struggle with this in terms of our competitors, hopefully can keep this level as high as possible
- Never stop trying to innovate and push the boundaries of service in our little niche
- How can you systematize these ideas to be able to give that to everyone, and make it repeatable, affordable, and realistic on a day to day basis?
- Keep training up as much as possible in this area. Try and find "the little things" that customers will remember
- What have you tried in the past, and what will you try moving forward?
- I think for us it has just been about giving the friendliest possible service, whilst still trying to balance speed. Striving to keep doing this, and trying to find more little things to give back is the goal moving forward.
