Derrick Ricca is a 25+ year veteran of the hospitality industry who has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality Group for the past 17 years. His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food. In this episode, Derrick discusses how he got into the hospitality field, why he believes you have to drop your ego to provide good customer service, what he feels makes the biggest difference in getting a group of people to implement and adapt to changes, how he gets a transient workforce to embrace the “environment” of the business, why he strives for a blend of work and life instead of balancing the two, what he’ll be speaking about at the Smart Customer Service Conference, and more!
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Transcript Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Now, as someone who wants you and your organization to have a voice of influence, I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best that you can for the people that you served. So over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with the experts who will be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at, it’s called Smart Customer Service in Washington, DC April 29th to May 1st 2019. And each of these interviews will feature insights related to a different aspects of customer service. So you can find out more the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes. Today, we have Derrick Ricca with this. Derrick is a 25 plus year veteran of the hospitality industry. He has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality for the past 17 years. His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food; not in any particular order (he says). Derrick is married with two sets of twins, which keep him actively coaching sports year round and trying his best to relearn algebra which I completely understand.
Andrea: Derrick, it’s great to have you here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!
Derrick Ricca: Thank you so much, Andrea.
Andrea: Derrick, I have to tell you this. This is a running joke in my house. It’s not a joke though. I worked in a hotel in college for probably about a year. So whenever we go to a hotel, I tell my husband things or I would tell him things when we first got married about “Well, we probably do it this way because of this or that sort of things.” And I would share with him some of the things that I’ve learned and he kind of makes fun of me for thinking that I know what I’m talking about just because I was at the front desk of a hotel. But I think it’s a big industry. It’s an important industry. So tell me, Derrick, how did you get involved in the hospitality industry?
Derrick Ricca: Well, you know, the first thing you can do is you can tell your husband, “You probably do understand what’s going on.”
Andrea: That’s right.
Derrick Ricca: Yes, the front lines of a hotel, especially when you’re a front desk agent, that’s one of the more challenging jobs that are out there. So anytime that you see a really good front desk agent, you know, you can tell that that person has a lot of qualities that most people don’t possess. And so you should be very proud of yourself because a year of doing that is many more years in other professions.
Andrea: Thank you. I will definitely do that.
Derrick Ricca: Yeah, and I kind of back toward by accident in the hospitality. It was never really a dream or a goal of mine. And what I did growing up was I battled my dad who was in sales and said “I don’t wanna go to sales.” He said, “Hey, you’d be perfect for sales.” And I’m like “I don’t wanna do that.” And for me, it was kind of one of those things where I had started a job working for a restaurant group and doing everything but food. And then I realized that, you know, I was a big fan of food and I was a big fan of selling and I was also a big fan of really making people smile. So I put all three of those together and I ended up interviewing at this hotel. And at the time, the hotels under construction and, you know, Kalamazoo was not really anything you jump up and down about, and the owner of the hotel said “Hey, this hotel is gonna be really something special.” I trusted him and 17 years later, it is really a special hotel. It’s funny to look back on it and say “Gosh, how did I ever end up here.” But it’s been a really fun journey.
Andrea: I love what you said about; you like to make people smile. Is that something that you’ve always noticed about yourself or where did that comes from?
Derrick Ricca: I think I’ve always been a people pleaser and those types of people belong in hospitality. If you really care about people and you have a little bit of empathy that you can spread around and you enjoy interacting, you know, hospitality is such a great career. And a few don’t enjoy that then that’s the last career you should probably get into.
Andrea: Have you _____ in making people smile?
Derrick Ricca: Yeah, and that’s the whole thing is you have to really kind of have something happen in your life where you can really appreciate people going out of their way to make your life better. Because a lot of times, in hospitality situations whether you’re a restaurant or a hotel or wherever you are at, it could be a retail situation. A lot of times, you’re not comfortable in that environment. It’s not your house. It’s not somewhere you’re used to. So a lot of times, people won’t go try out new restaurants because they don’t feel comfortable there. I’m just the opposite. I’m the person that would go to any dive bar or any dive restaurant just to kind of check it out. I think for me, it’s always been one of those things where, you know, I just enjoy life. I enjoy meeting people. I enjoy having conversations. I enjoy so many different opinions and so hospitality I guess was kind of made for what I like to do. And it’s kind of one of those things where as much as I have thought it in the past, I have been told, “Derrick, you’re kind of introverted but you’re kind of extroverted,” and it’s hard to really get out of it once you’re in it because it is really enjoyable.
