In an Automated World, Human Hospitality Is a Competitive Advantage

In the last decade, AI-powered chatbots have taken the realm of customer service by storm. The advent of generative AI in the last few years has only accelerated this drive. But as leaders race to adopt these systems, they would be well advised to consider a crucial factor: the value of the human touch in providing customer service—what we call deep hospitality. When Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts was developing and rolling out its concierge app a decade ago—a process that one of us (Micah) advised on—the team in charge faced a tension that’s become universal in business: how to add digital convenience without deleting humanity. The easy path, the one most companies take, would have been to turn the app into a sleek transaction machine. Message for extra towels. Click to extend a reservation. Eliminate the friction of human interaction. Measure success by how few staff hours each transaction required. But that would have been the opposite of hospitality. The Four Seasons team came up with a different paradigm that was deceptively simple: use the new technology to extend hospitality, not replace it. Guests could text their requests, but there always had to be a person on the other end. Not a chatbot. Not a ticketing system. A real concierge who knew them, remembered them, and could elevate every individual guest’s experience with thoughtfulness that no algorithm could predict. Where Deep Hospitality Lives and Breathes The indelible phrase “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” which Horst coined as a teenager, became Ritz-Carlton’s motto when it was founded in 1983. It expressed an ethos: a way of dignifying both the person being served and the one providing the service. It captured something radical: that hospitality, at its core, isn’t about service tricks or warm towels (though few guests object to those!). It’s about mutual respect: a belief that every interaction can honor human dignity on both sides of the counter. It’s not a department, and it’s not a script. It’s a mindset, supported by a system. It requires leaders who care as much about how their employees feel about their work as how their customers feel about the brand. Purpose Over Function A foundational element required, as you begin to build your organizational support for deep hospitality, is ensuring that all employees, from groundskeeper to C-suite executives, understand their underlying purpose and can differentiate between function (their day-to-day job responsibilities) and purpose (the reason why they’re working there in the first place). Over the years, we’ve made it a practice to ask employees in various industries: “What’s your company’s vision? What’s the objective beyond making money?” We find very few who can answer this clearly. This isn’t the employees’ fault. It’s a limitation of the culture and of leadership. If employees understand that they have an underlying essential purpose in your company, they’ll tend to respond to customers differently, particularly when off-script moments require on-the-spot decisions—judgment calls that will benefit from an employee applying their entire person creatively, rather than following the letter of the law or a one-size-fits-all dictum they’ve received from on high. At one Ritz-Carlton hotel, a maintenance engineer was changing light bulbs in a hallway when he saw a mother returning from the pool with two young children, her hands full of towels and pool toys, fumbling for her room key. This (typically not customer-facing) employee climbed down from his ladder before she reached him, took her burden off her hands, directed her toward her room, and made sure that all three of them had what they needed to get settled. Later, when Horst asked the engineer about this, he received this explanation: “My function is to change light bulbs. My purpose is to create memorable experiences for guests.” You can’t script that. You can only instill it—through hiring, training, and crucially, through treating employees as professionals with judgment, not as functions to optimize. Building a System for Caring Creating deep hospitality isn’t just about mindset. You need discipline: a systematic approach to ensuring that caring delivery happens consistently. Here are three changes this discipline will require of managers at all levels. 1. Stand behind employees’ judgment When you empower employees to exercise judgment, three things happen. First, they start noticing opportunities to create delight. Second, they feel ownership over outcomes. Third, their customers begin to feel the difference between someone following a script and someone genuinely trying to help. The discipline isn’t “give employees unlimited budgets,” although in our experience, giving them a budget of a specified size—e.g., Horst’s iconic $2,000 per employee at the Ritz-Carlton—to take actions that make customers happy can make a big difference. It’s “trust them to make decisions that serve the customer, then back those decisions.” 2. Build breathing space into your metrics The enemy of hospitality is relentless efficiency optimization. When leaders of call centers measure average handle time down to the second, when retailers only value transactions per hour, when restaurants optimize table turns, they optimize away the space for genuine connection. This doesn’t mean urging you toward inefficiency. The best hospitality companies operate with almost ruthless efficiency, but the efficiency happens behind the scenes in systems and processes that free employees to focus on customers. (The Ritz-Carlton famously achieved the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award twice—in 1992 and in 1999, a year after Marriott International acquired it.) It means building breathing space back into your metrics, not just for your customers but also for your employees. When you do this, you allow for human variations to exist and be honored. The discipline is this: Measure what matters for hospitality (customer loyalty, employee engagement, problem resolution), not just what’s easy to measure (speed, cost per transaction, throughput). 3. Stop hiring and start selecting your employees. This is something that can be dismissed as “just semantics,” but it’s actually essential. Stop hiring your employees and start selecting them like you would select players for a sports team. In most positions, the applicants you want on your team are those with a natural disposition of caring rather than the ones who have been “skilled up” in the technical aspects of their future position. There are, of course, exceptions. Many so-called backroom positions are perfect for employees whose personality makeup is different. But for the jobs that entail interacting with guests or managing those who interact with guests, it’s a lot easier to provide deep hospitality if the individual is already inclined to do so. How Deep Hospitality Transforms an Organization Deep hospitality isn’t free. But it may cost less than you fear—and it always costs less than indifference. We’ve seen leaders try to fake it, to script it, to bolt it on. But hospitality isn’t something you do to customers; it’s something you become as an organization. It’s creating an ethos, and the systems and ways of treating each other to back up that ethos, where people—employees, partners, guests—are treated as the point, not the process. That takes courage, because it means loosening control where you’ve been tightening it for years. But the rewards will be bountiful. Here’s why: The primary threat to a business today is the perception by customers that all you offer is a replaceable, interchangeable commodity. A direct way to escape this threat of commoditization is by creating enduring, human relationships with customers. When you connect with a customer on a hospitable, rather than transactional, plane, you become the brand that matters to them. Like someone in love, they only have eyes for you.

In an Automated World, Human Hospitality Is a Competitive Advantage

Summary.

Partner Center