Imagine you are hosting a party for 20 people in your home. You would make each person feel special by talking to them individually and then catering to each one’s individual needs. Now let’s expand the number of guests to the amount of people who visit one of your customer service locations on a normal day. Treating each one of those visitors like a personal guest becomes more challenging. Exponentially expand that number to 100,000+ and you have the amount of guests Disney tries to personally meet and greet on a busy day in the Magic Kingdom.

Guests have told Walt Disney World that they want cast members to make them feel special. To do that, Disney has embraced an ‘in-your-home’ strategy. In Disney’s world, visitors are not customers. They are guests visiting the cast members’ home. The warm, homey feeling that results builds emotive connectivity between cast and guest.

Personal greetings for 100,000+ people are, obviously, impossible. But you can, as Disney does, apply tactics that make the hosting duties more intimate and connective. One simple example is character experiences. Most guests, for instance, want to meet the Disney characters, especially Mickey Mouse. The numbers are, unfortunately, daunting. If the park is open, for instance, for 15 hours a day (135,000 minutes), and each guest family of four takes two minutes per visit with Mickey Mouse, two Mickey performers could, working overlapping shifts, conduct 450 visits each for a total of 1,800 guests per performer. Accommodating all 100,000 guests would require 56 Mickey performers.

Disney instead schedules regular visibility offerings—opening ceremonies, public meet and greet areas, stage shows, parades—that allow many guests to believe they have visited Mickey. Character performers leaving meet and greet sets are also taught to turn and wave before exiting. Many a disappointed child has been placated, and even left happy, because Mickey turned and waved at them.

Additionally, Disney will, using a strategy of “representative guests,” place individual families and guests in various daily events. All the guests then relate to the chosen family and feel like they too are being honored. As we learned in previous MIC Key Snaps, Disney involves representative guests in its opening ceremonies and flag retreats. As the snap accompanying this article demonstrates, Disney also features a family of the day in its parades. Disney also identified those situations where cast members and guests meet and established Touch Point Tools to effectively orchestrate those interactions.

The point is not to suggest that you, in your business, do exactly what Disney does. It is to suggest that if Disney, with its huge number of guests to meet and greet, can figure out ways to personalize the customer experience, you can too.

Perhaps you could ...

• Involve customers in ceremonial events
• Identify interactive elements that children will become engaged with (pleasing the child pleases the parent)
• Standardize greeting, thank yous and phrases for other common interactions
• Train your staff to read, and comment on, customer hats, etc. (IE-man wearing a sports team hat, “How is the team doing this year?)

Whatever methods you employ, make your customers feel special. They are, after all, the reason you exist.