If corporate America ever builds a hall of fame for customer service, it should dedicate an entire wing solely to the Marriott organization. Since J. Willard Marriott Sr. opened his first curbside restaurant in 1927, the company he founded has never wavered from one unifying goal: to deliver exceptional service to every Marriott customer. With a perfectionist’s attention to detail coupled with the fundamental belief that people truly make a difference, Bill Marriott Jr. has carried on his father’s legacy to create a $9 billion service-driven lodging and food service empire.

A Perfectionist Approach To Customer Service

Second-generation Marriott International CEO J. W. “Bill” Marriott Jr. says that he gained invaluable lessons in customer service from his father’s fanatically detail-oriented approach to running a chain of restaurants.

“Long before he got into the hotel business my father was primarily a restaurant owner,” Marriott explains. “By watching him and going around to our restaurants with him I came to understand the importance of an absolute adherence to quality. He never tolerated anything less than perfection in operations. When he went into a restaurant he examined everything, from how clean the counters were to the food’s freshness. Then he would go through waitress line-ups to make sure their uniforms were starched, shoes and stockings straight and that they knew the menu and the daily specials. Nothing escaped his eye. Admittedly, he was very tough, but that was because his whole philosophy in business was to take care of the customer. So everything was focused on delivering that customer value and a really terrific end product.”

According to Bill Marriott, despite the senior Marriott’s toughness he was still able to communicate his affection for his employees.

“When I first started out in the business, I just couldn’t believe that he was never satisfied. I thought things were pretty good, and he’d always find something wrong with everything that was being done. Even when people tried extremely hard to do a good job, he had a great knack for simultaneously telling them how bad they were but also that he still loved them.

“It was the old ham sandwich routine; he’d give them a kick, a kiss and a kick. He was great at telling people that they weren’t measuring up, while also telling them that he knew they could measure up and that he expected them to do better. He had a great affinity for his people and they had a great affinity for him.”

Besides an eye for details, Bill Marriott emphasizes the impact his father’s perseverance made on the future CEO.

“The other important lesson I learned from my father was ‘Never give up,’ ” Marriott says. “He was always determined to stay with something until he achieved it, no matter what the odds. He started out with absolutely nothing, and eventually built a really terrific company. A lot of that success stemmed from his unwillingness to give up or to accept anything short of the very best.

“The story I like to tell about my father that really sums it all up is about the day he died. It was at a family cookout in New Hampshire. We had corn on the cob, and there were two pieces left, one fresh and one stale piece. We argued about who was going to get the fresh piece. He wanted me to have it and I wanted him to have it, and finally I got him to take it. After we both ate our corn, he got up from the table and said, ‘We’ve got to get some better corn around here.’ Then he went into the living room, sat down and died. To the very end he kept insisting on getting the best. That’s what I remember most about him.”

A New Direction For Growth

By the time Bill Marriott became president of the Marriott Corporation in 1964, the company had grown to encompass 45 Hot Shoppes restaurants, four hotels and a fledgling airline catering company. The new president soon realized that in the restaurant business, it is almost impossible to maintain both rapid growth and control over quality standards.

“In the 1960s we got into fast food,” Marriott explains. “But in the fast food industry you can’t grow by owning and running every restaurant. But my father was dead set against franchising because he had seen his friend, Howard Johnson, franchise and then lose control of his business.

“I realized that in the hotel business we could make more money in two or three hotels than in a hundred restaurants, and it’s not as difficult a management job. Trying to run 100 restaurants is murder. When I became president I would go to 12 restaurants and six of them would be great while the other six would be terrible. Then I’d go back a week later and the situation would be reversed; the six terrible ones would be great but the six great ones would be terrible. There was never any consistency and it was driving me nuts. So I decided that since the hotel business was both more profitable and simpler to manage, that was the best direction for the company.”

Meet The Changing Consumer

While the elder Marriott left a perfectionist legacy on company kitchens and dining rooms, since assuming the company’s reins Bill Marriott has made the hotel side of the business uniquely his. In addition to the detail-oriented lessons and never-say-die attitude learned under his father’s wing, Marriott has created a service organization driven exclusively by the needs of the customer.

In addition Marriott has exploited the changing needs of American business with canny insight. As suburban business centers arose in the 1960s and 1970s, Marriott built hotels offering ready access to airports, office complexes and heavily traveled beltways and freeways. And by offering group rates, banquet facilities and other amenities, Marriott provided a genuine competitive advantage over competitors to mid-to-upper-range business travelers.

