Ep 2. Unveiling the Essence of Service Excellence in Today's Workplaces

Tristan Kelly: 00:00:10

Welcome to High Five, where insight meets empathy. I'm Tristan Kelly.

MIke Galea: 00:00:15

And I'm Mike Galea. And we created this podcast to explore the ideas, people and places shaping the way we work and live today.

Tristan Kelly: 00:00:23

From workplace design to customer experience, culture, and community. From we'll share stories of what happens when people and process truly connect.

MIke Galea: 00:00:32

Each episode will uncover those energized moments, the sparks that unlock potential, inspire action, and remind us why great workplaces matter.

Tristan Kelly: 00:00:41

So wherever you're listening, welcome. This is High Five. Welcome back to High Five, the podcast where we explore the power of people, place, and purpose.

Today, we're diving into something that every workplace, every building, and every service provider claims to deliver, but only a handful truly nail it, and that is service excellence.

MIke Galea: 00:01:07

And crucially, not. Service excellence is a nice to have, but as a strategic advantage.

Because in a world where the physical office is competing with home and tenants are more discerning than ever, it's the experience, not the square footage, that wins loyalty.

Tristan Kelly: 00:01:23

We're living through a shift. Amenities used to be the differentiator. Now it's the people who bring the building to life.

It's the quality of the welcome, the responsiveness, the ownership, the warmth. It's the human moments that create trust, belonging, and advocacy.

MIke Galea: 00:01:39

You know me, Tristan. You know I love data. I absolutely thrive on it because data tells the truth.

And did you know that 82% of employees say a positive service experience improves their willingness to return to the office? And companies with great experience, experienced cultures grow up to 80% faster as well.

And of course, 70% attendant satisfaction is shaped by service interactions, not the building itself.

Tristan Kelly: 00:02:04

I wasn't aware of the specific percentages there, but absolutely the sentiment is correct. People resonate with the humans within a property way more than they do the physical element.

MIke Galea: 00:02:14

And I guess this is all about diving into that to validate those numbers. Are they real? Are they not real? Was it just some study that was done in a moment in time, or does it actually stand true?

Tristan Kelly: 00:02:26

So today, we're going to explore the power of hospitality thinking, the neuroscience of great service, and how frontline teams are becoming the new strategic differentiators in workplace experience.

MIke Galea: 00:02:37

As always, I've got another did you know segment coming up. And you know what, Tristan? This is going to test you. It's a good one.

Tristan Kelly: 00:02:45

Cool. Okay, well, let's get into it. Okay, Mike, let's get started on service excellence.

Why is service excellence becoming the core differentiator in workplace experience today?

MIke Galea: 00:03:00

Well, my view is it does belong, because when it comes to Providing a service, we have to be really clear on what level we're doing. So there's the functional elements of a service, as in, you know, when we look at FM working and being hired to provide particular services.

So cleaning, security, front of house, hard services and maintenance.

When you wrap what service excellence means around all of that, it's not those functional elements of doing the job that's expected and that's what you're being paid to do.

For me, the differentiator is the heightened experience that comes with that, which is people to people, because the people create the workplace experience because of the very nature of human beings. We want more and we expect more and we call that value. So do you provide a higher level of value than a competitor?

Do you understand your strategy on how you're going to deliver it? And then equally as important, is everybody on board and do they understand it?

So it's actually, it's quite complicated and it's not as easy as it just sounds because you're dealing with people across many different segments, whether they're clients, occupiers, tenants, employees, whatever type we want to put on it. The company that differentiates it in a really meaningful way is the ones that often move ahead. But you're not to differentiate it.

You're not looking at service excellence as the starting point.

What you're looking for is your infrastructure, your strategy, the training you apply to that and then that gets back engineered into do our people fit that mold or don't they? Or are we hiring against our service excellence as against experience?

Tristan Kelly: 00:04:57

So in essence, being able to deliver service excellence fundamentally comes from having the right people in the right positions with the right behavioral traits to deliver service excellence. It's not just a process, it's you've got to have the right people with the right desire to want to deliver great service.

MIke Galea: 00:05:17

Well, it also comes down to, you know, what a business is particularly looking for. Some might see dashboards and data and, you know, insights as service excellence. So our team do a really good job.

