A Hotel Janitor Did What Most Car Dealerships Can't

A Vegas janitor walks a guest to coffee 0:00

[Steve Shaw] Welcome to Fixed Ops Focus with Steve Shaw and Dave Rogers. Dave, I hear you're in Vegas. Tell me something. Is there any good customer service in the world anymore?

Dave Rogers: Well, I'll tell you something, Steve. I got wowed today. I got wowed this morning, I really did. Contrary to last night at a very expensive steakhouse, where I did not get wowed. But today I got wowed.

Steve Shaw: Tell me about it.

Dave Rogers: So I went downstairs, it was a little after six, and I'm looking for a cup of coffee. There's a line outside this coffee shop. It's got to be like thirty people in the line, because it opened at six o'clock and it's 6:01, right? So I'm walking down the hall. I figure I've got to go somewhere else, I'm not going to wait in this line for coffee. And I run into this guy, just a regular Fontainebleau employee, Daniel, I think his name was. He's got a squirt bottle in his hand and a rag, and I guess he sees I'm looking for something. He goes, "What are you looking for?" I said, "I'm looking for a coffee shop. The one down there, the line."

And he goes, "Let me take you. There's a really good one down by the casino floor. Hold on a second." Goes into his little microphone and says, "I'm going to be offline for a couple minutes. I'm taking a guest down to a coffee shop." And then we start walking, and he's got a good brisk pace, and he's telling me all about the hotel and his coffee shop and his favorite coffee there. He just went on and on about his vanilla latte, that was his drink. He's building it up the whole time. He's just bullshitting about the thing, but he was so friendly.

Steve Shaw: That's awesome.

Dave Rogers: So we're walking. It had to be a ten-minute walk. You go down the escalator, we're walking through the casino floor. And I said, "Are you allowed to just do this? You're supposed to be cleaning something." And he goes, "No, no. We can stop doing our jobs anytime we want. If there's a guest that needs help, we have to walk you to it. That's what we're supposed to do." And I go, "Really? You're allowed to do it?" He goes, "No, we're told we need to do this. Because if I'm the last person you come in contact with here, and I kind of blow you off, you're probably not going to want to come back again, right?"

And I said, "That's probably right." And he goes, "But after I walk you to the coffee shop, you're probably going to like coming back here again." I said, "I am absolutely going to like it." We get right in front of the coffee shop, and he goes, "Don't forget about the vanilla latte. You have a great day." Shook my hand and took off, went back to his cleaning. I was like, that's amazing, right?

Steve Shaw: That's amazing.

Dave Rogers: And it was so simple. Yet I bet you ninety percent of the valets and service advisors and salespeople at a car dealership would never do the same thing. "What are you looking for? Service?" They would never walk you back to service, right? It's the old point the finger in a direction, "Back that way," type thing. And I understand it's a casino and everything else, but man, this guy's job was just to clean something. That's what he was doing, right? I don't think it was an act. It seemed to come right from his heart that he really wanted to help me find the best coffee in the place, which he did. So I appreciate that.

The DMV lady who fixed everything 2:53

[Steve Shaw] I love it, man. They must have watched the podcast looking for a wow moment. Funny enough, there's a janitor in Vegas watching our podcast. That's the only guy watching.

Dave Rogers: Right. He's the only guy.

Steve Shaw: So, you know my Wagoneer saga. I get a call the other day from the DMV in Marathon, Florida, and I'm like, who's calling me? So I pick up the phone, and the lady says she's so-and-so from the DMV. Her name is Melissa. Melissa from the DMV in Marathon. I'm like, here we go, right? I instantly get this angst. And she tells me, "I got this information from the dealer you bought the car from, and we don't have the correct information." And I'm thinking it's going to be a nightmare, right? And she's like, "But here's what I need you to do." And I said, "Okay, cool. I can get that done for you." And she goes, "By the way, Steve, your license is suspended."