Research Moves Marriott Forward

By the early 1980s Marriott realized that the traditional full-service hotel market had reached its upper potential. To maintain growth, Marriott looked to its Procter & Gamble-inspired market research apparatus. That research showed customers who were generally satisfied with hotels in the upper and lower ends of the market. Such mid-price hotel chains as Holiday Inn and Quality Inn were vulnerable to a competitor that could offer consistent service for a moderate price.

Enter “Courtyard by Marriott.” Without bellhops, room service and many of the other extras that helped make previous Marriott hotels successful, the new entry into the hotel market debuted in 1983 providing travelers with consistently high-quality rooms at a budget-conscious price. The Courtyards’ cookie-cutter design permitted rapid construction and, by 1989, more than 100 of these highly successful hotels were operating throughout the country.

Market research also helps Marriott cater to customers’ needs in specific locales. To attract members of the local community, Marriott hotel and resort restaurants offer menus featuring regional cuisine as well as wallet-friendly value meals and “early bird” specials. Pizza prepared on the premises and solo dining areas featuring accelerated service are among the other specialized amenities Marriott restaurants offer. Market research suggesting that seafood could draw both locals as well as hotel guests led directly to the moderately priced Sea Grill restaurants, now featured in more than 15 Marriotts nationwide.

Although extensive market research often tips the competition to plans in the works before actually getting a product or service going, Marriott rises to the challenge by being better, faster and more economical. In April 1993, for example, Marriott introduced the Marriott Miles program. Members can earn frequent-flyer miles with six different airlines simply by staying at Marriott, regardless of whether they flew on that airline, or at all for that matter. As Joe Brancatelli of Frequent Flyer magazine says, “Marriott Miles may not offer anything newer than Hilton’s or Hyatt’s guest programs, but Marriott just packaged it better.”

Customer-Driven Corporate Decisions

Today Marriott continues its never-ending quest to find the most effective ways to deliver what Bill Marriott calls “a really terrific end product.”

“We have an awful lot of ways to determine exactly what a Marriott customer values,” he explains. “One way is through focus groups that actively seek out customers and talk to them. To make these focus groups as diverse as possible, we target input from all Marriott customers, including business transients, men and women who travel just on business, associations – as many different important demographics as we can reach.

“We also recently did a tracking study where we interviewed 700 different customers for 30 minutes each about their lodging experiences. We asked them everything from what they thought specifically about Marriott in terms of our strengths versus what needs improving, to what their experiences had been with other chains. We like to do this kind of customer research regularly because we want to know exactly where we stand with the customer. The more you know about the customer the better job you can do.”

The Five Key Drivers

Extensive market research is hardly unique to Marriott. But while other companies may survey their customers to the brink of exhaustion with little genuine change resulting, Marriott implements customer-driven changes faster than any competitor. As an example, Bill Marriott describes the process Marriott went through after determining the most important elements driving a positive hotel guest experience.

“After extensive research,” he explains, “we found that customers at full-service Marriotts all want five things: a great breakfast, fast check-in, fast check-out, clean rooms and friendly service. And they want those five things consistently. And so we took them one by one. We said, ‘Alright, number one, what’s the problem with breakfast?’ The main problem was that waitresses were not in the dining room because they’re running back to the kitchen to get toast or to wait for an order, and meanwhile a customer is looking around for his waitress so he can get out quickly. So we’re now putting runners in the kitchen to bring out your food from the kitchen to the dining room. And in addition to putting more people in the kitchens to assemble orders we’ve actually moved a lot of the cooking into the dining room itself.

“Number two, to speed the check-in process we’ve installed what we call the ‘First 10 program,’ where we bypass the front desk by pre-registering guests, meeting them at the door and immediately giving them the key to their rooms. Number three, for fast check-out we now slide the bill under the door at four a.m. so all guests have to do is pick up the bill, sign it and they’re checked out. I spoke to a customer the other day who said that he stood in line for 40 minutes waiting to check out of a competitor’s hotel. He was furious, and he was a big customer of theirs.”

The fourth key customer issue was clean rooms. To make sure rooms are in full working condition before a customer crosses the threshold Marriott has implemented a room-by-room monitoring system. Maids must follow a 54-step process in preparing rooms to make sure they are clean and that all electrical appliances, from TVs to air conditioners, are fully functional.