We can prove it because, you know, our KPIs stand up and we average really high against those KPIs. But again, it's transactional type work.

It's, you know, was things cleaned on time, was things fixed on time, did things happen on time that, that could be a definition of service excellence.

But when you weave in workplace experience, that is completely different because we're talking about sentiment and we're talking about attraction and we're talking about retention and we're talking about those, those People to people interactions which, which are harder to quantify and harder to capture.

Tristan Kelly: 00:06:10

I suppose there can be a challenge in that Mike, in that what we want to be able to measure is the human impact that service excellence creates.

And yes, you can say that we answered the phone within three rings 99% of the time, but I find that actually service excellence can be really difficult to measure. What are your views on that? What processes or systems are you using to really get the human element of service excellence?

MIke Galea: 00:06:37

If I weave that back into what I do in my day job and that was one of the problems I faced into when, when I took this role was okay, so it is people to people interactions. We already know and the older Dodge that first impressions are really important.

We formulate 90 of our opinion in the first 10 seconds of meeting someone and that comes down to, you know, the very mannerisms that someone projects to you, including do they look up and do they smile and is their tone correct? I started to look at how do we capture first impression feedback as a way to quantify what that actually means and, and then how do we track it?

Because look, when we look at kind of service excellence or we look at workplace experience and you go to, to anyone that does anything within hotel, concierge, front of house, corporate or non, they all talk about the five star experience. Now we know what hotel five stars look like and that's not on the service, that's on the amenities, as you said earlier.

So does it, does it have a five star standard? Is a Benladon, you know, a thousand thread bear?

Is the place, you know, equipped to, to fit that five star mold right down to, you know, I think three stars pretty much the minimum that we operate in. But you can't do that with, with sentiment. It's just, it's really hard to, because what you're asking for is opinions.

I found a way that we could really non invasively capture first impression feedback and that's vistas going into a building for the first time and they spend 10 seconds at the end of it rating their experience against a five star standard.

But to do that I had to define what five star meant for us in this particular area and then get people to understand it because they ultimately control the outcome through that experience. So that's one element that I certainly looked at. And you know, we've done well in our data.

We've, we've captured well under 500 individual first impression pieces of feedback. We were average around 4.9 star, which is great. But again that's that in the moment feedback that we get.

And we could argue that actually we only capture great feedback. Do we capture that. That developmental or. And it's not so great because, you know, it's just through a QR code.

But that did give me some insights into. Oh, that's our gateway into building up through different data sets and through very different mechanisms, how we quantify the experience ourselves.

And I'm still on that journey. We're still there, but we're really, really close to it.

Because what I want to do is I want to set the benchmarking industry through data, through a little bit of science, and through something that is less sentimental and hey, we're great, everyone smiles and waves into something more meaning, meaningful that we can actually prove.

Tristan Kelly: 00:09:29

Yeah, some really interesting points within there. I think one of them that leapt out at me was there is a. There is a tendency to measure the positive elements of service. I think there's.

I think there's a lot to be said around how you turn issues around and things will always go wrong, and it's how you then respond to that. So customers aren't always going to be happy.

So what is it that you do as an, as an individual to turn that situation around, to turn what could potentially be a negative into a positive?

And I often find that those turnarounds, if you like, when you've taken accountability and responsibility for a customer's problem and you've turned it around and you've delivered a resolution, you've often created a much stronger bond than just by saying hi warmly and sort of have a nice day and all that kind of stuff. Because there's a genuine desire to accept that the they've got an issue, do something with it, and then provide a resolution.

MIke Galea: 00:10:30

So one thing we talk about quite a lot is the solution first mindset, and it's not about trying to solve the problem, is the steps you take to show that you care, that you understand it and you can make some suggestions and create options in order to resolve that particular issue that someone has. I find that even if that isn't resolved or beyond their capability is beyond their remit, that often is well received because it's.

Well, you know what, they try so hard and they showed passion and caring and empathy and understanding. Well, again, they're all really sentimental words. It's not just they fixed my problem and I was happy with it.

We found that when we go down that approach, we create a new benchmark for ourselves because we set the bar for them. So what they now have is a comparison of service.

