How Do You Cut Costs?

This WSJ.com article titled Luxury Chain Cuts the Flowers, Sends Out Wash at Some Hotels had me thinking about cost cutting and how to do so intelligently without negative repercussions on the business. Particularly the customer experience.  According to the article, the Four Seasons uses as its barometer whether the decision will affect the customer service experience.

The result for the Four Seasons: laundry is being outsourced, high-end restaurants may close on slow days and opulent, over-the-top flower arrangements may simply disappear.

I will miss the flowers, but I've often been concerned about  the wastefulness of them given how little time I spend in a hotel lobby. Empty restaurants aren't all that enticing to dine in. As long as the laundry is clean, where it happens is irrelevant to me.  Right?

However, the Four Seasons quickly halted an experiment to combine concierge and check-in duties at dead times [i.e., middle of the night] and refused other changes that hurt service.

In an age where the once-glamorous airline travel experience [remember those days?] now has us jammed tighter than sardines in flying tin cans yet requires us to bring on board pillow, blanket, food and drink while charging us for both checked and carry-on bags, I find it admirable and encouraging to hear of a company using the customer experience as the ruler for cost cutting decisions.

We definitely live in challenging times. But, why not use these times to rethink paradigms, reassert what's important and reinvent our customer retail experience?  Don't you think customers appreciate intelligent yet practical decisions that respect customers?

How do you determine how to cut costs?

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Image credit:
Hotel Bel Air Lobby Flowers originally uploaded by Al_HikesAZ.