Management: Be Our Guest, Disney Institute

Professional development titles should always be so fun and quick to read. 

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (revised and updated) 

Disney Institute: Theodore Kinni

ISBN: 9781423145844  (2011) 

Read August 2016

Basically the same idea as the Coldstone training I had way back when.  I wish I could have read this when I was first starting out as a manager, but now there's a lot here that I realize is institutional, and if you don't have the institutional backing and the money/infrastructure/manpower to make it happen, it doesn't really help much at the middle-management level, regardless of how inspiring and motivating it wants to appear.

Not to knock the Disney machine.  They've got a great thing going, and they're smart to share it (in fact, at ALA this year, there was a keynote address co-sponsored by one of the vendors that WAS How to Create the Disney Experience, using this very idea.  Again, not very helpful unless you have legit and enthusiastic buy-in from all levels of the organization - so I'm glad I read the book and didn't waste my short amount of time at the conference.

Basically, the idea is that the more streamlined, simple, attractive, and coherent you keep your operational "narrative," the happier, more calm, and more appreciative your audience (customers or patrons) will be.

So: 

1) focus on the basics first: safety, mission statement, the actual provision of the services.

2) add on set-dressing: make the environment pleasant and use experiential cues to support your basics.  Have clear signage, open and attractive areas where things all fit in (branding) and think about other senses to engage: scent, sound, temperature.

3) have a highly trained cast: make sure your employees are very good at their jobs by training them on the SPECIFICS of how to interact with people, down to hand-gestures and facial expressions.  (This is the part that Coldstone was very big on.)  You want friendly interchangeable motivated and helpful blank-slates that project the personality of the company, not of their own person.  (Honestly, this bit is really questionable from a HR perspective, but you gotta admit that they're right and it works!)

4) behind-the-scenes control: there has to be infrastructure to support all the other points, and if you don't have that institutional and manpower infrastructure, good luck making all the other things stick.  Put actual time and energy into developing and adapting processes and policies to keep audience and cast happy and working efficiently together to give the audience what they want. (or even what they don't yet know that they want, but they want it when they see it.)  

A fun read, with lots of Disney insider trivia and history, but it really does have to be an all-or-nothing sort of approach.