So when they go somewhere else and they, they experience something similar and they get a person with a less than positive mindset that just kind of shrugs and says, there's nothing I can do about that, reducing any form of options or it's just the way it is, you deal with it. Now they have a basic comparison and they'll never reach that level of service. And they'll be like, well, you know what?

When I went into that other place and I experienced these sets of people, wow, they were all over it. They were amazing. They were great. They made me feel more at ease.

That would be a high benchmark for them that quite frankly, a lot of other people would never manage to match. Because that's what we're like as human beings. When we have a good service, our benchmark resets and that is what we compare people to.

Tristan Kelly: 00:12:07

Absolutely.

I often say that when I'm trying to show people why it's so important to make a real difference in everything that they do is that you're always being judged by the most recent engagement your customers had.

So if someone's been to the Apple Store and they've had a amazing customer service that morning and then they walk into an office and there's a less than warm welcome, well, you're being judged against a massive global organization.

And so the benchmark is continually being raised and we can't just sit back and think, well, it's a different environment, therefore the customer can't have the same expectations. Well, unfortunately, the customer does have those expectations and will continue to have increasing expectations.

And we just need to be able to accommodate and adjust and flex to. To deliver a service that's comparable and is memorable.

MIke Galea: 00:12:56

Does that come down to value and applying value to something? We have to put weighting and stock on interactions so we apply value to it. So I pay for a service, Did I get the value back?

Now, when it comes to technology, the value is right there. Because you buy a smartphone, the value is in what you're getting with that smartphone.

You know, you're paying a lot of money for it, but you've got everything you need at your fingertips. There's value there. When it comes to people. To people.

And you interweave that into workplace experience, there has to be weighting of value there too. So is what we're saying then, those interactions between people create the value, therefore it's worth the service?

Tristan Kelly: 00:13:42

Yes. I think the differentiator is the human element of that interaction, which is over and above the service.

I expect my mobile provider to ensure that I'm able to make phone calls 24 hours a day, wherever I am in the UK, that's just a service.

The service excellence comes maybe where I'm notified that there's going to be an outage coming up and so I can adjust my plans accordingly, or that if I do have an issue and I phone through that someone's going to take accountability and resolve that issue for me. That's the excellent part. The service is what's expected, it's what you're paying for. And therefore the value comes from the human element.

MIke Galea: 00:14:19

And that's the differentiator, that human element. And that starts at the type of people you attract to represent your service or your product, through to how they connect to it and do it naturally.

Tristan Kelly: 00:14:32

There's a challenge there, isn't there, that you have to find the right people to join your organization. But then equally, you have to ensure that everything within the organization is working towards you, delivering service excellence.

And so that means that your training regime, that your policies, your processes, your daily mantra, your SOPs, your desired outputs, your KPIs, all link back to what your desire is. And if your desire is to create an amazing customer experience, you then have to build everything around that.

You can't think, okay, we're just going to stick a workplace experience KPI in and just expect people to deliver great service because they've not been hired for that. So you haven't hired people that have those values, those human values intrinsically within themselves.

So it's a hard thing to retrofit into afterwards if you want to be the world's best. And surely we should all be striving towards being the best versions of ourselves we can be, and as an organization, the best organization we can be.

MIke Galea: 00:15:34

I couldn't agree more, Tristan, and I'm going to lay it back into a little bit of science here. And that was Daniel Goleman in the 90s, created this term widely known as emotional intelligence.

And, and the concept behind that was someone who doesn't demonstrate high intelligence and IQ might demonstrate absolutely excellent interpersonal skills.

And the stock and the value and the weighting you put on the emotional intelligence that someone possesses, which is the ability to read feelings, read moods, connect, lean in interpersonalized conversations, build rapport, all that type of stuff is actually higher than intelligence and, you know, and the high, high Q that sits around that.

Tristan Kelly: 00:16:17

And therein lies one of the big conundrums within facilities management, often where you have several service partners. Each of those service Partners have their own company manifesto, their own company mission, objectives. They've got different sets of values.

They are hired for different reasons, but within that environment, within that one property or that one estate, you do them all to come together behind a shared set of values. And that's the challenge.

Some of those service partners are not hiring people with a hospitality mindset and therefore it's quite difficult to retrofit that mentality into that team.

MIke Galea: 00:17:00

We do have a unified set of values within OCS called True. There's loads of elements behind that. Trust, respect, unity and empowerment.

