Winter resorts like to contrast the thrill and adventure of an authentic outdoor experience with the artificial, manufactured fun of a theme park like Disneyland. But the two businesses share some key issues. That’s why Ski Areas of New York (SANY) began bringing in customer service trainers from the so-called “happiest place on earth” a few years ago, and the results have been more than positive.

Most resorts have gained a good deal of customer service tools and tips from Disney; one, Hunter Mountain, even sent lead employees down to Disney to learn first-hand. Myra Garcia, director of human services at Hunter, was one of them. And while she’s singing the praises with as much chirp as Jiminy Cricket now, before going, she wasn’t completely sure about it all.

“I was very nervous,” she says of heading down to her Disney training. “Look, I have a four-year-old, but I am just not a Disney person. I was afraid I’d come back having drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Garcia attended a three-day program at Disney that revealed the “inner workings” of how Disney hires, trains and keeps thousands of motivated, dedicated staff members. She also saw how Disney does such staples as employee dress code manuals, safety training videos, and hiring and selection procedures.


GOING DISNEYLAND

Garcia realized that translating what she learned at Disney to Hunter would take some effort. “Disney has what seems like an endless supply of money to dedicate to training, hiring, staff development, staff rewards, and a huge pool applicants,” she says. “Hunter, like many ski areas, has limited resources available for those types of initiatives, and our hiring pool is not deep by any means.”

But there are many similarities with Disney, too. Garcia quickly realized that Disney does not pay its basic staff a fortune. So the idea that ski resort employees might not be happy because of pay had to be let go and rethought.

Raising expectations was a big part of the effort to establish a more customer service-oriented culture. Garcia had to convince other managers it was both possible and imperative to expect more, and get more, from employees. And she had to find inexpensive ways to create a new culture. “I had to show how doing these changes would positively impact the bottom line for our organization,” she says. “It is a huge undertaking that is a work in progress.

“As an organization we had to get over the mentality of accepting negative behaviors from our staff,” she says. “We were making excuses for our staff on many levels; for example, we don’t pay staff enough to expect them to shine in customer service, and you get what you pay for mentally. But Disney’s pay structure is very similar to ours. Their cafeteria cashiers, ride operators and maintenance staff are not making $12 dollars an hour, either. So we had to figure out how Disney was able to keep front-line employees motivated and pushing the company goals forward.”

Another thing she realized was that ski resorts can be more particular when hiring, and that might very well be the first step to getting happy employees. “We learned that we don’t have to hire every person that comes through the door,” Garcia says. “We were in the habit of taking warm bodies and putting them in positions and hoping our training would work and they would turn into excellent employees.”

Now, she says, Hunter has become more selective, and every aspect of the hiring process is aimed at putting the right person in the right position.

“This was a big change for us,” she says. “Our HR department is two and a half people to cover nearly 750 employees. We had to bring other managers into the initial screening process, where we are looking for things like enthusiasm and motivation, the things that cannot be trained,” she says. Those applicants who stand out are now getting placed in Hunter’s key customer service positions first.

Translating Disney’s training process to Hunter was the easiest step. “We already had a lot of the methods Disney used,” she notes, “and a similar history. The founders of Hunter, the Slutzkys, have left us a rich and wonderful legacy. We used that to develop a video showing the history of our area and the history of the development of our ski resort. Our philosophy is to understand our past so we can expand and improve our future. Having something like the Slutzky family behind our resort for the past 50 years made integrating that aspect into our training program a breeze.”

And, she adds, “It has been wonderfully received by our staff—we have had employees request copies of our history video to show friends and family. How can you not call that a success?”


HAPPINESS FROM WITHIN

Garcia also adopted a key concept that Disney embraces: all employees share a common voice, a common goal and a shared outlook. True, that sounds like something Tinkerbell would say. But when it comes to how a resort can operate in a way that keeps the customer happy nearly all the time, that common sense of purpose goes a long way.

“They all speak the same language,” Garcia says of Disney. “I knew right away we needed to make sure all our internal dialogue was the same. We needed to get rid of the internal bickering before we could improve on anything else.” So she helped lead the Hunter staff toward a place where all recognize a shared goal, a place where ideas and opinions are respected, and where everyone knows they are a vital part of a great product.

Garcia instituted some perks to reinforce that notion. One is the “Smile Maker’s Award,” given every two weeks to three or four employees based on guest comments, observation, or just a job well done. The employees win a massage, dinner and—maybe best of all—a prime parking spot for a period of time. Each Smile Maker winner is entered into a drawing at the end of the season, with the chance to win a suite at a Yankees game.

She also worked to make sure each employee felt ownership in the mountain. One key step: Garcia gives each employee an unlimited season’s pass and one unlimited guest pass, rather than sticking with a system in which employees can build up points to get free passes to ski and ride.

