Louie Gravance

I am deeply passionate about employee engagement. During my time at Disney World, it was both an honor and a responsibility to train and motivate tens of thousands of cast members around a shared narrative. While many of the techniques I used back then remain effective, others have evolved. Just as our customers have changed, so have the needs and expectations of our employees, necessitating new methods of engagement.

Today, neither your customers nor your employees want to be mere co-stars in your brand’s “show.” Instead, they seek to have their actions—whether through purchases or performance—reflect their own successes as well as those of your organization. They aspire to be heroes of their own stories. Is it possible to align everyone’s individual needs and goals with a common purpose? Absolutely, and I’m here to show you how.

Let’s delve into the four key quadrants of an engaged work culture:

Story: Reflect on this—have you been focusing on what you want your employees to do, or on what you need them to be? They will commit to your story as long as it clearly benefits them and defines their role within that narrative.
Language: This was the silver bullet in Disney’s training success. Achieve clarity, consistency, and discipline in your internal communications.
Behaviors: I will equip your team with the seven most crucial actions to become and remain engaged.
Recognition: Are you recognizing achievements based on what your customers or clients desire, or based on your own objectives? The way we recognize excellence is one of our most powerful tools and often the most overlooked.

Your organization can unite around a collective narrative. I’m eager to guide you through this transformative journey.

When a service employee asks the question, “What’s in it for me,” the honest and correct response is EVERYTHING.”Your team members deserve to know that an investment OF themselves is an investment IN themselves.

This is not always an easy message to convey and convince your staff that “great service serves the server first.”

Let me Louie it for you.

Just as he convinced and inspired thousands of cast members at Walt Disney World on their first day; let’s illustrate to your employees how looking for opportunities to create magic for a customer can transcend their careers and lives.

When a WOW moment in customer service takes place it doesn’t happen only for the customer, it occurs for both, simultaneously. Inspiring your team to make that connection is the single, greatest tool for maintaining a culture of service excellence. It has been Louie’s pleasure re-ignite the passion for service excellence with bankers, nurses, claims adjusters, casino workers just to name a small few.

This power-talk explores what a WOW moment looks, sounds and feels like and why delivering them is good for everyone involved.

Every participant will come to understand that every customer interaction is an opportunity. An opportunity to define, not just what they’re willing to do, but what they’re willing to be.

ALL organizations are constantly engaging their internal and external customers in a NARRATIVE of sorts. Regardless of what anyone is selling or providing, a story is conveyed through every single transaction, involving every single sense we possess. This narrative drives everything from customer expectations to employee satisfaction and even your very BRAND ESSENCE.

• What do we look like?
• What do we sound like?
• What do we smell like?
• What do we feel like?

Since all of your team members are telling a story with every transaction, shouldn’t it be the story you want to convey to your customers? Every day? Every transaction?

For over 40 years Louie has appeared on radio, network television, film, stage, in theme parks, as well as worked with corporate trainers in medicine, retail, foods, manufacturing, automakers, insurance companies to name just a few. They are all, at their core, show business.

This is a lively and comedic talk that can be customized to your event and purpose.

This workshop is the perfect companion piece with the keynote, “SERVICE is a SUPERPOWER!” We further explore the delivery of “magical” service moments consistently through the use of ten basic skills.

Serving with INTENTION, and serving with VISION are just two of the skills covered in this deep-dive into the practical application of the Disney service principles.
Participants will:

1. Learn ways of identifying the narrative of your business.
2. Create an intention statement aimed at supporting the goals of your event.
3. Isolate keywords that ground your customers’ experience.
4. Learn a fun exercise they can implement with their staff called, “Good Show/Bad Show.
5. Create an action plan for performance improvement.
6. Laugh a lot.

Aimed at leaders and managers tasked with modeling and inspiring service excellence, participants come away with a training template for sharing what they’ve learned back home.

Healthcare professionals of all types are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted from over two years an unrelenting pandemic. Some experts have even dubbed their condition as a type of post-traumatic stress of disorder caused by an overload of patients, high death rates, personal danger, and ever-shifting safety guidelines. Perhaps it would be helpful to look at things a different way. Isn’t it time to remind and re-enforce the superpowers healthcare workers have to create “magical service moments” that far exceed the significance of a theme park experience? In fact, aren’t these moments happening countless times a day and never recognized? Author, speaker and former training designer for Walt Disney World, Louie Gravance asks the question, “What would ‘Disneyfied healthcare’ look and feel like? And what would it feel like to provide it?” This humorous and uplifting session explores ways healthcare teams can rediscover their service superpowers and the impact they provide endlessly to patients and co-workers alike. Louie suggests the Disney cultural template of following the P.L.A.N.

Purpose

Language

Actions

Narrative-Shared

As he says in his book, SERVICE is a SUPERPOWER-Lessons Learned in a Magic Kingdom, “Every time we delight a guest or patient it makes us, the service provider, immeasurably stronger.”