Ms. Borgman

Spas, Health & Fitness

Are Your Spa Employees Branded?

By Peggy Borgman, President, Preston Wynne, Inc.

A guest enters your lobby, eyes agleam with anticipation. Your beautiful logo, carved into a spectacular slab of marble, is perfectly lit. Your signature aromatherapy essence is wafting into the air. Your signature music is playing in the background. Her every sense is cued for an incredible experience. After drinking in the exquisitely coordinated environment, she turns her gaze to the uniformed spa concierge at the counter... who studiously ignores her, picking at her cuticles, as she answers the phone with a bored-yet-hurried greeting.

"Be with you in a minute," chirps another concierge in the guest's general direction, as she stares at a keyboard and loudly chews a lurid-colored wad of gum.

"Do you have an appointment?" asks Concierge #1, hanging up the phone and finally making eye contact, with the thinnest of smiles. Her glittery eyeliner looks like it might have been left over from a previous night's rave.

"Uh, yes," stammers the startled guest, whose fantasy has abruptly ended. "I'm Mary Smith." "We have you down for the, um, Spa Safari," replies Glitter Girl, squinting at the monitor. "Have a seat and someone will take you down to the locker room in a minute."

Your brand has gone from platinum to lead in a matter of seconds. Those hours spent poring over proofs of the brochure, fine-tuning the photography? Wasted. The expensive media buy your company just made? Squandered. In fact, you've just committed the ultimate marketing sin: you've overpromised, and underdelivered.

How? You forgot the most important expression of your brand: your employees. Think of them as the final link in the chain, where your brand-literally-touches the customer. The most compelling marketing plans, the most persuasive copywriting, the most tantalizing images, are rendered not just worthless, but ludicrous, when your employees' behavior contradicts your brand message.

Hospitality spas are highly vulnerable to this branding disconnect. "Branding" often occurs at the corporate level, far away from a spa's employee training programs. Marketing spins gorgeous fantasies to lure customers in and Operations deals with gritty day to day realities, often completely unaware of the marketing promise. When the two contrast sharply, the brand can be badly damaged.

Janelle Barlow, in her outstanding book, Branded Customer Service, makes the case for integrating your brand in marketing, employee training and recruiting. Employee branding requires the integration of your service delivery processes with your brand promise and brand identity. Some highly successful hospitality brands, such as Ritz Carlton, deploy an impressive litany of tightly scripted service standards. Barlow has also observed a different approach to branding customer service. This type of branding relies less on practices such as scripting, but still indoctrinates employees deeply in the culture of the brand. The employees can then respond in a brand-authentic but personal way in their individual customer interactions.

In the past, many hotel spas were given "hands off" treatment by upper management, and often looked at as something a bit exotic or arcane. Unlike Rooms or F & B, a spa division was frequently allowed to "do its own thing." As the spa industry has matured, and its mysteries have been plumbed, a realization has dawned that the spa brand must be a fully integrated part of the overall hospitality brand. The spa must be designed to delight guests, not just through impressive facilities, but through impressive customer service. Spa employees need to be much more than talented massage therapists or skilled estheticians. They need to share core values with the brand. All too often, however, an employment candidate with "years of experience" will win out over a talented newcomer with a far better attitude and personality.

Small disconnects-that unsettling pierced nose on a massage therapist, a frayed towel in the treatment room setup, some hair on the shower floor-add up to a brand "disconnect," and disappointment for guests. In a facility where employees internalize the brand "DNA," they intrinsically understand to leave the nose ring at home, discard the worn linens, or dispatch the hair in the shower personally, rather than leaving it for housekeeping. They see the big picture.

Employee branding begins with the hiring process. Hiring employees with true customer focus is the best way to ensure that your brand promise will be transmitted accurately through their behavior and communication. Employees who believe that the world revolves around their treatment room or styling station, regardless of how talented they are, are not building your spa brand-they're building their own.

Employee Branding begins with in-depth, structured interviewing that requires the candidate to describe how they'd respond in a variety of different customer service scenarios.

The interview question, "Can you think of a time in a previous job when you observed that a guest was disappointed?" is followed by, "How did you react to their disappointment?" The candidate who says, "I told the front desk about it," would take a back seat to one whose response is, "I asked the guest if there was anything I could do to assist them, and helped the front desk correct the problem for her."

A candidate for your front desk can handle a telephone call from an "irate customer" played by one of your managers to see if they can truly think on their feet and respond appropriately under stress.

Leadership by example and constant communication are essential to expressing your brand message within the organization. I was once told by a hotel CEO that he picked up trash at competitors' properties because maintaining an immaculate property, a critical element of his hospitality brand, was now an unconscious reflex.

Verne Harnish, author of "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits," maintains that effective leaders need to have a "handful of rules and repeat themselves a lot." Establishing your brand's core values and keeping them alive within your spa is not just a feel-good activity, but crucial to building brand equity and maintaining your competitive edge. How do you know when you've repeated your brand message enough to your team? Harnish offers this simple test: "Your employees will start making fun of you."

Peggy Wynne Borgman is President and founder of Preston Wynne, Inc., which operates day and hotel spas as well as Preston Wynne Success Systems, a spa consultancy and training organization. PWSS seminars train management employees for the top tier of the international hospitality industry, as well as independent salons and spas throughout the US and Canada. Ms. Borgman is a frequent speaker at events such as the IESC and ISPA conferences and author of Four Seasons of Inner and Outer Beauty (Random House). Ms. Borgman can be contacted at (408) 741-1750 ext 30 or pwb@prestonwynne.com Extended Bio...

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