The NFL is looking to Disney this year to train their Super Bowl custmer service employees.
Frank Supovitz, senior vice president of events for the NFL, said, “Nobody’s better at it in the world than Disney. You see that any time you go to their theme parks. They’re very customer-oriented."
The NFL is taking cues from Disney to help them implement Fans First. Fans First is an initiative designed to improve the fan experience – from airport, to parking lot, to stadium seat and back. They want to make Super Bowl fans feel like VIPs by training all of their employees to be on the same page and have the same customer-focused goal.
Here's an inside look at some of the costumer service skills the NFL is learning from Disney in preparation for the Super Bowl.
Extraordinary Service
- Know who guests are and understand what they expect when they come to visit.
- Use both demographics (mainly describe the physical attributes of a group and often compromise quantitive data) and psychographics (offers clues to what a guest needs, what they want, and what emotions they experience) as your two major kinds of information.
- Clues include: needs, wants, stereotypes, and emotions.
- Meet expectations and then exceed them…that is the WOW factor.
- Imagine an animated film…twenty-four frames per second, each a still portrait of that fractional moment, must come together to create an entire story…that is same with creating a guest experience.
- Hire the very best people to make the guest experience happen.
- Pay fantastic attention to details.
- Remember, everything speaks.
- Create specific behaviors that help you achieve the promise. At Disney, their standards are safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency.
Extraordinaire Employees
- The employees provide the first impression to the guest.
- Equip the employees so they can deliver a magical experience.
- Don’t underestimate the power of a good orientation program to create a portrait of the organization and its culture in the minds of new employees. A good orientation includes these elements: history and traditions, values, educational experience, academics, student life, courtesy, and efficiency.
- Guidelines for guest service should include: make eye contact and smile, greet and welcome each and every guest, seek out guest contact, provide immediate service recovery, display appropriate body language at all times, preserve the “magical” experience, and thank each and every guest.
- Build a performance culture by: keeping it simple, making it global, making it measurable, providing training and coaching, soliciting feedback and ideas from the team, and recognizing and rewarding performance.
Extraordinaire Setting
- Everything, animate and inanimate, speaks to guests.
- You can’t change people. But if you change the environment that the people are in, they will change.
- The components of setting include: architectural design, landscaping, lighting, color, signage, directional design on carpet, texture of floor surface, focal points and directional signs, internal/external detail, music/ambient noise, smell, touch/tactile experiences, and taste.
- Use these elements to create magic: know your audience, wear your guest’s shoes, organize the flow of people and ideas, create a visual magnet, communicate with visual literacy, avoid overload-create turn-ons, tell one story at a time, avoid contradictions-maintain identity, for every ounce of treatment provide a ton of treat, and keep it up.
- The setting should appeal to all five senses.
- Make sure the backstage and onstage areas are always separate.
Extraordinaire Processes
- Processes are a series of actions, changes, or functions that are strung together to produce a result.
- Factors that affect guest perception of wait times: access, respect, and information communication.
- Every one of these factors must be addressed for an enhanced guest experience.
- We must always improve outdated processes.
When it comes to making families feel welcome, there is so much we can learn from Disney. Service...Employees (volunteers)...Setting...Processes. These are four great areas to work on in 2012.
Posted by Dale Hudson