Andrea: Well, there’s something really special about that feeling of knowing that the other person is better off because of you.
Derrick Ricca: Yeah. You know, to be good in customer service, it takes so many different things. You have to really be able to drop your ego. And if you can do that, you can really do some magical things in customer service because customer service has gotten harder and harder over the course of time. And people, you know, always talk about going into places and just having such horrible customer service. And I agree, you go into fast food or you’re going to some of these places where the employees are hard to come by and they’re always short staff and they’re trying to get people in there. Sometimes, they’re working with the younger group that doesn’t have the experience. And it’s really hard for somebody to come out of there and say “Gosh, I really just have a great experience customer wise. So, you know, it’s something that’s always kind of needled me a little bit where I just kind of have looked at it, felt it and said “OK, I need to embrace this and I somehow need to push a better feeling to those people so that when they leave the feel good.”
Andrea: You just mentioned that you have to be able to drop your ego. What is that look like for somebody who’s in customer service to really drop their ego, what do you mean by that?
Derrick Derrick: I think that, for me, it’s one of those things where I really learned to drop my ego by coaching youth sports. I know that’s sounds really strange but, you know, I’ve been lucky. I’ve got some kids that are pretty athletic. I’ve always been able to _____ the chips are down and they need to win a game and they come in and hopefully do something good. But I learned that that’s not always the best thing to do and that sometimes you have to put some faith in some kids that may not have that much talent or what so that they can grow and develop. So it’s one of those things where there’s a person, the best thing that I can is get as much knowledge as possible and go into a situation to help the consumer or the guest or whoever it is. Not brag and boost about what I know but try to help them and figure ahead of time “OK, where is this person going and how I can help them the best way possible?” So it’s little silly things that people do that make a big influence that you don’t realize. You know, I had a consumer the other day or guest come in the hotel and he wanted to go off property and he wanted to get pizza but he was a little older and he just wasn’t sure of himself. So I walked him down there. And for me, it wasn’t a big deal. It took about 10 minutes and we had a really good conversation on the way down. I dropped him off for some pizza and it was funny he came back to the hotel and he asked, “You know, I’d like to go back there again tomorrow, would you come there and have lunch with me?” For me, it really kind of felt good like “OK.” You know, I found exactly what this guy wanted and I put him in a place where he’s happy and he wanted to share that with me. So you know, I went back the next day and made new friends. So it’s kind of cool where, again, you can drop your ego and you can look at something and you can just understand like “Hey, I just want to help this person and I want to make their day more enjoyable.”
Andrea: It sounds like good. It’s not about you.