Other resorts have benefitted from the Disney example. Jane Eshbaugh, marketing director at Holiday Valley, N.Y., says the area saw some clear parallels between its hiring process and Disney’s. As with Disney, Holiday Valley tries to establish an atmosphere of fun and positive energy as early as possible. The area strikes that “happy workplace” tone before employees are even hired. While it may sound hokey, she says, the area’s fall job fair is more of a fun fair than anything else. Potential employees are treated to Halloween games and an interactive show that displays who the Holiday Valley employees are, how they work and how they think. “We show them right off who we are,” she says, “and how we hope they will be as at part of our team.”

Garcia agrees that making that point is a giant start. “We need to have engaged employees who understand they are an ambassador for our mountain at every point,” she says.

It’s also important to show employees that you understand them, too. For Eshbaugh, this meant recognizing the unique dynamics of their employee pool as well as they understand the customer, and then adapting to their way of life and respecting what is vital for them. To wit: “We always have to make sure we plan the date [for the annual November employee orientation meeting] around the opening of deer hunting season,” she says. “It might sound silly to someone somewhere else, but here that is a very important day to so many of our employees. We have to respect it and work around it or we’ll never win them over.”


THE BARE NECESSITIES

So how do you get those now hopefully harmonious employees doing right on the snow, in the parking lot, tableside in your restaurant and anywhere else in your resort?

Simplifying the mission in the eyes of the employee helps, says Garcia. “We like to say that we create mountain memories one smile at a time, and we really mean that,” she notes. That can be a challenge when employees are facing down a long line of needy customers or outside in the cold. But, she says, “It is important for each employee to realize that if they can just focus on the customer in front of them—one person at a time—they can really make a difference. And you know, we have a short period of time to make an impact. Every Saturday is so important.”


THE SCHLEP FACTOR

Disney is also masterful at dealing with what we can call the “schlep factor.” Understanding just how much time, effort, money and patience it takes a customer to get in front of you is vital to customer service success. So Hunter has taken steps to give employees empathy with their guests.

“I tell our employees, if a customer is here by 8 a.m., what time did they have to pack their car in Brooklyn? We have one little traffic light in our town. How many [real and metaphorical] lights did those customers have to go through just to get here?”

Add that struggle to the “guest perception of time” (i.e., minutes and hours are almost like dog years; five minutes in a lift line can sometimes feel like 40 minutes not skiing), and you’ve got folks who are ripe to be disappointed. If they have hit a snag, they need help fast.

Eshbaugh agrees. “The car ride alone with the kids just to get here can be stressful,” she says. “And then, they come here and they are often putting their children and their safety in our hands. It’s a lot to make sure you do right.”


PUT ON A HAPPY FACE

When it comes to complaints or tough situations, Garcia says, it’s essential to empower each employee to correct the situation right there on the spot. “We knew a number of years back we needed to make a shift, and that we wanted a more hands-on approach from our employees. So now, if they hear a complaint, instead of them going off to find a manager or find another person to help fix it, we empower them to fix things right there. Because the minute you walk off to hand them off to someone else, you’ve lost them.”

So how do you get that to happen with, say, a lift op? “The angle I take is this: listen, if you are going to come to work with all your baggage—a hangover, mad because I won’t let you smoke—this isn’t going to work, and worse off for you, your day is going to go really slow. If you’re engaged, friendly, offering good trail suggestions, remembering folks on their later runs, your day is going to fly by,” says Garcia. “I do find that with the younger employees in the entry-level positions, you really have to show them. But when you show them, they get it. It really does work, and work for everyone.”

Both resorts are using surveys to find and fix problems. At Hunter, better surveying made it clear that customers were just not happy with the restaurant. That led to a complete change in management, menu, and décor, as well as training 101 for staff—everything from how to best open a bottle of wine to how to clean a table. Now, reviews are better.

At Holiday Valley, where they firmly believe in management getting out on the snow at least part of each day to hear what customers are saying, that led to a rather big investment at a time when—on paper—it might not have made sense.

Toward the end of the season, when, like all resorts, Holiday Valley was cutting down on the number of lifts running, the main lift broke down. Rather than just crutch by running other lifts for the last few ski days of the season, the area listened to its customers and brought in a crane, repaired the lift, and got it up and running for just those final few days.

“It would have been a lot cheaper to just wait until the snow was gone and do it then,” says Eshbaugh, “But we knew the customers really wanted us to do that, so that’s what we did. I know we won a lot of hearts with that move.”

And that is a perfect example of the Disney way: love your product and mission, know your customer and what they want, and then get it to them pronto.

“It’s a lot more than saying ‘good morning’ in a nice way,” says Garcia. “It’s the lift op suggesting a great trail. It’s the parking attendant seeing a father needs help with his kid’s gear. It’s fixing things happily and quickly.”

Anything less is just Goofy.