I'm like, "How can my license be suspended?" And she says, "Because you didn't pay your insurance on your old Wagoneer." The old Wagoneer was gone, so I sent her some paperwork. Got the paperwork to her. Immediately she got my license reinstated, and she calls the dealership in Tennessee and gets everything handled. And then the dealer in Tennessee had to send me some paperwork. She goes, "I do need you to stop by."

And I'm like, hey, stopping by the DMV in the Florida Keys, it's a pleasure, right? That's what I'm thinking. I've been there many times, and there are more people that work at the DMV in the Keys than there are people that live in the Keys. So I show up on Friday afternoon. There was a little bit of a delay, I had a couple hiccups, but I was communicating with the lady, and she was real nice. I walk into the DMV on Friday at like 11:30, and I hand Melissa this piece of paper. That's what I was supposed to hand her, an odometer statement, and I had to sign it in front of her.

I hand it to her, and she goes, "What is this?" And I go, "Well, this is what you wanted." And she goes, "No. That lady, blankety-blank, up in Tennessee, has no idea what she's talking about. Hang on a minute." And I'm thinking, shit, what am I going to do? My temp tags are almost worn out. She goes in her office, she comes back, she asks me a question, and I don't know the answer. I needed some number for the bank, right? And I'm like, "I don't know what that is." She goes, "I'll be back." She goes back in her office. She comes back like ten minutes later. "You're all set." And then she says, "You're actually going to get a $162 refund."

Dave Rogers: No way.

Steve Shaw: And I'm like, "What?" And she hands me my sticker, da-da-da-da-da. The DMV lady called the bank, she called the dealer, she called a half a dozen people, got everything squared away, and goes, "Here you go, Mr. Shaw." And I was like, wow. I literally was wowed. And the whole time, all I can think about is you and I talking about this. How does the lady at the DMV give me better service, just like the janitor at a casino in Vegas? How do they do that, and we're not doing it, right? It's so simple. It was freaking amazing. I'm totally jacked up about this woman. And I go, "I'm going to talk about you on my podcast."

A high-end steakhouse with no service 5:52

[Dave Rogers] That's nice. You know, last night a few of us went out to dinner at this place in the hotel, a high-end steakhouse. Very high end. One other guy and I got there first, and the rest of them met us. We figured we'd wait at the bar, because we had to wait for everybody to get there before they'd seat us. So we're sitting at the bar, and there's a guy behind the bar with a white jacket, very nice looking, right? He just looked like a butler almost, with his white jacket. So I'm staring at him, and he goes, "You have to wait for a bartender." I'm like, okay.

There's one bartender at this bar. It's a curved bar, there are maybe ten people at it, and the bartender's running around. Finally he comes up to us and says, "What do you guys want?" Like, he wasn't happy to see us, right? So we order two drinks. While he's making the two drinks, the rest of our party comes up, three of the other people. So he's got the two drinks on the counter, and we're like, "Can we get a few more?" And the look of disgust on his face was unbelievable, right?

And meanwhile there's a guy sitting a couple of stools down, and you can just see the look on this guy's face, like, Jesus Christ. So he goes to the guy with the white jacket, "Can you give me a hand?" And he goes, "No, you have to wait for the bartender." Like, what are you doing behind the bar if you can't serve me a drink, right? And he was very nice. I'm not going to say he was rude. But the bartender was just rude. Finally he gets the drinks ordered, and there was no smile on his face, no thank you, no nothing. And then he goes to the other guy, and I'm thinking, boy, this is a high-end place in Vegas, right?

We sit down at dinner, and we had another guy with a white jacket that couldn't help us with anything. And we were talking at dinner about the lost art of customer service, even in a high-end place. The one lady that was helping us wasn't the waiter. We were waiting for this guy, David, who was the waiter, right? We saw him three times the whole night. He had his little velvet jacket on. He came over after everything was kind of taken care of. Three times he came by.

I have no idea how much it cost. The two owners of the dealership group were there. But we were talking about it the whole night. The one tomahawk steak was three hundred dollars, right? So this wasn't a chintzy place. Better customer service from the fucking janitor. Much better service. We were talking about the lost art of customer service, and it really is getting rarer and rarer. Even in a high-end restaurant. I was shocked, really.

