The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty (5 page)
Read The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty Online
Authors: Carmine Gallo
Tags: #Business & Economics, #Marketing, #General, #Customer Relations, #Business & Economics/customer relations, #Business & Economics/industries/computer industry, #Business & Economics/marketing/general, #Business & Economics/industries/retailing, #Business & Economics/management, #Business & Economics/leadership
Fast-forward four years later when I left the firm to start my own communications practice (not in the PR industry). This particular client left the PR firm because I was no longer there and has been giving my practice a substantial amount of business ever since. While reviewing our company’s revenue one year, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the client—and the clients who came to us based on its recommendations—accounted for 20 percent of our revenue. Two hours of “overservice” had paid off. You see, the PR firm failed to realize that long-term relationships are based on hiring passionate employees who care about the client and who are given the freedom to satisfy the customer.
An Apple manager will rarely walk over to an employee on the sales floor and tell that person to end a conversation with a customer (unless there’s a situation that requires the employee’s attention, in which case the manager will make sure the customer’s needs are still met). If an Apple employee spends twenty minutes talking football with a customer and five minutes talking about the product, it’s perfectly OK, even if the customer doesn’t leave the store having bought a product that day. Apple hires friendly employees who genuinely like people and who are passionate about building relationships. It’s a philosophy that works for any company in any field.
Everyone is super nice at the Apple store at The Pier in Atlantic City. Take notes NJ!
—Julia G.
Steve Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder (today his wife Laurene Powell-Jobs manages the family’s trust of 138 million Disney shares). Jobs admired the way Walt Disney built a legacy that would outlast him, and he studied how the Walt Disney company maintained a high and consistent guest experience. In turn Disney also benchmarked its customer experience against Apple. The Disney Store was reinvented with input from Steve Jobs himself. The
two brands made each other better, and by studying what they’ve learned, your brand can become better as well.
At 60,000 employees the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida, is the largest single-site employer in the United States. Those employees embrace the Disney culture and spread the Disney magic to the thirty million guests who visit Disney theme parks every year. I’ve always been fascinated with how Disney can provide a consistent guest experience in almost every customer interaction, despite thousands of guests walking through its gates each and every day. I enjoy bringing my daughters to Disneyland in Anaheim, California. As a communications specialist I experience Disney a little differently than the typical tourist. While most people are looking up at the rides, I’m looking down at the spotless grounds. Litter is almost nonexistent on Disney’s Main Street or any other street in the park. The employees are friendly and outgoing, and they all have a sense of ownership over the experience each guest receives at the park. That’s why they pick up litter when they see it. There’s a restaurant near my office where the parking lot is always filled with cigarette butts left by employees on their breaks. Needless to say, I’ve never eaten there, because if the employees don’t even care about the grounds, they certainly will not care about the food or the service.
Disney employees deliver a consistent experience because the organization is dedicated to a four-step approach to people management: selection, training, communication, and care. The Disney approach is worth reviewing because the steps reinforce some of the same principles behind Apple’s approach to hiring, retaining, and motivating high-performing employees. These steps are well documented and transparent.
1.
Selection.
Disney shares the conditions of employment right up front. If a job candidate applies online at
http://www.disneycareers.com
, Disney’s vision, culture, and Disney’s famous appearance guidelines are clearly outlined. For people who apply in person at one of Disney’s casting calls (Disney doesn’t hire for jobs; it “casts” for roles), they are shown a video that explains compensation, appearance, scheduling, and transportation. Most organizations hire people who can do a job, and as a result, the
culture gets created by default. Disney and Apple
design
cultures, and they look for people who are passionate about them and who want to fit in.2.
Training.
All new hires from cast members to senior leaders are required to spend a day at Disney University where trainers share the past, present, and future of the Disney organization. The program is called Traditions because Disney traditions and values are shared through stories, examples, and activities. The goal is to build pride in the brand. The Disney trainers who facilitate the classes are also selected more for attitude than aptitude. Sound familiar? During one period when the recession forced organizations, including Disney, to cut costs, the Traditions program was trimmed back. The reaction was immediate. Supervisors began to complain that the hiring process had been changed. Disney was hiring the same type of candidates but not putting them through a culture course. The resulting decline in customer service was so obvious, Traditions was reinstated and has remained in place ever since. Values and culture matter, but not if your team doesn’t know about them.3.
Communication.
Senior leaders at Disney have learned that trust is built through an active feedback loop with the employees responsible for delivering guest experiences. Disney leaders are encouraged to spend 60 percent of their time with employees and guests. They are constantly having conversations with employees, listening to their concerns, and taking steps to improve the experience for both internal and external customers—employees and guests. I once heard that Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, posts a confidential voice message for internal employees and leaves his direct number. Holmes doesn’t just tell people that he listens. He actually does. When Tim Cook took over as Apple’s CEO, he, too, told employees that they could contact him at any time. One Apple Store employee told me that he sent Cook an e-mail asking a question about the signature glass doors at the entrance of his particular store. This employee was surprised to hear back from Cook, and a couple of days later an executive in Apple’s retail division personally called the
employee to answer his question. With one short e-mail response to an employee’s question, Cook responded, delegated, and built trust with the employee and the other staff members who heard the story.4.
Care.
Disney provides a supportive environment where recognition and rewards play an important role in motivating and retaining high-performing employees. Disney cast members enjoy being recognized for their contributions, and leaders have devised many creative ways of doing so. We’ll discuss recognition and praise a little later in Part I. For now keep in mind that Disney, Apple, and other customer service champions frequently honor the employee. One Apple Store employee told me that a few days earlier the staff had gathered for a quarterly meeting, which in most organizations is an hour or more of dull financial slides that mean more to senior leaders than to frontline staff. In this particular meeting, the management spent half an hour reviewing the numbers and the next two and a half hours celebrating the staff with games, activities, food, and even a karaoke contest. Management had turned the “meeting” into an event where the staff could interact, have fun, and bond with another.
Walt Disney believed that every employee—each cast member—must reinforce the brand’s values through their conversations and actions. Disney guests should always be treated like family, and people who don’t get along with the customer family have no role to play in the Disney show.
If you’re looking for a critically acclaimed Italian restaurant in Chicago, you might try Spiaggia on Michigan Avenue. A Chicago favorite since 1984, Spiaggia is the winner of the James Beard Foundation award for outstanding service. What some perplexed diners have found unusual is that some waiters have exposed tattoos on their arms and don’t quite fit the look one would expect at a high-end restaurant. Yet even stuffy, hard-to-please critics consider Spiaggia the best Italian restaurant in Chicago.
Andy Lansing is the president and CEO of Levy Restaurants, which owns Spiaggia and twelve other restaurants in the Chicago area. Lansing says that like Apple, Levy has a nontraditional approach to hiring. “I hire for two traits—I hire for nice and I hire for passion,”
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he said. “If you sit down with me, no matter the position you’re applying for, my first question is going to be, are you nice? The reactions are priceless. There’s usually a long pause like they’re waiting for me to smile. Because who asks that question? And then I say, ‘No, seriously, are you nice?’ ” Of course, no one is going to say they’re not nice. But the way a candidate answers the question and the stories they tell about the times they were nice provide Lansing with a good profile of the candidate. It also forces the candidate to go home and think about the position. If Lansing determines that a person isn’t nice, it means the candidate is a wrong fit for the culture. According to Lansing, “If you have a company of nice people in a service business, that’s going to be a good thing.”
Lansing also asks a question that Steve Jobs had been known to ask: What are you passionate about in your life? “If this is just a job to you, it’s the wrong place,” says Lansing. “If you give me someone who’s nice and passionate, I can teach them everything else. I don’t care what school you went to, I don’t care where you worked before. If you give me someone with those two traits, they will, nine out of ten times, be a great success in the company.”
8
Zane Tankel owns twenty-four Applebee’s restaurants in the New York region, including the Times Square location, which has the highest annual revenue of any Applebee’s in the world.
Tankel’s locations generate an average annual revenue of $4.25 million, double Applebee’s nationwide average. “We hire for attitude and personality,”
9
Tankel told a reporter for the
New York Times
. “We can teach you to cook, to make a drink, to be a server, but we can’t teach you how to be nice.” When asked how he screens for friendliness, Tankel said, “You see it in a person’s demeanor and mannerisms; it’s in their smile. Is it sincere? It’s the way you shake my hand, look me in the eye, the way you say hello.”
If you want to know what makes Apple great, Steve Jobs had an answer. “Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists
and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
10
If you hire cookie-cutter employees, you’ll create a plain vanilla brand. In some cases plain vanilla might suit you just fine, and if you’re happy with it, that’s perfectly OK … especially with your competitors. According to Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson, “Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch. If their eyes lit up, if they went right for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them. He wanted them to say wow!”
11
Ron Johnson once said that Apple wants to reach your heart instead of your wallet. If you can touch your customers’ hearts, profits will follow. But no company can touch hearts with heartless staff. Hire nice, friendly employees who have a passion for service and enthusiasm for your product. Hire those who say “wow!” They are the soul of your company.
1.
Visit an Apple store and watch the employees.
Take note of their personalities, watch the way they behave and interact with each other and the customers. Visit Disneyland or Disney World with kids. Take note of the smiles you see on the faces of the staff and how they interact with you, the children, and with each other.2.
Ask yourself, “What attitudes define our best performers?”
Make an effort to build a staff of people whose attitudes reflect the culture you’re trying to build. Avoid culture by default. Design a culture instead.3.
Try asking the question of job candidates, “Are you nice?”
The way they answer the question—and how long it takes them to come up with an example—might tell you everything you need to know.
3
Cultivate Fearless Employees
If you don’t feel comfortable disagreeing, then you will
never survive.—Tim Cook, Apple CEO
A
pple is willing to hire people based 10 percent on their knowledge and 90 percent on their personality, but employees must be
100 percent
fearless. When evaluating potential employees, Apple hiring managers will ask themselves, “Would this person have been able to go toe-to-toe with Steve Jobs?” The Apple cofounder was known for being a demanding boss, especially as it related to the customer experience, and he felt as though it was his duty to be hard on people. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face,”
1
Jobs told Walter Isaacson for the biography
Steve Jobs
. “It’s my job to be honest. … That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other.”
