The Art of Hospitality
Sometimes it’s difficult to see past your own feelings. As the great Brian Mashburn once taught me, “Feelings are real, but they aren’t always right.” Sometimes your feelings can lead you to more pain than necessary for your life.
I work for a ghost kitchen concept. Its a space with small commercial kitchens that people pay quite a lot of money to set up and be a part of. So, for a moment, imagine you have paid a chunk of your life savings to start your dream of having a commercial kitchen and you walk in the door to get your key (super exciting moment). On arriving at the location, you walk up to the front desk and no one is there to greet you. A few minutes go by and finally someone notices your presence and doesn’t say anything, but instead gives you a shrug/nod to see what you want. You inform her that you have come to pick up your keys. She goes on a wild goose chase to figure out where your keys are, but eventually finds your key and opens up the facility door for you to come in the back.
She heads back to the front after handing you your keys. So you begin meandering around the facility looking for your kitchen number. Eventually, you find your kitchen and let yourself in. When you come inside, there is stuff on the floor, the drain is black when it is supposed to be white. There are streaks all over the vent hood. There is food chunks in the sink. There is clothing laying around and a table that someone looks to have been utilizing as a desk. Um… ok… not really what I was expecting. You go back up to the front and the person you got your keys from is lounging near the front, playing on her phone. You let her know that you decided not to accept the keys until the kitchen is cleaned out and hand the key back to her. She is offended… and mutters under her breath that you wasted her time searching for her keys. Blood boiling, you walk out angrily and report all of this to the Operations Manager… ultimately finding out this woman is the Site Supervisor. Facepalm!
Counter that with the same starting scenario: you walk into the facility to pick up your keys. No one seems to be at the front. After a couple of minutes, you are greeted with a warm smile and “How can I help you today?” “Hi! I’m here to pick up my keys.” “Awesome! I am Crystal, I am your Site Supervisor. I have your keys waiting, along with a welcome packet for you to introduce you to some key steps for your onboarding process and also the facility expectations. Would you mind meeting me at that door over there and I will show you where your kitchen is?” “Sure! Sounds good.” You head to the door and Crystal lets you in. She walks you to your kitchen and it smells reminiscent of recently being bleached and everything looks spotless. You smile, excited to take on this new adventure. Crystal shows you how to use the app to let yourself in and out when you need and asks you if there are other email addresses you need access to be sent to. “Yes, can you send it to my business partner?” “Of course,” Crystal replies warmly.
I have a pretty easy guess which experience would be more desirable for you if this were you. But, let’s say the facility were the same as scenario one, but the person you were interacting with behaved like scenario 2: Warm greeting at the front with an explanation of who you are speaking with. She walks you to the back and explains how to use the app to get in and out of the building. When you walk in, the kitchen clearly isn’t ready for move in: stuff all around, food in the sink, drain is a mess and there is a weird odor. She looks around as surprised as you are, takes ownership of the problem and says “I am so sorry about the state of your kitchen. I will get with our cleaning team and get this resolved immediately. Let’s make a list of all that needs to be fixed together so that I can get this information to the team and make sure that next time you come it looks exactly how you would like for it to look.”
The Site Supervisor from the first scenario created a domino effect for the customer experience. That customer is thinking “How are my guests going to be treated when they walk in the door? Why did I pay so much money for this? Is this how they handle all of the things they do here? Why is nothing ready? If I paid a deposit and first months rent at an apartment that looked like this, I would be livid.”
The Site Supervisor in the second scenario was brilliant. Everything was what should be expected. That set up that partnership for success and created a warm and happy memory for that person. It was an experience.
Scenario three is the most interesting, though, because in scenario three, the customer experience wasn’t perfect, but the hospitality of the person and the quick response may have saved the company the cost of a concession, does not make the customer wonder about the treatment of her customers and still showed genuine care. It wasn’t perfect, but the supervisor showed up really well to solve problems instead of escalate them. The quick solve did better things for the relationship than a dismissal of the problem existing or blaming the partner for wasting their time. This one was the value proposition of the art of hospitality.
