Crystals Luxury Shopping at CityCenter Las Vegas

Each time we visit Las Vegas we spend time devouring its unique shops, looking for what's new in store design, materials, and services. (And shopping. It's one of the hazards of this job.) We've found Crystals at CityCenter to be much more than an ordinary shopping center; it's attention to detail is sublime. From Crystals own website: "Designed by internationally renowned architects Studio Daniel Libeskind and David Rockwell, Crystals will be an experiential environment combining dramatic architecture and design with the world's most elite high-end couture and luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, Ermenegildo Zegna, H. Stern, Marni and Mikimoto. Add dynamic dining concepts from the likes of master chef Wolfgang Puck, as well as innovative nightlife and Crystals is destined to become one of the world's premier shopping destinations."

Dramatic architecture and design: Check.
Elite high-end luxury brands: Check.
Experiential environment: Check.

Check it out...

You'll find exquisite attention to detail throughout Crystals common areas.
One of the views from Crystals looking out at CityCenter.

Crystals touch screen interactive site maps

make it easy to find your way around.

Touch the screen for more information.

One of the unique sculptures you'll find throughout Crystals.

Ice sculpture that's highlighted by various colored lights.

This sculpture features clear tubes housing a vortex of swirling waters.

Lots of open spaces to highlight the product.

Each store front is distinctly different.

Crystals is reminiscent of fine shops in a luxury shopping district.

Almost every store had a Decompression Zone and Speed Bump displays.

Our favorite store at Crystals. Assouline features fine illustrated books and luxury editions dedicated to fashion, photography, art and design all by Assouline Publishing.

A dangerous store for Georganne and her American Express card!

This display at Assouline almost looks like wallpaper.

Love the carpeting!

Tiffany had the more affordable sterling silver jewelry displayed in cases located at the front right side of the store -- Lake Front Property!

In addition to fine food and the unique dining "basket" overlooking the mall, Mastro's Ocean Club will feature live music in its piano lounge seven nights a week!

A closer look at Mastro's Ocean Club "basket" dining area...

Louis Vuitton is a two-story store. It features a combination of light and space that makes the merchandise pop. The glittering glass sculpture, located near the curved stairway inside the store, is shown below.

Inside Louis Vuitton.

Notice the detail around the upper perimeter of the wall.

This is Marni. Its most noticeable design feature is the large chrome fixture that loops throughout the store. It reminds us of a more elegant version of the apparatus used in dry cleaners. Marni's graceful fixture, however, does not move.

Inside Roberto Cavalli. The center platform glitters, showcasing product.

The store features small rooms -- vignettes -- that house the latest collections.

Check out Crystals the next time you are in Las Vegas. Visit Crystals on-line at http://www.crystalsatcitycenter.com

Mystery Shoppers Make You Better

There used to be a show on the Travel Channel called “Travel Spies” where three mystery shoppers assume faux identities, visiting hotels, resorts, cruise ships, and theme parks to see how well each does in the customer service department. The chosen properties agree in advance to a Travel Spies inspection, but they have no idea what the spies look like, or when they will visit the property.

In one memorable episode, the Travel Spies visited the Library Hotel in New York City, a hotel that dedicates each of its guestroom floors to one of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System. Each of the hotel’s rooms has an individually chosen collection of art and books that relate to the category of floor it belongs to. One of the Travel Spies, for example, was in a room with a fashion theme, so all of the art and books in the room had a fashion theme. The hotel also offers a huge amount of amenities, including a video library of the American Film Institutes top 100 films.

During their stay the Travel spies rate every aspect of the hotel and generally do their best to drive the staff nuts. They critique the lobby, their accommodations, including its furnishings and extras, the room service menu, how long it takes for your food to arrive, the quality of the food, and of course the staff. They also make out of the ordinary requests.

One of those requests was a call to the front desk to request that a temporary toilet seat be installed for a boss who prefers to travel with his own seat. "Can you temporarily install this toilet seat?” the Travel Spy asked. "It’s for my boss. He won’t use any other, it’s his personal seat." The front desk clerk accommodated the spy’s request to install that seat with the little yellow duckies printed on it. And he did it himself.

