John Emery of Alpine-X: 5 Things a Business Should Do to Create a Wow Customer Experience

Control and shape the experience from earliest touch through departure. This includes easy-to-book reservations, fair policies for guest changes, and ease of arrival and departure — all in addition to the focus on the resort experience itself.

As part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Emery.

John Emery serves as CEO of Alpine-X. Alpine X develops year-round snowsports resorts in North America. John previously served as CEO of Great Wolf Resorts, Inc. (NASDAQ:WOLF), a family entertainment resort company, where he led the company’s expansion to a nationally-recognized brand and IPO. He was also President of Interstate Hotels & Resorts, Inc. (NYSE:IHR), a global independent hotel management company with more than 400 hotels.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve always enjoyed the energy and camaraderie of teamwork in service businesses. From working at a Roy Rogers fast food restaurant as a teen, working as a CPA for Deloitte, progressing into hospitality management and then to developing branded family resorts, the common threads have always been valuing being part of teams with diverse skills and backgrounds and serving the community.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

At 16, my first day at my first job was terrible. I literally struggled to make french fries. At the end of my shift the manager pulled me aside and said “The only reason I’m not firing you is because I like your sister”. Then he laughed, and told me he liked my effort and I’d get the hang of it, that it wasn’t a bad first day. That little restaurant was a true mix of people — high school kids, immigrants from several cultures, hard working single moms, young managers starting careers. The restaurant was open seven days a week and the team there worked hard, bonded and learned from each other. We never talked about the benefits of diversity to our team then, but we all lived it, benefited from it and carried the lesson forward to our future careers.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Success in a service business is always about the entire team. In a resort experience, housekeepers, front desk staff, restaurant servers and other team members all have more direct impact on our guest experiences than I do. Training, fairly compensating, and valuing each member of our team is critical to the delivery of the experiences our guests enjoy.

Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

A good example for Alpine-X, with year-round snowsports resorts close to where people live, we will be teaching enormous numbers of guests to ski and board. It can be an intimidating process. Our goal is to go beyond merely providing those services by focusing on the entire experience, from booking reservations to arrival at the resort to post-ski food and beverage, and other entertainment experiences. This drives recurring guest visits and encourages guests to add to their groups each time they visit.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

I think the disconnect is two-fold. First, training and retention of trained team members is crucial. The success of that gets back to properly valuing our team members who interact with our guests. Those may seem like entry level positions but they deliver our guest experiences and define our brand. Secondly, and something that always bewilders me when companies fail to do this, is empowering each team member to resolve potential guest dissatisfiers when they arise. Certainly there are limits but each team member should have the authority to make judgement calls and improve the guest experience. An added benefit for our team is the feeling each team member gets when they improve someone’s visit.

Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?

Competition is a bit of double edged sword for customer experiences. It clearly increases focus on the experience but often squeezes margins. Good management teams make this work. One of the best impacts to customer experience comes from ratings and social media influence.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

These are why our teams love what they do. With my background in family resorts a lot of our most memorable stories involve providing experiences to reuniting military families when service members return home. Since our resorts are open every day of the year, we take full advantage of that capacity to provide experiences for the entire community.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

For the specific examples I mentioned, I’ve never tried to quantify the ripple effects, but those examples are just part of being a positive member of our local communities. In general, of course, wow experiences generate repeat and word of mouth business, the best marketing that we have.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

My thoughts from running family resort brands:

Empower your team through training, compensation, advancement, authority. Empowering front desk staff to give a free meal etc. to smooth over a service mistake, long line, or late room goes a long way.

Design and deliver experiences for the entire community. Alpine-X is leading the democratization of snowsports. Through convenience and affordability we want each member of our communities to be included.

Lead towards a lower carbon future. Alpine-X resorts are designed for efficiency and coupled with significant renewable energy creation to lead to a lower carbon future.

Guest experience defines the brand. Our resorts will all be similar, but not copies of each of each other. We embrace regional and cultural differences in each to best reflect our communities.

Control and shape the experience from earliest touch through departure. This includes easy-to-book reservations, fair policies for guest changes, and ease of arrival and departure — all in addition to the focus on the resort experience itself.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

Social media is the best platform for guests to express their experiences. With businesses like ours social media creates a constant, honest stream of feedback for prospective guests.

My particular expertise is in retail, so I’d like to ask a question about that. Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition? Brand loyalty is real. Amazon created ease of ordering, fast and free shipping, ease of returns, etc. What our brands, and others, need to do to compete is define our brands from the earliest customer touchpoint onward. Ease of ordering, direct to consumer and ease of change are all effective in building loyalty to whichever platforms a brand uses.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Truly focusing on inclusiveness in the design, marketing, delivery and affordability of experiences, products and services. If we can go beyond basic traditional inclusion and have every person in our communities know and feel that what we provide is specifically for each of them, regardless of their past experiences, background, or socioeconomic status, we can create shared bonding opportunities and bring people together.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Twitter — John Emery @AlpineXceo

Linkedin — John Emery

Instagram — AlpineXUSA

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!