72% OF CFO’S WISH THEY COULD SPENT
MORE TIME ON CORPORATE-WIDE
STRATEGIC INITIATIVES, ACCORDING
TO A MCKINSEY QUARTERLY SURVEY
LRA Ties Customer Experience to the Bottom Line
ROB RUSH KNOWS THAT WHEN A CUSTOMER ISN’T
happy, that reflects in a client’s profits. And while
that might sound obvious, Rush, president and CEO
of LRA Worldwide, a Philadelphia-based consultancy that specializes in customer experience management, knows his firm exists because companies
often choose short-term over long-term solutions
to drive customer satisfaction.
Rush says when companies, specifically those
in the hospitality industry, want to grow revenue,
they look at external fixes, such
as marketing campaigns and
renovations. He examined this
philosophy in a recent LRA
Worldwide newsletter, where
he cites the University of
Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index rate of
71 percent for the hotel industry. That’s down from 75 percent for 2006. “And this drop,” he writes, “is
concurrent with the influx of flat-screen plasma
TVs, communal lobby gathering spaces that look
like Starbucks and 1,200-thread-count Egyptian
cotton sheets.”
So what’s going wrong? Companies are investing in upgrades without working on where the real
trouble might be: having the right staff, Rush says.
Companies would rather gloss over that trouble
with fancy ad campaigns, but without the right team
Rob Rush
in place, those expensive efforts will soon lose their
effect since they aren’t backed up by any deeper,
long-term investment. Rush calls his article “a
lightning call out to the industry.”
When a hotel reaches out to LRA, he says, however, the firm avoids Madison Avenue and instead
focuses on improving the overall experience the
customer has. Was her check-in pleasant? Did he
get the drink he wanted at the hotel bar? “Our point
of view,” he says, “is that a lot of money is spent
by organizations… and we
believe at the end of the day
that’s important, but what keeps
them coming back and referring
by word of mouth is the quality
of and the efficacy of the experience. The heart of the lodging
industry is hospitality. And
what we find when we do
research is that what’s most
meaningful is the quality of the staff.” After all, he
says, “everybody can put in a better bed.”
The answer is a two-step process, Rush says:
hiring and training. “It really matters what kind of
people we get on our bus,” he says. Once they’re in
the door, however, companies, he says, really have
to invest in them. They need to view that investment, he says, as an investment in the customer as
well because the result is profit in both human and
financial capital. —Jacqueline Durett
Da taWatch
Consulting by Numbers
Your F irm’s Structure: Does It Work?
Is your firm’s organizational structure help or hindrance to
your ability to complete your job? The way firms are set up
can have a huge impact on the bottom line. And, according
to the data below, there may be some missed opportunities in terms of organizational structure, especially at large
firms, where more than one quarter of consultants say
their firm’s structure does not have a positive impact on
their ability to get the job done. The following charts are
compiled from our 2007 Best Firms to Work For Survey.
Myfirm’s organizational structure has a positive
impact on my ability to complete my work.
BY JOB TITLE
Partner
13%
23% 64%
Manager
21%
47%
32%
Consultant
17%
51%
32%
Strongly Agree
Agree
Neutral/Disagree
