Who is Your VP of Perfection?

A colleague of mine told me a story about an event he was attending at the nonprofit we both worked for. It was a graduation dinner and each of the students were seated together with their families and 1-2 staff members.

It was during the dinner that one of the student's grandmother asked my friend a peculiar question. “Sir, could you tell me who here is the vice president of perfection?” “What do you mean” my friend responded. “Well since I arrived, everything I have experienced has been perfect. When we drove up, the parking lot was well lit with easy directions, we walked in and were greeted with big smiles and treated like royalty. The decor was delightful and interesting and everywhere I looked it was spotless. We have just enjoyed a scrumptious meal and I want to thank the person in charge of perfection. Is that you?”

My friend responded “well thank you so much for sharing that with me. I will make sure your evaluation gets back to all of the staff that made this event happen. While we don’t actually have a VP of perfection our founder has created a culture where every person/department strives for excellence. Our hope is that everyone that visits us will feel exactly the same as you.”

If you haven’t read the Perfect Order blog go ahead and give it a read at this point and then come back.

Great! Can you begin to see how the perfect order can apply to service?

Think about your organization and the particular service you provide.

1. Who is your "VP of perfection"?
2. What does perfection look like in your organization?
3. List all of the things that your customer or guests care about. If you don’t know ask.
4. Go back and look at the comments on the surveys you send out. What is missing?
5. Give each one of your service categories a rating of 1-10 with 10 being perfect.
6. Ask your team what it would take to get 10's in each category.
7. Determine how much it would cost for each improvement.
8. Prioritize your list based on the greatest impact and least expensive to the least impact.
9. Create an implementation plan.
10. Put it into practice.