“The system is better now,” Marriott says, “because it’s easier to eliminate problems. If we have a toilet overflowing in one room more than once, we know that the toilet in that room has a problem. Before, we would have kept fixing it without keeping any record, but now we can see by the tracking system that room 401 has had a toilet problem twice in a row and we can replace the toilet.”

Going The Extra Mile

As for number five, friendly service, Marriott has long been renowned for competent, amiable and efficient employees. “Chairman Bill,” as many Marriott employees refer to the CEO, believes that his people deliver superior service because they have an emotional investment in making customers happy. To emphasize this belief he refers to all individuals on the Marriott payroll as “associates.”

“Our basic philosophy,” he explains, “is to make sure our associates are very happy and that they work to go the extra mile – take care of customers and have fun doing it. A lot of companies go through the motions but they don’t go the extra mile.”

The first step in going that extra mile means making the effort to hire the right people. Well aware that in today’s business environment no company can expect to sit back and attract the best people through good karma alone, Marriott has developed a marketing approach to sell the company to prospective “associates.” As Senior Vice President Clifford Ehrlich says, “We approach it by saying we have jobs we’re trying to sell, and the prospective work force out there are the buyers.” In addition, Marriott focuses significant effort on retaining and promoting from within employees that have proven themselves capable.

As a result, more than a third of the company’s managers have moved up from hourly wage positions. Once they’re on board, Marriott attempts to give associates the greatest possible amount of freedom and autonomy that corporate policies will allow. Another term for the extra mile at Marriott is “discretionary effort.”

“That discretionary effort is usually the difference between a good hospitality experience and a bad one,” Ehrlich explains. “In the service business, tapping into the discretionary effort that people come to work with is very important. The trick in management is creating an environment in which people can contribute to the success of the business. You can’t practice a lot of strict top-down management and achieve that.”

Marriott accomplishes the elusive goal of employee empowerment by allowing associates to determine for themselves how their days will be spent and using the “one uniform concept,” which eliminates strict job classifications among associates. At Marriott hotels, for example, every employee is cross-trained to handle all major guest services.

Pressing The Flesh

Chairman Bill genuinely cares about what Marriott’s associates have to say about the way the company is being run. He logs an average of 200,000 travel miles every year visiting Marriotts, inspecting and talking to associates.

“I used to be able to visit every hotel every year,” Marriott says, “but these days I can only get to between 150 and 200. When I get to the hotels, I usually go first to the front desk to let those people know that I understand how important they are in helping customers begin their experience with us in a positive way.

“Then I head for the kitchen to see if it’s clean, if the food’s fresh, if they have the right uniforms on, etc. I also like to see how the associates react. Are they happy to see me? Do they want to have their pictures taken with me? What is their level of enthusiasm? How do they like their boss? At one hotel the boss and I went into the laundry. The laundry people said to him, ‘Hey boss, why didn’t you come see us yesterday? You’ve been down in the laundry every day and you missed yesterday. Where were you?’ And to me that’s a great sign that he’s a good manager. He’s out of the office, with his people, and they appreciate and love him for it.

“When managers are out with their people and with customers instead of sitting in their offices, productivity is higher and guest satisfaction is higher. But basically, when I meet with the associates, I just want to do whatever I can to let them know that they’re important to me.”

Although some employees might have mixed emotions about these spot inspections from the CEO, they nonetheless appreciate the opportunity to speak directly with the man at the top. He places a tremendous value on these encounters as well.

“CEOs don’t listen enough,” Marriott says. “The people who work for them know more about their particular areas than the chief executive does. It’s only from the associates on the front lines that I can perhaps learn about unique practices that I can then take and apply to other hotels.” But even the globe-trotting CEO cannot meet with each of Marriott’s employees. For this reason company policy states that any Marriott employee with a grievance who has not seen action after meeting with a supervisor can go directly to the chairman. Although this rarely occurs, Marriott claims that in more than one case he has interceded on an associate’s behalf.

“One woman approached me,” he explains, “and said she was a cocktail waitress at the Marriott Marquis in New York. She complained that the shoes they were required to wear were too high and caused pain in their backs and legs. I told the people there, ‘Get them some lower pumps, guys.’ If they’re not comfortable, and if their backs ache, then they’re going to growl at our customers.”

The results for the customer tend to be anything but ordinary, as in the case of the US invasion of Panama when Marriott employees risked their lives to hide American guests in the laundry room dryers. Common courtesy can produce genuinely uncommon valor. At Marriott, fanatical customer service, perfectionism and attention to detail are learned, not inherited habits.