Derrick Ricca: It was funny, I remember in college, I took a course and the professor was big on servant leadership. And I never understood really what he was talking about even while I was in the class. And then as I got into the real world, you kind of look back at things that you’ve done in your past and you say “Well, OK, now it all makes sense.” You do things sometimes and it’s not about you, it’s about the situation. So there’s a lot of times in my life where I looked back on it and I put myself in situations that don’t necessarily benefit me but they have taught me a whole _____ lessons. So today, I went to the grocery store and I decided that I wanted to make my kids a fun dinner. So I was going to make them homemade mac and cheese and they really enjoy that and it’s a special treat. So I went to the grocery store looking for some truffle oil and I find some truffle oil, and the gentleman was actually stocking in that area. I looked at the price and it’s like $20 a bottle, and he knows like I am not going to pay $20 a bottle for truffle oil. So, you know, I told him “No, thanks. I appreciate you letting me know that you guys have this. This is really not what I’m looking for.” So I went shopping around the rest of the store, and he actually came and found me and he said, “You know, I totally forgot, we have our own house olive oils that we infused of flavors and there’s a truffle one and it’s only $5.” So it’s this huge bottle of truffle oil. And I just thought it was cool that the guy understood what I was going through and I understood what I was concerned about and then helped me. Because for me, you know, like I grew up working in grocery stores. And to this day, still people think I work in grocery stores because what happen is I come home from work and typically I’m dressed up from work in a hospitality and I usually have a suit on. Every time, I go to the grocery store, I usually take my tiles and I walk to the grocery store and I get my groceries. Well, there was one time where I was in a extreme amount of hurry going through the grocery store because my wife was home and she called me with the “Oh my God, we need milk.” And when you have four young children and you get a call “Oh my God, we need milk,” that is a “911 gotta get home.” So as I’m going through the store, I’m going towards the back of the store to get milk, and of course, I ran into a little lady who is so nicely asking me to get items off the top shelves. So I slowed down for a second and I understand “OK, I should do this.” And so I helped her get _____ top shelves. Then she proceeds to ask me if I know where Marsala wine is because she was making chicken Marsela. And where the wine was in the store, it’s not easy to find. It’s not in the wine and it’s not in the vinegars, they put it somewhere else. So I walked her to get this then she says, “I need to find this.” So literally for 20 minutes, I’m helping this lady go through the store. We say good bye. She says, thank you. She was so sweet. I go back to pick up the milk. I finally get the milk, go to the front of the store and I just had milk and I was in this line waiting. And I listened to the lady and she was checking out in the line next to me and she was telling the cashier about how this wonderful man helping her and the people at this grocery store are so very nice and he is such a nice man. And so at that point, I just kind of give _____ to myself and I thought “Gosh, I’m so glad I slowed down and I’m so glad that this grocery store is benefiting through my work.”
Andrea: Yeah, exactly. They were so glad that you stopped in that day.
Derrick Ricca: Yes. You know, it’s one of those things where I’ve run into people that I’ve worked with before and not knowing walking in the _____ or department store and they’re in front of me and they don’t hold the door. And working in hospitality, I didn’t kind of get after a little bit like “Hey dude!” And then they kind of understand and get through it but those one of those things where when you’re in hospitality it’s ingrained in you. And when somebody, like today, where the guy understood what I was feeling and was able to solve my solution. For me, it was a big deal like I thank him a lot and he said, “No, you don’t need to thank me.” I was like, “No, I do because that was really, really cool!”
Andrea: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. I love the story. So what exactly do you do? What’s your role or your job, your position that you do at the hotel?
Derrick Ricca: So my job is basically to fill the medium space in the hotel guest rooms. You know, we have 40 guest rooms and we’ve got about 50000 square feet of meeting space. Typically a hotel that size has about 20000 square feet of meeting space. So having that much more meeting space is something that obviously needs to be filled. So my job is to get people to stay in the hotel to have meetings, holiday parties do all that. And for us, it’s been a lot easier, I mean, when I first started there, it was not easy. And as time has going on, we just continually added better people. And last year, for the second time in the last five years, we won Renaissance National Hotel of the Year.
Andrea: Wow, congratulations! That’s really great!
Derrick Ricca: Thank you.
Andrea: You know, that’s an interesting point that you bring about that the people kind of change at a slow pace too. I’m assuming this based on what you just said but maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong. Is it hard to make big changes with like a current group of people and getting everybody to buy in to those things or that sort of thing? Does it help to just kind of waited out overtime and start to replace people or what kinds of things made those people better and better as you went along?
Derrick Ricca: You know, I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I think it’s getting a very good leadership group in and that makes the biggest difference where you have leaders that are compassionate and they’re trigging people with empathy, authentic, and they have high levels of integrity. And then it’s also one of those things where a few people that don’t fit and they’re not on the right seat on the bus, you either reorganize them or you find a new place for them. And we have a ton of employees that have been there for a long time and it’s a test on it to just really what a great organization we work for, but it’s really when you look at everything in how it works. We have managers that are leading by example. We have people that truly care. It’s just makes a big difference when you get good people and they’re all working together. You know, with hospitality, you have a very transient workforce. So for us, we’re in a college town, we have a lot of college employees and they don’t always stick around for more than two or three years. Some of them do and we have a number of them that we’ve promoted from within. So it’s a thousand little things. There’s no silver bullet and it’s not necessarily, you’re right, it’s not one big sweeping0 change. It’s so many little things.
