The Magic Behind citizenM's Success - Michael Levie

Michael: Last week, I was asked to talk to a group of industry hoteliers about high tech and high touch. And it is such a boring old debate and such a stupid question to ask, because in my opinion, there is no high touch without high tech these days. It needs to enable. But I always say to people, look, your phone, this is not technology. You know why? It works. So if you ask me something and I don't know the answer, then I grab it and I Google it and I get my answer. Or if I need to check in for my airline flight, I do it at my boarding pass. Or if I need to order something online or… So this has become a different device and technology needs to do the same for us. So recently Citizen did something really smart. And it was already after I got out of the day to day, you know, there were very smart people doing great things. And they launched a program whereby our ambassadors, our employees in the hotel, instead of having to use all type of different systems, you know, whether it is the PMS or the POS or they need to inform people or whatever needs to be, so RoomMove normally, you know, would take you to several systems and they just created an app which in the back connects everything up and for them is just number this goes to number that, done. Two seconds. And so facilitating that gives them the ability to keep their eye on the guests, on the service delivery. So it is an enabler. And I think that that was our vision when we got together because the partners that got together and especially the senior partner, Rattan Chadha, came from retail. He just looked at the industry and said, very complicated. I mean, you need to facilitate. And basically we need to focus more on a retail delivery. That's basically where where we got together and focused our business processes solely on what we need to provide the guest with and everything being guest-centric. And the rest is just our problem to make sure that it's organized. Look, what is service? Service in the end is contact between two human beings. If that's genuine, yeah, then there can never be an issue. It's always good. It's always comfortable. And I think that that's a little bit that we focused our service on. So what I learned early on from the Sonnebren family is that the guest is the one that pays the bills, not the one that owns the company, because we need their income to pay you. So if you take a hierarchy, it usually is a pyramid structure, right? The guest sits above there. Well, if you look at the pyramid, then you have the CEO and then you go down and you get, you know, the whole organization. Well, the line staff sits at the bottom. Well, you know, I have not seen too many CEOs other than, you know, what is that, that program where the CEO goes onto the floor? Undercover boss or something like that? Undercover boss. That's the one thing. So, so there is no relationship between the top level C-suite and the staff and the guests. So what we did is we inverted the pyramid. So now the guest sits up top and they immediately with the end responsible for the living service. So our entire organization services up to the ambassadors, our alliance staff in the organization, so that they can provide the service to the guest. And in order to empower them and be sure that they can be accountable, we articulated very much what our values and culture is. Select only on that the ambassadors. do an immersion program where they get to see and feel what it is. By the time they hit the floor, they're end responsible and accountable for the service delivery. Yeah, then it becomes a very natural process.

Josiah: Michael, I'm going to read you another listener comment, which I think highlights this, and you're going to enjoy. So Steve Browne is a director at Skift, and he says he wanted to talk, or ask you, rather, how much emphasis is placed on empowering guest-facing employees to make commercial decisions, such as occasionally offering free coffee, croissants, and even beer. He says, for context, every time I work from one of the London properties, which, by the way, the CitizenMembership is a best-kept secret, It's not going to be much more, but he says the genuine warmth from the staff stands out. And it's this authenticity, which is not as consistent in other chains, but he finds it consistently at CitizenM. So I share that from the perspective of, I think the idea you just shared sounds good, but sometimes I hear people talking about a theory and it doesn't translate into the actual guest experience. And I heard you describe everything from how staff are selected, to the immersion process. So I guess I'm going to make the question a little bit more pointed in terms of culturally, how do you ensure that people don't only just do this once coming out of immersion, but consistently stay focused on the guest as you described?

