In an intense, understated, hospitable talk on Friday at the Winter Institute, Danny Meyer, the New York City restaurateur and author, most recently, of Setting the Table: The Power of Hospitality in Restaurants, Business, and Life, outlined what he calls hospitality quotient, or HQ, an indispensable ingredient for retail success for businesses. "We're in a hospitality economy, not a service economy," he emphasized.
Service is "doing what you promise to do, and delivering on that," he continued. "Hospitality is how you make customers feel when you deliver service. Hospitality is emotional; service is technical." The goal is to make your business your customer's favorite.
Make no mistake: providing good service is important. "If you don't do those [service] things, you'll totally go out of business," he said. "But service gets us only to about the 49-yard line."
He gave several examples of good service: a dry cleaner who gets a stain out of a coat or a bookseller who gets the book a customer wants or a restaurant that "gets the right food to the right table to the right person at the right temperature at the right time."
Many companies compete and wind up providing roughly equivalent levels of good service. For example, decades ago air conditioning was a competitive advantage for restaurants that had it. "Today if an air conditioner is broken, customers will never come back," he said. "If it works, no one notices."
Likewise, over the years, hotels competed by adding more amenities, like better shampoos, mattresses, sheets and more. But now many hotels offer the same amenitites, so these things are no longer major advantages.
Given a choice between businesses that all provide great service, hospitality determines loyalty. Meyer noted that his neighborhood has four dry cleaners that all provide the same good service at the same price. He prefers the one where he was once asked how his son's baseball game had gone. He didn't understand at first; then the dry cleaner told him that when Meyer had dropped off his laundry the last time, his son was along and in a baseball uniform. "I go to the dry cleaner that takes an interest in who I am as a human being and what matters," he stated.
All hospitality is a dialogue with the customer, as opposed to service, which is a monologue, he continued. "Only through a dialogue will the person on the receiving end of service feel on our side. That is a crucial critical advantage we independents still have over any chain."
Another way of understanding the difference: "In service, one size fits all. In hospitality, one size fits one." And: "Hospitality comes down to two prepositions: to and for. Hospitality is present when the people on the receiving end feel we did something for them rather than to them."
HQ, or hospitality quotient, is "a compendium of emotional skills" that can be learned and stems from "deriving pleasure from the act of providing pleasure to others." At his restaurants, Meyer aims to hire people with HQ. "The more people on your team with HQ, the higher the chance of doing better," he commented.
High HQ people "are kind, are intently curious, have a higher than average work ethic, are highly empathetic and have a high degree of integrity," Meyer said.
He gave an example, this from his early days as a restaurateur, of good service that offered no hospitality. In the mid 1980s, a customer asked for a chardonnay. Meyer, knowing that all white burgundys in France are made from chardonnay grapes, brought out a Meursault. The man said, "That's not a chardonnay!" Meyer argued that it was. "Being right or wrong is irrelevant," he said. "What's relevant is that everyone wants to feel heard. I should have heard him and said, 'It sounds like what you really want is a California chardonnay.' "
Like books, food and wine are a commodity, Meyer continued. So how to differentiate these commodities? He encourages his staff to communicate their love and enthusiasm for food and wines to diners. His restaurants emphasize handcrafted, artisanal wines that tend to have a story behind them, and sometimes staff members have met the winemaker. Hearing those kinds of relationships "bonds people" to the restaurant.
In fact, he emphasized, "our customers want to fall in love with us or your store. They don't want to fall in love with the wine or book but with the place that has the incredibly rare combination of feeling like a place where you are going out and coming home at the same time."
Meyer's restaurants train employees constantly. "Basically we tell our staff that the reason anyone comes back for our roast chicken is because of how we treat our community." [Editor's note: Meyer is doing something very right because we know from personal experience that his restaurants, which vary greatly in cuisine, price and decor, are exceedingly pleasing to the eye, stomach and heart.]
He compared the achievement of hospitality and great service with swans, who appear so graceful--at least the 50% of their bodies that appear above the water. Underneath they are "doing technical delivery stuff."
---
Meyer said that his restaurants and indie bookstores have "so much in common." Besides being independent, ABA stores and his restaurants have "taught chains everything they know and then they try to drive us out of business." In addition, to some degree both his restaurants and bookstores work on "paper-thin margins." (He added, "But in your case, it's a lot easier to stay thin than in mine.") Also, "you're feeding brains and I'm feeding tummies." Absent what "we do, our communities would all look the same."
Meyer thanked booksellers for "the support you have given Setting the Table. Not a day goes by that I don't hear from five or six people and from all walks of life" who are touched by the book. He described it not as "a business book to analyze," but as "creating a language to describe what I've done for years intuitively."
With more than 1,500 employees, it was "increasingly unfair of me to be an intuitive leader and expect the people working for me to know what mattered most to me. I needed to write a manual of some type to show in language important to me what we do." He extolled "the power of language to unlock people's ability to live their passion."--John Mutter