When I lived in Baltimore, there was an upscale restaurant my husband and I would visit on special occasions. The food was spectacular, the atmosphere lively and the service was excellent.
Until one time, when it wasn’t. The waiter essentially abandoned us, the food arrived cold, and trying to get the check involved everything short of tackling a manager. We may have gone back one or two more times, but it wasn’t the same. That bad dinner was many years ago, but I still wistfully recall the restaurant’s better days.
That’s what Brian Grandbouche, senior vice president of operations for Kisco Senior Living. is talking about when he says a senior living community is only as strong as its weakest link. When service fails, the resident or customer often has their vision of a place permanently altered. That’s why Kisco’s The Cardinal at North Hills in Raleigh, NC, became the nation’s first senior living community to use the Forbes Travel Guide Luxury Hospitality Standards Training Program.
Kisco already had a rich culture, but “we always want to look at how we can take something to the next level,” Grandbouche told me this week. Implementing the five star standards of Forbes was a multi-year implementation.
“Every single associate has to be on every minute of the day,” he told me. “The leadership has to buy in lock, stock and barrel. It’s easy to do this 9 to 5, but when you think about the caregiver in the middle of the night, you have to start with the foundation and then teach the standards.”
For the Cardinal, the return on investment has been that occupancy accelerated and word of mouth has spread in two years.
“You can’t build a beautiful building without delivering on service,” Grandbouche says. Kisco is also taking the lessons from the implementation to influence customer service in its other communities.
“It’s all centered around the resident: The resident needs in San Francisco are different than that of Raleigh, N.C.,” he says.” It has to be something residents want and will pay for. Will your company culture buy into this? Do you have systems in place? Do you have sustainable programs? This is a daily approach.”
On the surface, training on customer service doesn’t sound difficult. But Grandbouche stressed it’s a “way of life.” Forbes dove into learning about senior living, doing interviews with Kisco staff and asking questions. It’s paid off.
“This thing caught fire: There’s a pride of working at the Cardinal,” Grandbouche says. Part of the plan involved teaching how customer service isn’t only about meeting resident needs: It’s everything from how someone parks their car and walks into the building, whether they arrive five minutes early, how their uniform looks and how they greet people in the hallway.
It’s also critical that managers support their staff in keeping to standards. For example, one of the tenets is having enough knowledge, with anyone in the community being able to answer questions such as “When and where is art class today?” Or if a resident’s bathroom is flooding, it’s being empowered to say “Okay, I’ll stay with you here while we call maintenance,” and not having a manager question their time away.
None of this is cheap, of course, and hiring Forbes isn’t practical for many skilled nursing facilities. But developing a multifaceted approach to customer service training over a long period of time is one takeaway. Additionally, even the most fiscally challenged facility can examine how it hires, and how to attract better talent that will deliver excellent service. At Kisco, the hiring practices have been reconfigured to match customer service guidelines, Grandbouche says.
“Not everybody is going to fit into the culture,” he says. “We’ve changed our hiring practices intentionally. Everyone is fighting for talent, but there’s discipline involved in waiting for the right person.”
After all, whether it’s a waiter more interested in talking with his friends, or a senior living staff member snapping at a resident, the break in standards leads to bad word of mouth. I learned recently that the Baltimore restaurant had closed. I don’t think anyone was surprised.
Follow Senior Editor Elizabeth Newman @TigerELN.
