My wife and I recently went to Summerhill Spa to redeem our freebie (mentioned below), and the first thing I should get out of the way is that the 90-minute hot stone therapy massages were great and we were satisfied. We tipped well to show our gratitude.
The one thing my wife and I both noticed and thought odd, and is the subject of this blog post, was that no one introduced themselves, either when we came into the establishment nor right before our massages were to start. They were all Asians in black – well one had a white T-shirt on, but essentially if you did not ask for their names you could not request the masseuse again. I actually did ask their names (as is my habit and training) and both ladies seemed surprised. So my first thought was that this was a customer service training mistake, and also it was doing a dis-service to the masseuses as surely their tips and requests would rise if they introduced themselves at the beginning, built rapport and thanked the patrons as they left, giving the patron a name to go with the face and service.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps the management had not over-looked something. Perhaps they intentionally did not use name-tags, and did not encourage the staff to introduce themselves.
Why would that be?
Perhaps to establish a sense of standardization of service at the spa. In other words – don’t come to the spa just for your favourite girl, because if/when she leaves to go work elsewhere, she might take clients with her! At the very least clients who’d grown accustomed to her may not return.
The funny thing is as mentioned before that all the girls are Asian, so if you are not too good at differentiating between Chinese, Korean and Japanese, and if you didn’t ask for names, you simply could not request the same masseuse you had for the next time. You would have to trust in the standardization of quality of the ‘Women in Black’.
I don’t know which way is better, and I don’t know for sure why the management decided to use this no-name style. Do you have any thoughts?
For now I think I am going to stick to my belief and communication skills training that says that a name is the most wonderful sound in the world to a person, and to be remembered by someone is flattering and the beginning of building rapport and a healthy relationship. I always endeavor to remember names of folks in the service industry, especially at places I frequent. I think I would hope for the same from others. What do you think/prefer?