I just returned from a much-needed weekend family vacation to the beach. However, one aspect of the vacation that made it much less enjoyable was the sub-par customer service.

The poor service really got me thinking about how businesses operate. I tend to do this when I experience really good or really bad customer service.

Sometimes good customer service is simply a coincidence. This generally happens when a business is lucky enough, or intentional enough, to find a good employee who really cares about their job and also happens to be good at it. Other times, however, customer service is not a coincidence; it's a repetitive experience regardless of who you deal with at that business. 

We typically call this a brand experience.

A positive brand experience could be obvious to anyone, but especially to successful business people. These experiences are almost always characterized by being well thought out from beginning to end — starting with the people that are hired to how they're onboarded, how they're trained, how they're tested, the policies and procedures of the organization, the systems utilized by the organization, the empowerment of the staff, and the rewards and consequences the staff experience. With all this said, a positive brand experience is intentional by those in charge of the business.

If I were to ask you if you wanted your customers to have a positive brand experience, I know without a doubt that you would respond with an emphatic yes! We all want this for our business.

Another perspective of a positive brand experience that can often be overlooked by business owners is the experience that employees have at their organization. Generally speaking, those firms that focus on positive brand experiences also tend to experience higher employee retention rates, higher employee satisfaction, and a much healthier work environment.

Creating this positive brand experience is more important today than ever. Unfortunately, since 2020, I'm finding that more and more organizations are trying to excuse their poor brand experience due to poor staffing and the inability to find enough workers. It's our job as leaders to set that excuse aside and figure out solutions so we can attract the necessary staff and ensure that the staff, and our business operations, are well-prepared to provide a positive brand experience.

This concept of a positive brand experience is exactly why employee training and development are so important and exactly why training platforms are even more important. There are many platforms to choose from in the marketplace. When I Googled the phrase "business training platform," I received just under one-billion search results. So obviously this is an important topic and one that I'm certain you've thought about before.

Going back to my weekend vacation experience, I can state emphatically that the specific hotel location I was at has a problem. I have stayed at hotels in this chain of hotels for many years, totaling thousands of nights over the past 20 years. This experience really has me thinking about how poor experiences are caught and dealt with in business.

So, let me highlight some things I observed while on vacation, and what those things revealed to me. You may find this helpful as you think about your business.

Lack of Processes or Lack of Processes Being Followed — On our first night we had a terrible experience where we ordered room service after arriving very late and were told it would take approximately 45 minutes. After an hour and 20 minutes, my wife called to see where the order was, and the person who answered the phone could see in their "system" that the order had never been picked up and taken care of, so she called the kitchen to ensure they "saw the order." We ultimately received the room service order two hours after we ordered it at 1:30 a.m. There could have been numerous issues that caused a problem like this, but at the very least, it reveals a lack of adequate processes.

Poor Training — Two things showed me that the hotel was not actively committed to effectively training their employees. The first was that various employees didn't know basic things, such as when different restaurants were open within the hotel. The second was that different employees performing the same role, such as poolside servers, did not follow the same process for basic things. This was additionally likely due to a lack of processes. If the hotel company was committed to training, the processes would have to exist in order to train.

Weak Leadership — The hotel we were at was an ocean-front hotel, with two gates that lead to the beach. The gates were closed from evening to late morning, and you needed your room key to open the gates. The one problem is that the card reader was broken on the gates and did not work. The hotel was aware of the problem. I'm thankful that during the day, they had one gate staffed with a security guard and kept the gate open. However, during the early morning and evening, we were stuck walking around to the front of the hotel to get back in. Good hotel leadership would have, at minimum, had a sign at the gate apologizing to the guests for the inconvenience of the broken card key readers, but unfortunately we, and other guests, only found out about the broken card key readers when we were trying to get back from the beach. While these things can happen, a good leader would not have just left guests to find out about the broken card key readers on their own when they tried to re-enter the hotel from the beach.

I point these three specific things out because good leaders understand the importance of a positive brand experience for their customers and their employees. Good leaders also see the necessity for processes, systems, and training along with the need to review those three things at the very least annually, if not continuously, and revise and update them as needed. When was the last time you, or your leadership, reviewed your processes, systems, and training and made changes to them?