During the visit the spies make lots of faces and snide remarks, and before they leave, they give the hotel manager their critique. Their subjective critique. Sure, it has numerical ratings for each category, but it also includes their own comments. We cringed when they told the owner of another hotel that they found his room décor lacking. He thought he had successfully put together rooms that were unique to his resort theme. Judging from the photos he showed, it looked like a pretty cool place.

Can you imagine what it would be like if every customer criticized your business using similar criteria? Yikes.

METHODS OF MYSTERY

We’re no strangers to mystery shops, we do them, too. And we also assume faux identities. In fact, we try to morph into the typical customers that you see every day. We’ve been well-dressed and complete slobs. We’ve been wealthy and cash-challenged. We’ve been nice and we’ve been downright self-absorbed. We’ve shopped with one of us in a wheel chair, a fat suit, and we even have professional make-up artists turn us into 70-somethings. When we can’t pull off a disguise, we hire someone who can. But we’ve never purposely set someone up with a ridiculous request. We believe that there is more to it than judging what a business is doing wrong.

Using a mystery shopper service is a good thing because it let’s you uncover how the average customer perceives your business. And we all know that the customer’s perception is our reality, whether we like it or not. Most mystery shoppers are hired by a shopper service to anonymously shop the business, make a purchase or a return, and then report back to the service on how they were treated. Mystery shoppers also rate the business on cleanliness, merchandise and merchandise presentation, policies, and more. Even how the telephone is answered. Good mystery shopping reports include more than just a numerical rating, they also include the shopper’s personal feelings about how they felt in the business.

Our mystery shopping report covers these areas: Exterior Appearance, Interior Appearance, Customer Service, Associate Abilities, Purchases, Refunds, and Overall Visit. We also include a demographic profile so that the mystery shoppers can describe the associates who helped them. You can hire a mystery shopping service, you can do it yourself, or ask your friends to objectively shop your business for you. You might even hire mystery shoppers on a temporary basis for pre-determined the length of time. Drop us an e-mail and we’ll send you more information about conducting your own mystery shops.

EVERYONE’S A MYSTERY

Our overall focus, of course, should be to assume that every customer who walks into your business is a mystery shopper. If you treat every customer equally well then you’ll have nothing to worry about. These five tips will help you set the focus:

1. Offer each customer a warm and sincere greeting. The sincere part is important; according the body language gurus, we take 55% of our cues from a person’s body language, 38% from their tone of voice, and only 7% from the words they use.

Instruct your associates to acknowledge each customer every time they encounter them. This acknowledgement might only be a smile and eye contact, but it makes the customer feel valued. Implementing our 7-Tile Rule - acknowledging each customer each time you come within seven floor tiles (7’) of each other - is always a good idea.

2. Offer to help each customer. You can smile and say hello, start a general conversation, or talk about product the customer might be interested in. A great ice breaker is to ask, "What brings you to see us today?" If the customer has a specific need at hand, they’ll tell you. If they are just there to learn more about what you do, they’ll let you know that, too.

3. Your store must be spotless, and your sales floor needs to be easy to shop. Make a list of closing duties that need to be completed each night before everyone leaves. Each night, take a copy of your closing list and assign someone to each task. And every morning make a 60-second pass through the store, noting anything that needs to be done before you unlock the door for business.

4. Unless they are talking about something that pertains to business, encourage your associates not to engage in idle conversation when customers are around. Customers do not care what you did on Saturday night. They do, however, care that you are discussing what you did on Saturday night in front of them.

5. Sincerely thank every customer for stopping by, letting them know that you are always here to help. Even if they left empty-handed. How they are treated determines whether they return in their time of need.

The bottom line is that every customer may not be a mystery shopper who is as picky as the Travel Spies, but they are definitely evaluating your store at each visit. The big question is this: will you pass their test?

COPYRIGHT KIZER & BENDER . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

New Year, New Attitude!

You may have heard Rich talk about three signs that hang in our office conference room:

When times are bad things change.

When times are good things change.

10 percent of your business changes every year.

Change is good – and important to your business – no matter how it finds you. It certainly found us.