An hour waiting for dessert 8:34

[Steve Shaw] It's funny you say that. So I take my mom out for her 80th birthday last week, right? And we go to my favorite steakhouse in the world. It's Charlie's Steakhouse here in Tampa, and I've been going there for fifteen years. I love Charlie's Steakhouse. If you want the best steak tartare on the planet, go to Charlie's, right? I've been threatening to take my parents there forever. My dad calls me up. I literally drove home from the Florida Keys on Wednesday so I could take my mom to dinner on Thursday at Charlie's Steakhouse, right?

So we pile in the Wagoneer, we go down there, and it was amazing, right? The show. They took us in, they put us at the table, they did all this great stuff. They bring out the tray of meat, and they're showing us the tomahawk steak, and my dad's like, "I never had one of those." And I'm like, "Well, get it, whatever you want." My dad's turning 82 in a couple days, and my mom was 80. So I'm like, who cares, right? Have everything. So my dad orders his tomahawk steak, it was two hundred and some dollars. My mom gets a big steak, and my whole family's there. They gave us the show, right? It was amazing. Until.

They do everything for us, right? Our dinner reservation was at 6 PM. At 9:30, we're still sitting there. And it's like you said a long time ago, I'm waiting for an hour for the dessert. At 8:30, I was like, "Yeah, we kind of need to go," right? I'm kind of giving this to the waiter. But he continues on with his show, and I'm like, bro, we've been here for two and a half hours. There are six of us sitting at the table. It's not like it's a date and we're cocktailing and all this stuff.

An hour. I wait for an hour. I get a little annoyed every now and then, and my family is calming me down: "Don't say anything, it's fine, it's fine." So finally I get up, and I find the manager. And again, they were wonderful people until this moment. His name is Paul. Paul was great. And I go, "Paul, I'm not mad. I love you guys. But we've been waiting for an hour for our dessert." And he freaks out, right? He's like, "I'll take care of it."

What I really wanted was to say, "Paul, can we get our desserts to go so we can go home?" But sure enough, he goes over and kicks the ass of the dessert bar, the people working it. He goes over and starts beating the shit out of them, evidently, telling them how much they suck because we're sitting over here waiting for our dessert. So I come strolling back over, our desserts are sitting at the table, and the waiter must have gotten reamed as well. That guy went from being my best friend, and our family's best friend, to the biggest jerk ever.

And he hands me a bill. It's probably like what yours cost at the steakhouse. I didn't know a dinner could be that much money, right? He goes, "The tip is included." And I was like, shit, right? So I signed the bill. I didn't argue about it or anything like that, but it's a good thing the tip was included. I still would have tipped him, and tipped well. But they went from being amazing to this. That guy must have gotten his butt chewed out, right? Talk about coaching. Probably not the right time to coach your people. So anyway, we paid our bill. Paul gives me his card on the way out, and he goes, "You come back, and I will take care of it." I go, "Paul, I will come back, but I think it was handled inappropriately."

Dave Rogers: That's what happens. It's funny how you take these restaurant experiences, or whatever it is, and you flip it into the car business. It's the same thing. People have an expectation, right? Get in, get out, keep me updated, whatever the case may be. And the time to coach the guy was not while you guys were still there. There's no way.

Acura and lifetime customer loyalty 12:57

[Dave Rogers] So at the Acura meeting we're having here, I guess it's a normal factory thing, but they started a new thing with Acura. They're down to three models right now, and they've got new cars coming out in a few years. They're in a little bit of a downturn. The EV projects didn't work out for them, just like a few other manufacturers, right? They had to scrap it all. But one of the things they've announced is that they're going to have customer lifetime loyalty. They're now going to try to gauge that lifetime loyalty.