Michael: You know, the interesting thing is if you and I have the same values and we share the same culture, I can touch you the keys because you will do what I do. And I might disagree with something here or there, but that's not where the just goes wrong. So if you select the right people, that's the first step. then emerging them and making them understand that they're responsible. That comes with, you know, logic. In 99% of the cases, employees walk in next to the garbage, through the backloading dock. They clock in because we tell them we don't trust you, right? Because for our administrative systems, we need to know when you arrive and when you leave. Then we put them on, you know, some horrible polyester, you know, outfits, put their heads into computers in front of the guests and say, now be personal. Yeah, good luck. So if you understand that the employees are the key to your success and accountable for that service delivery, they come in through the front door. They have uniforms that they're recognizable for the guests, but there needs to be a human component that shines through. They eat where the guests eat. They eat what the guests eat. They are basically our future guests. They just happen to be on the journey where they work. And if you then make them and responsible and accountable, yeah, they really understand that they great fright with it. And you asked is, you know, how do you give something away or not? It's a very good question, actually. So I always said, if you always go to the same bar and you have a really good relationship with the bar owner or with the bartender, every once in a while has to say, hey, listen, this one is on me, right? Well, we say, yeah, that's great business, but if you catch him giving that one away, then he's stealing. You really should get rid of him. So I figured, I said, well, that's stupid. We need to facilitate that. So on our cash registers, you will find a button that says a random act of kindness. So whatever that random act of kindness is, we ring up. whether it is a beer or coffee or anything else that we need to do. And when we say our ambassadors are accountable and need to have the freedom to give that service to the guest, there cannot be a restriction. So if you have an issue and I go like, wait a minute, I need to talk to my boss. Well, That's not going to go over real well. So they need to be end responsible. So they have zero limit. There are no limits of what they can do. They're end accountable. And in all my experience prior to Citizenship and giving that freedom to the right people that you select, it's never an issue. As a matter of fact, they give away not even a tenth of what happens in other hotels. It's because of the human connect and that comfort and that, you know, just feeling home.

Josiah: I wonder if you could speak a little bit to training, because if I think about everything that you do, the way that you are hiring, bringing people on, everything systemically in the hotels that you do to make your team members, your ambassadors feel special. Training is still, I imagine, a very important piece of this. And I'm curious how you think about training and the training process for new ambassadors.

Michael: I think training, again, is maybe the wrong word, because we call it an immersion. So if you for the first time come to my home, Josiah, your guest, when you're there on a regular basis, you're just one of the troops and you feel comfortable. And it's a little bit the same when you hire new people. They should not come to work and feel that they need to do something according to brand standards or anything. What it needs to be is that they fulfill that service delivery. So we create a very comfortable environment. We emerge them in that environment. The real training that takes place is barista training, cocktail training, system training, life safety training. But those are our core foundations that we need in order for them to have certain skills. I cannot teach you to be nice. I cannot teach you to be empathetic. I cannot teach you how to react to a situation because everyone, every single one is different. And there's plenty of examples. Just to give you one example, when we had just opened the hotel, one of our ambassadors, you know, sort of stood in front of the door, exit door, and nobody really could leave the hotel without telling him that they had a good time or he was asking that they had a good time. And one gentleman sort of slipped behind him and was already half on the way out the hotel and into the street. And he ran out. Oh, the guy was like me. Easy. Yeah, it was it. And the guests went, good. And, you know, if you explain that from a service point of view, hey, you, I mean, I mean, more wrong it cannot be, but it was so genuine. It was so well-meant. I want to make sure that you had a great time, that the guests actually felt good about it. So you direct a little bit, you don't go to school with your guests. You don't put an arm around them. There are certain rules. But, you know, because it is so genuine, it's so honest, you get away with anything almost. We hire on character and a lot of people say that way, but we depend on it. So we don't do interviews. We do different type of screening so that we can find out who you are and what you stand for. When you look at our central office, it's a completely different ballgame because there we need knowledge. There we need specialized knowledge because they, on behalf of many in the hotels or because of systems, need to make decisions, you know, that are based on very specific knowledge fields that deserve to be worked together. So the hiring is different there. So there we want best in class. We scrutinize very much on, you know, if you centralize things, you can afford better specialized people and you get the best. And then the only screening we do there is where we like them because it's no fun to work with people that you don't like. So we do that last screening where we like them, but really the importance is their skills. And the skills there are very important because otherwise you cannot deliver good results. It's that simple.