After 18 years in the same offices we decided we needed a change. Okay, that isn’t entirely true. Our idea of change was buying new furniture and rearranging the joint; our landlord’s definition involved a new lease that was absolutely unsignable. Our only option was to move, and fast. We had to be out in less than 60 days.

Our old office was in a 100 year old, very cool (and haunted!) office building. We were surrounded by small business service providers; nice people but definitely non-creative types. The best time was when the Special Olympics team down the hall brought kids in to get ready for some event; otherwise, it was a pretty quiet place. This daily lack of stimulation was affecting our attitudes; we were in a rut and we knew it, so if we had to move, it wasn’t going to be to a similar office environment.

We wanted to stay in St. Charles but we wanted to be where all the action is, so that meant being downtown. (A little St. Charles trivia: in 2011 it was named the best city in America to live in by Family Circle Magazine. We stumbled upon it when we stuck a pin in a map right between the two cities where we live. Voila! St. Charles.) We looked at plenty of spaces that we loved but couldn’t afford, took a deep breath, and kept on looking. And then, almost by accident, we found the perfect space, in a great location, with a private entrance and floor to ceiling windows. Or maybe it found us; the space had been empty for over a year. Before the ink was dry on our new tenant-friendly lease, two other companies tried to grab it, too.

We decided that we were going to throw away everything in our storage room. We hadn’t looked at most of it in years anyway. In the office, we tossed old files, video tapes – junk we didn’t need. And we sold our big cherry office suites in favor of sleek new furniture.

One of the joys of owning or running your own business is that you can make positive changes whenever you want. That’s the easy part; the hard part is deciding to do it. The other hard part is convincing your staff that sometimes in order to grow your business change is necessary.

In our travels we’ve visited well run stores, and we’ve visited stores where things have gotten a little out of hand. We’ll never forget the retailer who had three absolutely rotten associates on her team, but was afraid to confront them about their bad behavior. Other associates complained, customers complained, and she had witnessed several nasty incidents herself. But she was afraid to let them go for a number of reasons, one of which was “What would I do without them?”

Sigh.

This retailer needed positive change and she needed it fast. We said, “You cannot afford to be afraid of the people who work for you. They work for you.” We needed to convince her of the damage these employees were doing to her business, because that was exactly what was happening.

Several years ago we had the opportunity to conduct an in-store study.  We interviewed each of the store’s associates and made a list of those we felt had a positive attitude about their jobs, and a list of associates we felt were on the negative side.  Next, we chose three associates with positive attitudes, and two who were just the opposite.  We asked the store owner to assign these five associates to work together in the same department.  Three weeks later we returned and interviewed the five associates again to see if their differing attitudes would affect one another. In this phase of the experiment we were happy to find that the positives won – the two negative associates had substantially improved their attitudes. But the experiment wasn’t over yet.

Next we reversed the chemistry and placed three negative attitudes with two positive attitudes in the same department.  At the end of this three week study, the associates who started out with a positive attitude had crossed over to the dark side.  But our study wasn’t finished yet.

In the third phase, the store owner assigned three positive sales associates to work with three negative sales associates. All things being equal, we waited to see what would happen.  At the end of three weeks time we had six associates with much less than positive attitudes, proving that people with negative attitudes are likely to have a more powerful effect on others as those who think positively.

Yet, even in stores where positive attitudes prevail, sometimes things just don’t feel all that positive. You may have noticed how “up” your associates are on days when the sales floor is packed. On busy Saturdays, associates are engaged, customers are happy, and you’re selling lots of stuff. But on a slow Tuesday afternoon, you’re likely to find that everyone is just a little less enthusiastic.

What’s the difference? Actions drive attitudes. If you find your associates dragging their feet or feeling lethargic on slow days, then assign tasks and responsibilities that will keep them busy when they’re not helping customers. You’ll find that their attitudes will improve. You can’t change a person’s attitude, but you can control their actions, and that action will fire up attitudes.

You want to talk change? If you own or manage the store, the attitude of your company and all who work there, falls directly in your lap. Your store has your personality. So be the daily example, the positive attitude everyone can count on. When you walk onto your sales floor, shine. New year, new attitude! Make some changes. Get organized; kick the negatives to the curb, and good things will happen in 2012!

  

© KIZER & BENDER  .  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED