Go and see the magic for yourself.
Since 2019 Eric and I have been looking to Disney in general, and specifically the guest experience at Walt Disney World, as a standard for a level of service which we strive to show to anyone who visits Lake Charles Toyota. Disney’s philosophy at its core is laser focused on the experience of their guests. They are committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure that those guests are delighted by every interaction they have with a Disney cast member, and to finding new and creative ways to deliver that experience each time. We feel that this philosophy very closely aligns with what has always remained one of our core values across the three decades we have been in business; the desire to treat every customer, vendor, and employee as though they were honored guests in our own homes.
We also feel that there is great synergy between Lake Charles Toyota, Disney, and Toyota Motor Company, as we all believe that our guests are our greatest asset and should be treated as such, and that there is no higher honor than having someone choose to spend their money with you.
Before we go forward I want to go back a bit and touch on that synergy, to help you understand where all this is coming from. The embrace of the Disney philosophy isn’t a sea change in strategy or an epiphany we have had recently, it’s an evolution of ideas we’ve been embracing for decades. There’s no better way to emphasize to the “Showtime, Thank You, Next” philosophy than to piggy-back off the ideas of a mind-bogglingly successful company that calls its employees cast members and color codes its facilities so they can know whether or not they’re “on stage.” Another maxim you have been hearing from us for decades is “Timeliness, No Defects, and Caring.” Our experience with this trio of ideas goes back to the launch of Toyota’s Signature Program, a framework specifically intended to help a dealership script each interaction its customers have with its staff to be the best experience it can be. I sincerely feel that although the past CEOs of Disney don’t reference it in their books (yes, I’ve read them all) there has got to be somebody there who has heard Horst Schultz’s presentation on his gleaning of these philosophies from his experience as a hotelier, because I’ve never experienced an organization that more obviously invests all their resources on delivering those ideals than Disney. The Ritz Carlton does it professionally, Disney does it passionately.
Once we re-discovered the magic of Disney for ourselves as adults and realized the impact it could have on our leaders and this company, we realized that there was no reason to reinvent the wheel when we could send our people there to experience it for themselves… more on going and seeing for yourselves later.
Back to the here and now… at Lake Charles Toyota we strive day after day, year after year to put these principles into practice wherever possible to deliver a guest experience that sets our organization apart from our competitors and creates a happy and fiercely loyal customer base. But it doesn’t start with the guest experience, it starts with the employee experience. Delivering an employee experience consistent with these principles and fostering a workplace populated with passionate and loyal staff members who have internalized these guest-experience-focused philosophies is a critical and integral step towards delivering the quality of service we desire.
Towards that end, we have developed this employee incentive and enrichment program focused around the Walt Disney World guest experience. It’s one thing for us to tell our staff what type of service we want to deliver. It’s another thing to show it to them. Having experienced the magic ourselves already, we wanted to develop a way to help our extended Toyota family experience it as well. As I said earlier, there is a great synergy between our philosophies and those of Disney and Toyota.
To bring a Toyota principle into the mix, you may recall the phrase “Genchi Genbutsu” from your initial onboarding videos… or you may not. No hard feelings if you don’t. Genchi Genbutsu is a component of the Toyota Way which translates literally to “the real place” or “the real thing” and in common parlance it means that there is no substitute for experiencing something yourself. On the factory floor they use that principle to encourage their managers to go out into the workplace and see what factors are influencing the quality and speed of production. Here at Lake Charles Toyota, our factory floor is the showroom and the service drive. We want you to be able to experience first hand the quality of service we want on our factory floor.
The “Be Our Guest” program is our way of giving our staff an experience that their families will remember fondly for years, and also will expose them to what we mean when we say the “Disney Experience". We know that once you come home having gone and seen this for yourself, you’ll understand what we mean when we say it, and you’ll have a keener sense of how to deliver it to our customers.
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Corey Tarver
General Manager
