Thursday, January 12, 2012

My Favorite things at Disney World #12

Customer Service
 
I know its weird to include customer service when I did not include an icon like Space Mountain. However, it is simply amazing how good Disney is at this.
               
The thing is that Disney holds itself to a higher standard than the customer actually does. It is the gold standard when it comes to how people deal with customers, and really if you think about it, we all deal with our own versions of customers.

In the two times I’ve gone to Disney I only had two incidents where a “cast member” was rude or “mean” to me, and both of those times was a minor miscommunication or completely my fault.

Everyone else will fall over to get you what you need, and that is just awesome.

I recall back in July of 2010 I was looking for a Mad Hatter hat. I scoured the stores in the Magic Kingdom. I happened to ask one girl where I could find one, she found her supervisor, who proceeded to take me around the store and finally went to the back room to look for one.


And damn does it look good on me.

However, the coup de grace was during our last trip. After three long days of going to the parks open to close we were exhausted. We stayed at the hotel, did some laundry, ate a lunch at the food court and then decided we should try and figure something out for dinner. We didn’t have any reservations for the evening so we went to the concierge desk to see if there was anything available.
 
We knew we wanted to see the Main Street Electrical Parade in the Magic Kingdom, and stay for when they had Extra Magic Hours, when the park stayed open late for resort guests.

We explained this to the lady at the desk, and she went through what was available that evening, showing us menus and explaining where they were in relation to the park.

As we were talking to her we happened to mention we had a lunch reservation at Le Cellier, a very hard reservation to get for dinner at the Canadian Pavillion in Epcot. She mentioned how wonderful that place was, and how we HAD to try and eat there for dinner sometime, because it was so romantic.

As she was searching the restaurants my wife started talking to each other about some troubles that we had the previous day, when I kept hearing the concierge saying “oh my g**” Assuming she was talking about our troubles we kept talking finally she told us “everyone be quiet!”

She had our attention.

She was able to find reservations open at 9pm at Le Cellier but we had to act fast. We knew that the Electrical Light Parade was at 7:45pm and while we really appreciated it we wanted to see the parade, and couldn’t go to two parks in one day without a Park Hopper ticket.

She talked to her supervisor and was able to get us 2 Park Hoppers (a normally 50 dollar a piece value) for free, plus she scored us our reservation.

It was about 3pm at this point, and we knew we wanted to enjoy this advantage for as much as we could.

We caught the bus to Magic Kingdom, and because it was Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, the park was packed. I’m talking 40-minute wait for the Haunted Mansion packed.

We took the monorail to Epcot, which was not nearly as crowded, and rode several rides, and then went back to Magic Kingdom for the parade. When we walked in we asked the Cast Member in charge of crowd control for the show where there were seats available. She pointed out there were seats RIGHT on the curb by the entrance.

We watched the parade, made a quick exit to the monorail back to Epcot, ate dinner (which I will talk about another time.) and then made it back to Magic Kingdom, staying there until about 2 am.

The next day we mentioned that we wanted to give the Concierge a tip for helping us out so much. We were informed that a tip wasn’t necessary and it is their pleasure to help out.

WOW!

I can’t tell you how much that meant to us.

During this trip, of course we’re not expecting to have that great an experience, but the fact that she did this is something that I will appreciate for a long long time.

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