And I started laughing. They were talking about all the different measurements and some of the tools they were adding, and they're talking about the life cycle of a customer and all the places where customers defect. You've seen it before, where it's like the infinity sign, right? Purchase, service, intent to repurchase. And they're showing all the defection points on there, which was pretty interesting, because you can start thinking about that for any circumstance you deal with, whether it's the car business or restaurants. I don't care what it is. It could be your local bar, it could be where you get your haircut. Where do customers defect, and what makes them defect?

Now, an Acura dealer is going to say, "Well, you've only got three cars to sell, and you're not coming out with a new one for two years." There's no new, flashy, shiny object for people to buy. And they're trying different things. I'm going to give them a little credit. I think they've reorganized where they're going to go after CPO customers. They have used car leases now, so you can lease a CPO from six months up to two years, and they have a two-year lease for new cars. So if you can get people into a new car on a two-year lease, when the new cars come out maybe you can keep them entertained with the product line. They've talked about some new products coming out, 2028 and beyond.

But it's funny. We talk about the wow, we talk about loyalty, we talk about these little things, and then I'm sitting there listening to a manufacturer talk about it too. Imagine that. Customer lifetime loyalty, right? Who would have thunk that's important, especially with a car line?

The last impression is the one they keep 15:14

[Dave Rogers] But you said it with the restaurant. You're still going to go back, you love the place, but it's that last hour. Everyone has to remember, the lasting impression is always the end of the transaction. If my car is done and I've got to wait thirty minutes for my paperwork to come up, or if my car's done and the cashier's got a friggin' attitude, or the valet doesn't bring my car up into the drive, that's what causes people to defect. It's always the final part, the end of it. You can recover, but that's the lasting impression we all remember.

And that's the message I would give to anybody, whether you're in the car business or the restaurant business. I don't care if you have an ice cream truck, right? If I just throw the ice cream at you and treat you like shit when you buy it, you're probably not going to come to the ice cream man again.

Steve Shaw: Well, I've got fifteen years of loyalty to this particular restaurant, so one time is not going to make me never come back. I just thought it was funny, because you're a hundred percent right. It's that last little thing, right? That last little bit. And the janitor was right too. If he was mean or rude to you, you would say poo-poo Fontainebleau. But he was great to you, so it's going to make you want to come back. So I think you're a hundred percent right. The loyalty is to that brand.

Let your people know they can help 16:35

[Dave Rogers] And he's had some formal training, because he said, "Listen, I could do my best job today, but tomorrow morning somebody pisses you off, and that'll be the thing you remember," right? And I started laughing. So he obviously had some kind of training in that. I give them credit. Casinos, overall, have done a good job of that stuff for years. But I was shocked. I really was expecting him to say, "Hey, go down the escalator and go get your coffee there." But no, he walked me to the place, which is kind of like the Disney way of doing things. You take a couple minutes out of your day. But he was told he can do that.

And that'd be one of my messages to anybody in the car business: why don't you let your people do that? Show the customer where the bathroom is, show the customer where the showroom is. It shouldn't be a problem to do that.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I think you're right. It's not just let your people do it. It's encourage them.

Dave Rogers: Well, you have to let them know they can do it, right? What's their assumption? And again, there are some skeptics out there who are going to go, "He's just wasting time. He just didn't feel like cleaning something." Well, maybe that's the case, but he still showed me the best coffee place in the casino. So I was surprised.

Mike and Mike at the Jeep dealer 17:41

[Dave Rogers] Going back to customer service, didn't you tell me you had to bring your Jeep in for service recently? How'd that go? What have you got?

Steve Shaw: Well, I was going to bite my tongue, but since you brought it up. The funny part is, this is when everybody's going to leave our show, right? So I'm not mad at my car. My car has a defect, right? And I get cars. But I'm mad at Jeep. I wish Jeep would take care of its loyal owners. In my family, I've had two Wagoneers, I've got two Wranglers, a Dodge, and I have five ProMaster vans. So you'd think I'd be a good customer. But Jeep itself basically gave me the finger. I don't want to get into the down and dirty stuff.