That is about relationships and it is about immersing what is our culture and our area of expertise into the business that we are delivering a service to, because that's what they're paying us to do, deliver this service, deliver it really, really well. I think it's everyone's responsibility. Yeah, from, from an experience point of view, people do have expectations, you know, what they expect to get.

And I think that shared and being very open with customers about what to expect.

So we use mechanisms in the industry like satisfaction surveys or nps, and that tells we're doing a good job, how satisfied are our customers, because we've asked them that and would they promote us, because that's nps.

But then when you do like an engagement survey, which is really common too, and then you capture that engagement survey results, as in this is how our people feel, we then weigh that against the satisfaction level and we look at nps, you look at all those data sets and go, okay, it's going really well, or there's some areas of improvement, or it's not great. But the danger with that one is, especially with engagement surveys, is you're only capturing a moment in time.

It's how people feel on the day they've completed it, not overall. So even that as a, as a window into service tells you a great deal.

Because if they're feeling not that great, it means they're not connecting to what you're trying to deliver. And, and I do a great deal of work within, within our front of house and, and, and our workplace hosting service to measure that.

Not just, you know, half yearly, but every single month.

And it tells me where people need more support, they need more help, they need to reconnect if they're not getting enough communication, if they feel a little bit siloed.

And, and that's something I've been working on because that extends back into the business because they're conveying the information and that communication that we are proactively given.

Tristan Kelly: 00:19:01

And we can look across the hospitality sector and there's some really good global benchmarks of service excellence. We've got Ritz Carlton have got their gold standards where they empower every employee to really take ownership of service recovery.

The Disney Institute, they've got their on stage, off stage. So they really drill into people. If you're on stage, you're in a public facing area.

If you're off stage where you're back of house so you can kind of relax a little bit.

We've got the Shangri La moments of service and again the idea there is to empower staff to spot moments of care, those little small gestures that transform experiences.

Pret a manger, I think I read that first within Chip and Dan Heath's book the Power of Moments, where pret a manger provide their front of house teams with the ability to give free items at their discretion, which builds a moment of excitement. I think that's often talked about.

Then we've got one which I quite like, which is Singapore Airlines who have their TLC model which not only does it remind me of a 90s RB group, but I quite like the human element there. So the tender loving care and their model is around take ownership. So never pass it on.

So if you've got a customer comes up to you with an issue, will you take that on? Even though it's not in your parameter, within your roles and responsibilities, you take that on.

You never pass the buck and say, well actually no, that security's problem or while the lights are out, that's engineering. Or I'll send a note to the building manager, you deal with it, you take ownership and the L element is listen deeply.

So you really listen to the customer's issues, you really get an understanding of what the challenges are. And the C is for close the loop. So you resolve the issue and then you feed back into the customer to say your issue was a, I fixed that.

How do you feel about that? Was it delivered to satisfaction? Is there anything else I can do?

And I think they then integrate that into their, their whole model of operation, which is why it's renowned the world over. And I think that's good because you can then see how a front of house professional who takes full ownership would create long term loyalty.

And often, as you just mentioned, it's hard to, it's hard to create great loyalty when often people walk past your front of house teams really quickly and don't recognize them. They're just in a, in a rush.

But when things go wrong, I think that's when we have a real opportunity to create long term loyalty and to create those service excellence moments that are spoken about that are shared for a long time afterwards.

MIke Galea: 00:21:40

It's interesting you've mentioned some of those examples there. I'm going to comment on one or two of them actually, and I'll give it, here's a real life example.

I had a family member on Friday, just gone, who just traveled through Singapore Airlines and she called me, excited. She had a nine hour stopover at Singapore Airport and the airline proactively signed her up to a tour of Singapore where there was a bus.

They picked her up, they took her into the city, they showed her around, it was fully guided, fully curated, brought her back again. Then they took it to the botanical garden which exists in the airport.

And then there was a massage and there was drinks and it was just everything was, was like an itinerary was given. Now she had the opportunity of signing up to, or not signing up to it. But what she said to me was, I'm in every air. She travels quite a lot.

She had every airport I've ever been to.

