Effective Restaurant Marketing Idea #5

"WOW" #5- Customer Compliments - When you receive a compliment from a Guest. Be modest ... take the attitude of Horst Schulze of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Chain ...

Horst Schulze, President and Chief Operating Officer of Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, was contemplating the fact that Ritz-Carlton had just been named the top hotel company in the United States for the second year in a row. "That's good," he thought, "but not good enough. We're not good enough and we have to get better."

To Horst Schulze, one complaint was one too many, and one complaint could mean one customer lost, not to mention all the others to whom that dissatisfied customer might talk. Multiply that by a few dozen, he felt, and Ritz-Carlton could be losing thousands of customers a year.

Ritz-Carlton was making money at a time when some of its competitors were not. Ritz-Carlton had the best Restaurants in the business. "Great food, great product, great service, and great costs," thought Mr. Schulze, "but that's not good enough. We have to find a way to be even better. Real quality means zero defects and 100 percent customer retention. Those are the goals we have to shoot for."

Horst Schulze knew that other upscale hotels were not going to stand by and let Ritz-Carlton walk away with their customers. These other hotels would be trying to steal Ritz-Carlton customers, especially those with complaints. Ritz-Carlton couldn't afford to rest on its laurels; it had to go out and steal their customers, and keep them. Schulze has said, "Give each and every target customer what they want, when they want it, at a price they are willing to pay -- and let them know about it. In other works, (1) we get them in the door, and (2) we give them a zero defect performance every time. That leads to 100 percent retention -- no lost customers and plenty more coming when they hear about it." Horst Schulze knows how to do restaurant marketing and has planned many marketing ideas through outstanding service.

He demanded that the food and beverage quality be second to none and that impeccable service be the crucial ingredient in creating his version of an ideal luxury hotel. History shows that Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company earned the Baldridge Award in 1992. Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company did not adopt the Baldridge criteria in order to become more market-driven, but to become more competitive.

Jim DiChiara, Vice President of Sales for the Ritz-Carlton has stated, "The reality of life is that if you don't put the ingredients in the soup, you're not going to have a great soup. You ask people what they want in the soup, you make the soup, and then you ask them if they like the soup. It's pretty simple, but we tend to create our own boll weevils in business. We make it more difficult." Jim continued, "Successful companies don't just have great products; they do the best job in conveying values and what they have to offer to their markets. Restaurant Marketing does not stop at bringing the Guest in -- it is continuous. How the Guest is treated is a great restaurant marketing tool. I think the days are over when we can pass on our inefficiencies to the Customer. How could we make ourselves attractive to a wider audience?"

Patrick Mene, the Corporate Director of Quality for Ritz-Carlton says, "People believe it was location and price that determined success. Our restaurant marketing hallmark is genuinely warm friendly service. Our people are caring, relaxed, and yet refined. And they know that our Customers expect to be waited on and do not want to have to wait for service. Year after year we have all our customers polled to determine how satisfied they have been with the hotel staff who have served them. With 10 as the optimal score, Ritz-Carlton will receive an average score in the high nines, as opposed to the mid-sixes for our competitors. Another story illustrates the Ritz-Carlton approach to service. You might see a maintenance worker in the hall working on a wall socket. And suddenly there is a Guest with an empty ice bucket, looking uncertain about where to go. That maintenance worker will immediately insist on retrieving ice for that Guest. Everyone is trained to break away to solve a problem and then snap back to his or her routine. Of course, leadership and training assure that commitment to service. In the end, it is the combination of leadership and highly standardized systems that explains why we generated more revenue per available room than any other hotel chain."

Jim DiChiara stated, "To us restaurant marketing means continuous improvement. It comes down to what can you do that the competition is not doing to give yourself a competitive advantage. We've always done what we did intuitively -- what we thought was important. We rushed to solutions to make decisions -- we fixed the problem, not the cause."

But let's not forget, as Mr. Schulze says, "The founding reason for us to exist is to make money. We sell excellent service, but the purpose is to make money. You have to charge for the service, for the friendly employee. When we capture a Guest, that Guest is willing to pay more than at another hotel because they receive better value for the dollar. We want to accomplish simply the highest occupancy at the highest rate, the highest top line. We want consistent good business in slow times, or good times and, consequently, a high return on investment. We clearly understand that we will not have investors if we don't deliver returns on investments.