How our Hotels used Data to Make our Laundry Service Glamorous

By Ana Brant

In early 2016 some numbers surfaced at a few of the Dorchester Collection’s luxury hotels that
caught leadership’s attention: Complaints about our laundry service were on the rise, as was
the cost of compensating guests for damage to their clothes.

One hotel had to replace a fabulously expensive Givenchy evening gown. At another, an
Hermès Birkin bag, which is almost impossible to buy unless you’re a celebrity, had to be
restored, at great expense, after a waiter spilled wine on it and our laundry made the damage
worse while trying to clean it. In another hotel there were 55 laundry-related complaints in
January 2016 alone.

Continually measuring performance across a range of indices can let a business see where it’s
succeeding and where it can improve. But acting on performance data alone is a sterile exercise
that may result in the rote optimization of individual customer touchpoints while the overall
service is commoditized — a dangerous trap if you’re a luxury business. Another common
mistake is to address customer complaints through incremental improvements. Such
complaints could indicate areas that are deeply important to customers. These may be areas
where being “good enough” is not good enough. For performance data to have meaning, it must
be paired with insight about what customers really want.

To figure out how to act on the laundry issue cropping up in our data, we had to start by better
understanding what our guests really wanted from us (beyond clean, undamaged clothes
being returned on time). By diving into the data, we were able to dramatically reduce customer
dissatisfaction, increase customer loyalty, and develop new, differentiating service offerings.

Figuring Out What Our Customers Wanted

Our innovation team, at 45 Park Lane, in London, started by compiling data about our guests’
clothing behaviors and our hotel laundry processes, getting housekeeping and bell staff
involved, as well as searching social media for customer posts.

The team discovered that guests often tag the clothes they wear with designer names when they
take selfies at our hotels and post them on Facebook and Instagram. The team interviewed the
bell men and discovered that some guests’ clothes were hung on the bell carts in special
designer bags. The housekeeping staff tracked and reported on items left unattended in rooms.
(Tidying up clothing left outside the closet and leaving it visible to guests is a five-star standard
for housekeeping.) Finally, the innovation team picked up the guests’ clothes and examined
them before hand-delivering it to the laundry.

This investigation led the team to start thinking about what our guests wear and why they
wear it. A cotton polo shirt retails for about $29.95 at The Gap; a guest who wears one may
have very different expectations than the guest who shows up in a Brioni cotton-and-silk polo
shirt, which retails for about $575. By analyzing our guests’ behaviors, we came to understand
that the difference is about far more than material and cost. The guest who wears the Brioni
likely sees themself as part of the world of fashion, and their shirt as an investment rather than
a consumable. When they hand it to us to be cleaned, the owner trusts us to understand those
priorities and the suggestion of status woven into the fabric.

The team also found that our guests pack many more garments than one would think necessary
for their length of stay, and went shopping for more when staying at our hotels. Moreover,
about 80% of our guests use the laundry service, and they trust us with their most expensive
garments more than they trust the dry cleaner down the road.

Fashion and clothing were central to the guest experience — much more so than we had
realized. To borrow Clayton Christensen’s phrase, our hotel laundry’s “job to be done” is not
cleaning dirty clothes; it is preserving and enhancing our guests’ sense of participation in the
world of fashion.

And yet, within the hotel, the team found that our employees saw the laundry service as
removed from our guests, physically and psychologically, and as a less-than-desirable career
path. This mindset was generating a high risk of us not meeting the high expectations of our
guests.

The innovation team concluded that we were neither seeing nor valuing our guests’ clothing as
they did. This disconnect inevitably led to errors, rising make-good costs, and, worst of all,
disappointed guests.

Delivering on Customer Desires

Our research indicated that we needed to increase the resources we were devoting to this aspect
of customer service, so step one was increasing the laundry budget by 30%. We hired an expert
craftsperson to run the service, who has rapidly become one of the hotel’s most influential
employees. The team designed a PR and social media campaign around her, raising the status
and morale of the laundry staff.

Budget also went to education. The innovation team conducted workshops for the staff to
familiarize them with fabrics, labels (which can be filled with esoteric, hard-to-understand
symbols for clothing care), and designers. A field trip to Bond Street, a high-end fashion
destination in London, was aimed at helping staff understand the value of the clothes our guests
entrust to them and make informed decisions about which garments could be laundered in-
house and which should be sent out to specialists. Feedback we’ve received indicate that these
investments in improving our laundry employees’ skill sets have made them feel more essential
to our mission and made their jobs more interesting.

Understanding that laundry’s work goes beyond cleaning clothes, our new laundry leader
focused on presentation. Now, when a Chanel jacket or Dior gown is returned to a guest, it has
tissue paper stuffed into the sleeves and shoulders to preserve the proper drape…and to add a
little glamour and ceremony. Laundry staff also include a note with the garment, describing
how it was cared for and conveying that we value the guests’ clothing as much as they do.

These service improvements cost very little (for example, tissue paper was already part of the
laundry service, used to wrap clothing; now it is being used to add value) and have had great
success. Improving the quality and reputation of the laundry enabled the Dorchester, which
shares laundry with 45 Park Lane, to offer its services to selected high-end residences in the
Mayfair district. This created a side business, with the new revenue going toward defraying the
increased laundry budget.

In the luxury sector, rethinking old business processes often can create new opportunities for
revenue opportunities and for extending the brand.

Identifying New Areas of Improvement

Appreciating our guests’ relationship to their clothing has encouraged us to improve existing
services and create new ones. For example, when we pick up guests at the airport, we clean
their luggage so it looks as it did when they embarked on their trip — or better. If their clothing
has been disturbed during the flight, we ask their permission to repack it before we take it up
to their suite. This white-glove luggage service may eventually become another new source of
revenue.

We are rolling out these innovations, and more, to our other hotels. In addition, fashion has
become a larger part of our social media outreach. For instance, in Paris, our Hôtel Plaza
Athénée is strengthening its connection to haute couture with the motto “It’s not what you
wear, but where you wear it.”

If we had simply set out to reduce customer complaints about laundry service, we would not
have been able to recognize or act on the market opportunities presented by our guests’ love of
fashion. Of course, taking these steps has helped address the problem — the 55 complaints we
recorded in one month last year are down to just five in one month this year — but by going
beyond the data we’ve gained a much deeper understanding of why our customers come to us.

As a luxury brand, it is not enough to do everything well; that’s table stakes. The key is to
figure out what is most important to your customers and do it better than anyone else.