Andrea: How do you help the transient workforce to embrace the DNA of your hotel and sort of be the kind of person that you want serving your guest, how do you do that?
Derrick Ricca: I think it starts off when we train our associate. You know, we put a little extra TLC into it. They have days amount of training before they even get out on the floor and engage with a customer or guest. I think they see a lot and they observe a lot and they see people doing things. I mean, that’s part of the big thing with customer service is. You have to actually see it in action. You can’t just teach it and expect people to do it. I think it’s basically, and I hate this word, I hate the word culture, because it’s so overused and sometimes misused. But it’s more of like an environment I think. And I think once people understand the environment of what we’re trying to do and you enjoy it and you’re working for the other people that you work with, I think that’s what changes that. I mean for me, you know, I’m the floor frontline service all the time and so I enjoy it because I love to be out there and I love to interact with our operations team. We have so many good people but it makes it fun like you enjoy when the hotel is really busy.
Andrea: You enjoy when it’s busy because why exactly?
Derrick Ricca: Yeah, you get certain energy from it. I mean, you’re working hard. It’s fast paced. It’s not stagnant. It’s always moving and it’s not predictable. It’s not easy, but you get this feeling of like, gosh, it’s really, really cool. You see so many people and you’re interacting and there’s so much going on and there’s so many moving pieces. And sometimes, you’re wondering like “How, did just happen, like how did we transition from a five person group to an 800 person group, like how does that physically happened?” It’s a fun environment to be in because it is a fast paced moving organism basically. It’s never boring. So I think that being on your toes and always having to be up on a stage performing for all of these people, you know, you really have to put your game on and pull up your boots and work hard.
Andrea: I like the way that you put that, the idea of being on stage. Is that something that you talk about the team that you have? How do you help them to think about that in terms of like you know when you’re with people on stage? How does that go for you?
Derrick Ricca: You know, we had that kind of discussion before where people were always watching. And it’s really kind of cool because what we’ve done is we’ve used tons of metrics but we’ve also taken in customer cards. So we get so many customers comments and we go through them and understand them so that it makes us better. Because there were things we’ve done in the past that have just been cleaned out stupid and you learned not to do those anymore. And then you talked to the guests more and they tell you “Hey, here’s really what we want.” And so for us that helped us become better customer ambassadors because we can do small things to make their stay better.
Andrea: Sure. That makes a lot of sense. OK, I know that you’ve mentioned your kids before and coaching, do you ever bring in your personal experience at home to be able to relate to how you want to do and you want your team to do customer service at work?
Derrick: Oh God yeah. You know, a lot of people say, you know don’t bring your home life to your work and vice versa. For me, I’ve never been one of those people that says, “Oh you gotta have this work-life balance. You have to do things a certain way.” For me, it’s always kind of work out where it’s been great. You know, if you work in a safe work environment where you have that feeling and it’s like “Gosh, I really belong working here,” it makes work a lot easier. But I’ve always been the type of person that says, instead of having work-life balance, why don’t you have a blend of work life. I’m not saying that you always have to bring your home life into work but I think sometimes it is good. I mean, there are times where I’ve had really good things happen to me outside of work and I bring that feeling into work and it just helps you perform in a better level. Now, you look at the opposite side of the road, of course, if you’re going through rough times, it’s hard when you have to go to work. But for us and to myself, I work with such a good team. But I’ve gone through some difficult times in my life and I’ve brought it to work and I’ve been helped out. And so, I think if you have that greater understanding of what you’re trying to do and those people around you have that, it makes it a lot easier. So yeah, I would say if you are doing while things are happy and things are good, bring those to work and share it with the people that you work with, your guest, your customers, or whoever you’re coming with, you know, who will appreciate that. It’s one of those things where people call my voicemail and leave a message and say “I really like your voicemail message,” and I laugh about it because I recorded it like six years ago and while I was recording it, one of my cube mates was trying to make me laugh so I’m kind of giggling on the message. And I never really listened to the message and I went back and listened to it and I was like “Oh, it makes sense.”
