Building competitive advantage, by design
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
As President and Chief Operating Officer of the Four Seasons hotel group, Katie Taylor is a leader in perpetual motion. She clearly relishes the challenge of leading this high-end hospitality business within earshot of the chain’s 82 check-in desks worldwide. Because, she states, matter of factly, ‘there’s virtually nothing I can do to drive a great guest experience from a desk in Toronto’.
I recently heard Taylor speak at a design management conference in San Francisco, where she outlined Four Seasons’ commitment to design thinking as a way to create lasting competitive advantage for the business.
The concept of design thinking applied to a luxury hotel may conjure up images of architectural blueprints, exotic fabrics and flamboyant lobby artworks. Of course, out-of-the-ordinary environments are an essential part of the Four Seasons formula, but that wasn’t the kind of design on Taylor’s mind. It’s was in the soft wiring of the business where she felt the real competitive advantage lay. For the Four Seasons brand prides itself on redefining luxury as a service for individuals with considerable wealth, but a paucity of time.
As you would expect with a luxury hotel chain, there are a lot of non-negotiable service standards in place; 240 to be precise. Yet standards alone don’t make for a memorable stay. So how does Four Seasons go about building an authentic service culture to impress the most demanding travellers on earth?
Clearly, a rote service style dependent upon rigid policies, procedures and lines of command wouldn’t cut it with these guests, demanding of highly personalised and practically instantaneous attention. There was a need, from day one, to trust highly in staff at the frontline, give them the latitude to show initiative and offer support ‘in tune’ with the individual guest’s needs and wishes.
So, the recruitment policies of the business were systematically designed to identify personable staff with an open manner, a demonstrable ability to show initiative, a pleasure in serving others, no matter if they were being recruited as a valet or a property manager.
Taylor described a standard five interview policy for every job role in the hotel, four interviews to be sure the candidate was a great fit, the fifth and final interview with the most senior staff member on duty that day, to deliver the message that the new recruit has an important role in delivering memorable service to guests. It’s the idea of building the brand through a differentiated workforce, one quality staff member at a time.
Taylor makes it clear that the employee’s experience with the Four Seasons brand is shaped as consciously as that of the guests’. She speaks of honing the guest experience through honing the staff experience. Of course, the leaders of most service businesses mouth such words – that their people are their greatest asset and that management exist to serve those on the frontline. But it’s the Four Seasons’ systematic follow-through that proves they mean it.
For instance, every member of hotel staff is provided with three full uniforms on site. If, at any time of the day, the staff member feels the need to freshen up they can. By helping to make the staff feel good about themselves and put them in a frame of mind to deliver great service to guests, it surely becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A surprising number of Four Seasons’ innovations focus on guests’ functional needs. A recent example was the installation of a humble power plug above every bedside table in every room across the network, to enable guests to recharge phones, cameras and ipods. Demonstrating that the best service advances are sometimes the ones that guests barely notice.
By thinking more deeply about how great service comes about, the Four Seasons business has been able to create a system that delivers it much more often to its guests. The strength in this approach isn’t the power of any single initiative, it’s the way in which each small idea, layered upon another, builds into an unmatchable service advantage.
If this all sounds like ‘nice to have’ management theory, consider this. The Four Seasons group has a 33% better margin capture per room than their closest luxury competitor. Thinking both creatively and systematically in parallel pays.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 15th July 2010