I've never experienced that level of detail and service, not from getting into the airport, but from the moment I stepped onto the plane to the moment I stepped off that kind of loop, carried on right through the Singapore Airline experience back to getting on the plane again. And that it's interesting that you brought that example up because I only got that very recently in terms of a real life example.

So well done to Singapore Airlines on that one.

The second bit, the Disney is an interesting one because you could argue that Disney's high level of service comes from the expectation that service should be given because it's Disney.

Tristan Kelly: 00:23:13

Yes.

And I wanted to interrupt you earlier when you were talking around five star hotels and that there's an element of that five star being derived from the amenities, the quality of the beds, the quality of the decor, the quality of the restaurant, et cetera. Does it have a Michelin star restaurant? All those kind of things. But there is expectations.

And I think, I certainly think when you look at brands like Disney, Apple, there is an expectation and that expectation has to be met. It then becomes even more of a challenge to maintain service excellence. Hence why you need to have certain models in place.

Recruit the right people yet who've got the right attitudes and the right behavioral traits to deliver great service, but then ensure that you've got the right models in place to maintain or to continually strive to exceed expectations.

MIke Galea: 00:24:03

And I know that from that Disney Training, you're in a, you know, they're in hot countries. They, you cannot remove, you know, your mask and ruin the illusion of the characters.

You cannot, you know, if you're a cleaner, a porter, a security, you have to follow the same ethos as Disney. And you going into that environment, as in, I'm accepting a job in any capacity, you're accepting that as an, the absolute core of the role itself.

So going back to the very first thing you said was in when businesses are hiring, do they hire on that? Well, they do.

Tristan Kelly: 00:24:38

We've touched on Ritz Carlton with their gold standards, Disney or on stage, off stage, we've talked about Singapore Airlines with their tlc. In corporate real estate, we often don't have the equivalent. But should we?

MIke Galea: 00:24:51

In my view, we should. Absolutely. That's why I, I have a job. Whether we ever get to those standards is, is different question altogether, and I would hope we do.

But yeah, I do think we should set the standards and set the benchmark and become that disruptor within our own industry that people would want to follow. That by itself becomes a major attractor, you know, a retainer of, of talent. I've got a great did you know for this one.

And I'm going to lead you in with a little bit of a statement. So imagine preparing for a single guest interaction for an entire year. That's the level of intentionality behind Japan's omotenashi philosophy.

Have you heard of ome tanashi?

Tristan Kelly: 00:25:43

I haven't, no. But that's dedication.

MIke Galea: 00:25:46

A whole year, A whole year for one single event.

Tristan Kelly: 00:25:50

Wow.

MIke Galea: 00:25:51

So Omata Nashi. Their philosophy is, it's a concept. It really challenges in the way we think about service excellence in corporate and hospitality spaces.

So it's, it's rooted in Japan and it's one year for a tea ceremony and this happens.

It's, it means wholehearted, selfless service and it has its roots in the tea ceremony, that's seido or chido and tea masters, they'd spend up to a year preparing for a single ceremony, carefully planning every element from flowers to tea utensils, so guests would experience a moment of what they call ichigo itchy, a once in a lifetime encounter. Now the term emote urinashi literally means no front or back.

And it signifies that everything is done transparently and intentionally in view of the guest, symbolizing sincerity and trust there. But you know what? Why, apart from it taking a year to do, why is it remarkable? Why do you think it's remarkable?

Tristan Kelly: 00:26:54

There must be something within the Customer.

So the person receiving the tea ceremony, knowing the level of input and the level of dedication that's been put into the ceremony, that must create part of the experience. So if you know that this whole.

The tea ceremony is a year in the making, that must create a heightened level of expectation and a heightened level of enjoyment.

MIke Galea: 00:27:19

You're absolutely right.

Because every year you visit the ceremony, your expectations and, and benchmarking of that event, just as we've been saying, this whole, you know, episode raises. But, you know, for them, it's, you know, why this exists and why people love this is. It's the unmatched depth of care.

So entire seasons are planning for just a single guest moment.

And the value that's put into their transparency, that every ritual during, during this is performed visibly and seen as an act of kindness and cultural precision is the exacting standards that echo through the kind of Japanese culture. So, you know, the Ryokin and even corporate guest relations.

So they're, you know, they're very intimate in terms of what value they place on the experience that they're given.