But finally, I took my car into the dealership down here in town. They had looked at my car once before, and there was some back and forth between me and the service manager, and he turned out to be really nice, right? I got to know the service advisor, I got to know the manager. The first time I took it in, they couldn't fix it. So I was like, okay, now I'm back with Jeep, and I'm still mad at Jeep itself. Long story longer, I won't bore everybody, but I take it back one more time. I'm like, "Guys, we've got one last attempt." I've got 2,000 miles on my car now. This is one last attempt to fix my truck, or we're going to have to take a different approach.

So I called up the service manager, and I'm like, "Mike, what should I do? How should I approach this?" And he's like, "Come back down. Let me meet with you, let me look at it." Literally, I drove in the next day. He walked outside, he scanned the VIN, he looked at everything, sat in my car, did a bunch of stuff. And he says, "It looks like everything is updated," and Jeep's notorious for their software. He goes, "But let me take it back to my technician, because I've got a question and I don't really have the answer." I'm like, "Sure, why not?"

So I go sit in the waiting room. Very nice. I had my coffee, everything was great. I'm not used to sitting in a waiting room as a customer, but I brought my backpack. An hour later the service advisor, his name was Mike as well, comes back: "Got you all taken care of." I'm like, "What do you mean?" And he explained the process and the updates and so on. He goes, "I think you're all set." And I'm sarcastic, so I go, "Well, I guess we'll see what happens." So now we're in the process of seeing what happens for a few days.

But these two men actually cared enough. The service manager goes, "Come down, let me look at it with you, let me take it back to my tech, let me talk to them about what's going on," instead of the typical "Let me write it up, throw it in the shop and give you a no problem found." They actually did a great job. Mike and Mike, I sat and talked to them for a while, and I got a wow. I wouldn't have said that three months ago, because I was having some issues.

These guys really went out of their way to try to address my problem, even when Chrysler gave me the finger. Jeep said tough, whatever. But these two guys said, "Let's see if we can get you on the road." And I'm a happy guy, right? I'm happy the car's performing, and I was blown away by these two guys that took the time. They didn't have to, right? They could have said, "Sorry, Steve, you're out." But they did take the extra moment. What did it take, an hour of the guy's life? And now he's got a happy customer. If they had done that years ago, I'd have bought a car from them. So next time, maybe when I need my third Wagoneer, I'll buy it from these guys. So we better get out of here.

Dave Rogers: Listen, maybe they watch the podcast and realize you didn't shop there because of that reason.

Steve Shaw: You never know.

Make it part of the culture 21:12

[Dave Rogers] GM tip of the day, man. I probably never did it when I was a GM, and I'm sure there have been times when I was a manager that I didn't really review it with people. I know when I went to Disney training, that was one of the topics. But you've got to let your people know they can do these extra things. It's not just always turning the car, it's not always just throughput, it's not always just making a buck on every transaction. You've got to look down the long road, in the long run, and make sure people are happy.

If it's that one little thing, asking somebody how their day is, or saying hello, or walking them to the bathroom, or walking them to the shop. It sounds like a no-brainer, but I don't know if it is a no-brainer that people know they can do that, right? Or have they ever been trained, if they haven't been told they can do it? He went fifteen minutes out of his way to show me where the best coffee was. I've got to believe your valets or your janitors in your dealership can walk two minutes out of the way and show a customer where service is or where the bathroom is.

So I think it's a point to bring up, and I think every GM should make mention of it, and it should just be a culture thing. You've just got to make sure everybody knows they can do it, because if you don't tell them they can do it, they probably don't know they can do it. Or they never thought of it.

Steve Shaw: Well, yeah. As you're talking, I'm thinking, what message did service manager Mike send when he walked out to my car? He did all of this for me, took my truck back, personally did everything, instead of saying, "Just tell Steve to go away," right? He went out there and spent his time, and I was very appreciative of everything he did. So I agree, what a great message that man sent to his staff about taking care of customers. So kudos to the CDJR store here in beautiful Port Richey, Florida.

Dave Rogers: Nice.

Steve Shaw: All right. We better get out of here on that note.

Dave Rogers: All right, brother, I'll talk to you soon.

Steve Shaw: See you, bro.