Andrea: Do you have any particular insights that have really hit you from home that you bring to work then? You want to share any of those?
Derrick Ricca: For me, I’m lucky because I was blessed with, you know, marrying somebody that really made my life better. And so I think having that support system at home has really helped me out a lot and I’ve been able to, as I said, dropped my ego with my wife and I’ve learned a lot from her. You know, there were times in the past where I may have offering a certain way and she’s able to kind of say, you know, you should do this or do that. Or it’s things that I can watch that she’s done and see how she’s handled things and then kind of applied that to my own life. So you know, I think about times in which she’s had to do things and she’s been immersed in all kinds of drama and she’s chosen not to go through and respond like I would. I would immediately say, “This is stupid,” or whatever the case was. You know, I’ve been able to really kind of look back and say “OK, now I understand why she didn’t do that.” And so it has helped me know when to just stop talking. But she also too is one of the other people that has helped me as far understanding when you’re having something good, share it. And when something’s bad, you can’t let it negatively influence you or really kind of change your mood. And it’s hard when you have two sets of twins that are all strong willed and they’re loud and they never stop, it’s sometimes is you get through the day and you just take the deepest breath possible. But sometimes you just have to understand like “Hey, this is the time in our lives. We’ll get through it and you have to just kind of enjoy it.”
Andrea: Love that! OK, Derrick, let’s talk about your session at Smart Customer Service, what are you talking about there?
Derrick: So each year, I’ve always have a fun topics. And my thing is, it’s always been important to me to go to these conferences and provide people to take something home with them. Because there are so many times where you go to conferences and you sit there and you go to breakout sessions and you listen and it’s good information but it’s not really applicable. You can’t physically or mentally take it home with you or make changes. So every year, I try to figure out something where somebody can look at it and have a little bit of inspiration to go into their work environment and make it better. So this year, really more the discussion is talking about how do you fix customer service and how do you provide good levels of customer service without really truly focusing on customer service? And what I mean by that is what are the ways that you set yourself off to provide better customer service to your guests, and a lot of it has to do with things that you don’t really think about. In our case, we have so many different things that have happened over the course of time that had been changed. One of the big things right now is technology, and technology is pushing, pushing all the time and that’s a big focal point, and it should be a big focal point of every single customer. I don’t care every single industry; I don’t care what customer you serve or what you’re doing. And so for us, there’s time where we have to look as an organization and say “OK, this is not about our guest or a customer, this is about us and how we do things. We need to change it so that we’re more customer centric and how do we do that?” So the best example is I actually went to a customer service conference about three or four years ago and I thought to myself “Gosh, do you what’d be easy right now is the hotel that I was at in DC and I won’t way which one it was, their customer service was lacking and ______.” And I was challenged because I needed some help and I didn’t know where to turn to. And I thought “Gosh, how great would this be if I could just text the front desk and they could then respond to it.” I didn’t want to call and feel stupid about my question, especially somebody that works in a hotel that should know all the answers. I brought that back to our hotel as well where a lot of our travelers, you know, the first thing they do when they check is they have their phones in their hands. And then the second thing they do is have their phone in their hands. So as soon as they unpack, they’re on their phones. So it’s a lot easier for them to just text, “Hey, I need some more towels or how do I turn the air up in the room?” So for us that’s a win-win situation if we can figure out how to incorporate that for our guest.
Andrea: Sure. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea there. I think the session will be very interesting. You bring a lot of great experience to this conversation and I thank you for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC.
Derrick Ricca: Yeah. I think you will have a very enjoyable time. It’s a good group, and every year I’ve gone, I’ve picked up some things and brought them home and I think it has helped out in my journey in customer service. So it’s a great conference.
Andrea: Awesome! Alright, if you would like to learn more about the Customer Service Conference, you can go to our website www.voiceofinfluene.net.
Derrick Ricca: OK!
Andrea: Thanks Derrick!