But it's ultimately a tradition that pulls out hypertensive ritualized service, but it leaves an enduring emotional impression and actually it transcends training to become more cultural artistry.

Tristan Kelly: 00:28:32

And if you were delivering that service, you take huge amount of pride in doing it right, not least because you've been spending a year getting yourself ready for this interaction.

But I know when I used to work in hotels years ago in, in, in restaurants, and, and when you delivered an amazing service, there was such a sense of pride in that because you instantly saw the impact it created for the dine in for the diners, and you then Times that by365. In terms of the amount of effort you've had to go through, I suppose it'd be like a sushi chef.

They have to train for years and years just on certain elements of the, of the, the sushi ritual. That sounds pretty special.

MIke Galea: 00:29:24

There you go. That's your. Did you know.

Tristan Kelly: 00:29:26

Fantastic. Well done. So, Mike, I've got a high five for you. Several years ago, a colleague and myself had to attend a tender meeting.

It was quite an important pitch. It was out of town and so we're taking the train up. We'd done a bit of work on the train and then we grabbed a taxi at the station.

We make sure we got there in plenty of time. Pitched into reception, checked in. My colleague discovered he left his laptop in the taxi. As you can imagine, he was really.

He really started panicking. Because our, our pitch was on there. This is pre cloud, so it's not as if we could have downloaded it and used my laptop.

We were working just off his machine. Now, we're not going to name him because I don't want to cause him any embarrassment, but clearly he was very upset, very agitated.

A lot was riding on this pitch.

Amira, who was on front of house at the time, she picked up on this, this sort of anxiety that he was, he was showing and, and she didn't hesitate and it was amazing, you know, she treated the problem like it was her own. She didn't pass the buck, she didn't ignore it. She said, look, guys, leave this with me, I've got you. I think she'd really picked up on, on his fear.

Not just a laptop, but the embarrassment of letting his team down. And she assured him with genuine calm. You know, she asked lots of questions. Where did you get the taxi? What was the color of the taxi?

What can you remember about the driver? Did you see his name on a tag or anything like that? You know, what was a make and model of the laptop?

She fired in loads of questions and got as much information as she possibly could and then she said, right, leave it with me. She then went away.

She had checked the CCTV and noticed that there was a logo on the side of the taxi when it dropped us outside the front of the building.

She phoned the taxi company and within a short space of time she tracked down the exact taxi and then 30 minutes later, the laptop was delivered to reception and handed over to my colleague with a smile. You know, my colleague said that she had saved him and honestly, she had. And so that's a great high five moment.

So, Amira, if you're listening, once again, thank you.

We eventually went on and we did win that pitch and so not only was it transformative for the business, but equally, that high five moment is a great example of service excellence. So I think that's a great high five moment.

It shows that a small act of ownership and empathy can turn a disaster into story that I've been telling for years.

MIke Galea: 00:31:56

Wow.

I mean, that's a strong high five when you add in the stress and anxiety facing that situation and a mirror fixing and solving that is exactly what we've been talking about, solution first, problem solving, mindset.

Tristan Kelly: 00:32:21

So if there's one thing to take away from today, it's this. Service excellence isn't an add on.

It's not the soft stuff, it's the strategic stuff, it's the difference between employees wanting to come back and wanting to stay away.

MIke Galea: 00:32:34

And it's a difference between a building that's just a building and a building that feels alive. Powered by people. The frontline teams, the ambassadors, the cleaners, engineers, receptionists, security officers.

They shape every impression, every interaction, every moment.

Tristan Kelly: 00:32:49

Because when service becomes a habit ingrained into the day to day workings of your building, workplaces become destinations, communities form, trust builds, and the whole organization feels the benefit.

MIke Galea: 00:33:02

So thanks for joining us for Episode two of High Five. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please share it with someone who needs a little bit of inspiration in their service culture.

Tristan Kelly: 00:33:12

And remember, excellence doesn't happen by accident. It happens because people care. That's it for this episode of High Five, where insight meets empathy.

MIke Galea: 00:33:21

We hope it sparked a few new ideas and maybe an energised moment or two.

Tristan Kelly: 00:33:26

If you enjoyed the conversation, follow the show and share a high five with a colleague who'd love it too.

MIke Galea: 00:33:31

Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Sam.