On the plus side, RGIII (aka Football Jesus) played well. RGI (aka Rex Grossman), well, he played like Rex Grossman. The Shanahan's have a difficult roster decision for backup quarterback. They can choose the famously erratic and always underwhelming Rex, or they can go with a raw and almost certainly erratic rookie, named Kirk Cousins. It's a choice between the devil, who stinks, and the rookie devil, who probably will stink, at least for the foreseeable future.
This weekend, we took a short trip to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The Aquarium is an amazing place located in Baltimore's beautiful Inner Harbor. The Inner Harbor is the only beautiful part of Baltimore. Charm City, Baltimore's nickname, is best known for leading the nation in crack heads per capita. Another popular nickname for the city is Crackmore.
The drive to Baltimore from Northern Virginia takes a couple hours in traffic. So we drive to the Inner Harbor on Saturday morning and booked a hotel for Saturday night. We got two rooms in a well located place called, Home 2 Suite By Marriott. The hotel is a newly renovated suite style hotel, which means in every room you get a kitchenette with a nice refrigerator, a microwave, and a very nice TV. The rooms are very nice, but I doubt they'll stay that way for long.
Check-in in the hotel was a bit of an adventure. We had two rooms booked. One for Laura and I and one for my sixteen year old twin daughters of whom you have read in previous posts. Laura and I got booked into our room fine. However, when the twins reached their room and opened the door, they walked in on a couple who had just been given the same room. Yes, the hotel has no control over the issuance of keys to rooms already occupied by guests. As you can imagine, this could be quite a security problem in the event, say, Jerry Sandusky walks in on a room occupied by two ten year old boys. The hotel staff was apologetic and quickly provided another room, unoccupied, for the girls.
When Laura and I got to our room, we found the temperature in the room a balmy eighty degrees. I looked at the thermostat, and it appeared to be set at sixty-eight degrees, and the system had been activated to cool mode. I assumed the staff had turned on the unit just prior to our arrival. Soon, we would have a comfortable room.
However, after an hour, the temperature had increased to eighty-one degrees. We were headed out to dinner. So I called down to the front desk and asked them to take a look at the air conditioning while we were gone.
We went to dinner at a nice Italian place on Charles Street, called Maisys. I mention this little detail in case you are ever in Baltimore near Orioles' Park and need a food recommendation. Try the pizza. They have unique pies like barbequed peach and bacon. That's a recommendation for the chicks in the audience. They also have man pies like classic pepperoni with perfectly crispy crust. Before this becomes a food review.....
When we returned to our hotel room, we found the temperature was still eighty-one degrees. Obviously, no one had looked at the air conditioning. I wasn't terribly pissed off at this point. We had just had a good dinner, and I was willing to cut the courteous hotel staff a break. I called back down to the front desk, and the attendant agreed to send someone right away.
Ten minutes later, while Laura was on her cell phone trying to solve an emergency on the home front, I heard a knock at our door. When I opened the door, I was surprised to see someone I recognized from the staff. They had sent up the valet attendant, who had parked our car, to fix the air conditioning. OK, I thought, maybe this guy is just a multi-talented dude. That thought didn't linger long.
Many of you know that I am a God in home repair circles. OK, maybe not. I am mechanically declined. Nonetheless, when I first noticed the air conditioning wasn't functioning, my testosterone activated primal instincts from my prehistoric ancestors who killed wooly mammoths with just a glance. Maybe that wasn't my ancestors. Maybe that was a Chuck Norris movie instead.
My fight or flight instincts put me into a heightened mental state where no problem was unsolvable. I turned the system off and then on again. Then I did it again. Maybe my ancestors, and Chuck Norris, weren't that good at the HVAC stuff. I then used that technological marvel, the telephone, to call the front desk the first.
What do you think my valet attendant / HVAC technician did when he arrived? He turned the system off and then on again. Then he did it again. We men stand alone at the top of the evolutionary chain. Then he pronounced the system working again. Whether it was working or not turned out to be a moot point, since they didn't have any other rooms anyway. Laura and I got to spend a night in an eighty-one degree room in August. We had a magically romantic night together. Nothing happened between the sheets since we slept on top of the sheets sweating like Amazon boars. I have no idea if Amazon boars actually exist, but if they do, I'll bet they're sweaty – and stinky – like we were.
What does this have to do with treating customers like fools? You say, “Frank, air conditioning units break.” Yes they do. The business problem, however, is that they had no procedure to find the malfunctioning unit before it affected a customer's service experience.
The hotel should have a checklist for the cleaning staff that requires them to check the air conditioning. They should also be checking light bulbs, hot water, the telephone, and the television. These checks would add maybe five minutes to the staff's cleaning time, but they would eliminate ninety percent of customer issues with rooms. The hotel would have a chance to fix bad customer experiences before they happen.
This lack of a pre-check-in checklist tells me the hotel management doesn't have much experience. That's why I wrote earlier that I expect this hotel to deteriorate quickly. If the management doesn't know something as basic as this, what else don't they know? By the way, they also don't know how to operate a valet parking operation, but that is a topic for another post maybe. It took us half an hour to get our car at checkout.
Here's what you should take away from this post. Good systems create good service. At S&K, every tax return goes through the same process from scanning to final checklists to make certain we aren't missing deductions. That doesn't make us perfect. It makes us very good.
The least expensive way to ensure good customer service is to prevent customer service problems in the first place. Walk through your customer service procedures in the eyes of your customers. What goes wrong? What can go wrong? Then create service checklists to prevent the issues you've identified before they occur.
Laura is my second wife, and I am her second husband. Before we married, we decided that between us, we had enough children – four daughters. Just in case we regretted our decision to not have a child together, we recently adopted a child – a twenty-one year old male. He is Laura's daughter's fiancee. Yesterday morning,he wrapped his Mercedes (yes a freaking Mercedes for a twenty-one year old Navy enlistee) around a tree. His first phone call was to us, since his fiancee was too smart to answer her cell phone at 6 AM on a Saturday morning. Please congratulate us on our new child. At least he is out of diapers. Soon we'll start teaching him to drive along with my sixteen year old twins. To date, they have only damaged my front bumper. I hope my insurance agent isn't reading this. I still want Nationwide on my side and not just in my bank account.
Thanks for reading! As always, for real tax and accounting advice, visit our main S&K web site at www.skcpas.com. Also check out our new site for medical professionals at www.totalaccountingcare.com. Go Skins!!
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