Experts of Experience
You’re Overthinking Customer Service! (Luxury Hospitality Gets It Right)
Wed, 29 Jan 2025
What does it take to deliver unforgettable guest experiences at scale?Shannon McCallum, VP of Hotel Operations at Resorts World Las Vegas, shares her incredible journey from a high school hospitality job to leading one of the most iconic destinations in the industry.In this episode, Shannon breaks down how her team leverages technology like mobile check-in and AI while maintaining the personal touch that builds loyalty. She also dives into why empowering teams, fostering employee engagement, and adapting to change are essential for success in today’s fast-paced hospitality world.--Key Moments: 00:00 Meet Shannon McCallum, VP of Hotel Operations at Resorts World Las Vegas02:05 Shannon's Journey: From High School to Hospitality Leader05:12 Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale07:58 Empowering Teams for Exceptional Service23:08 The Role of Technology in Modern Hospitality38:50 Employee Engagement: The Key to Customer Satisfaction47:18 Advice for Customer Experience Leaders –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: Who is Shannon McCallum?
People come to Las Vegas, especially to celebrate. It might be a birthday. It could be an anniversary. It could be a divorce party or a bachelorette.
We get it all here. Hospitality is one of the best industries to learn from when it comes to customer experience, no matter the industry that you are in.
It's really about using the data that you have in order to be able to supplement that guest experience and be able to look for permanent fixes and not band-aids.
There's always going to be things that happen. But if we recover well, then that's where loyalty sprouts from.
Loyalty surpasses brand. It surpasses location. I've been in three different hotels on the Strip and guests will follow people. They trust that you are going to ensure that they have a great experience. We can't be complacent. Our world is changing so quickly around us. The competition is gearing up. So we always have to be looking to see how we can better the guest experience.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to have Shannon McCallum on the show. She is the vice president of hotel operations with Resorts World Las Vegas, as well as the global board director with the Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals Association.
Shannon has over 30 years of experience studying and transforming customer experience within the hospitality industry and has been named the top 25 hospitality executives to watch in 2025 by the International Hospitality Institute. Personally, I believe that hospitality is one of the best industries to learn from when it comes to customer experience, no matter the industry that you are in.
So today we're going to explore how leading hospitality players like Shannon are really creating customer loyalty, leading empowered teams and creating wow moments at scale. Shannon, so great to have you on the show.
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Chapter 2: What shaped Shannon's hospitality career?
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
So I want to kick it off by taking a little bit of a trip down memory lane. You first started working in hospitality as a high school student. So you've literally been in this space for pretty much your entire career. And I'm curious to know if there was a specific experience that really shaped the way that you view the hospitality industry as you've gone through your career.
Lauren, you're 100% correct. I started very young in high school working in hotels. I had a luxury hotel just down the road from where I grew up. And when I was 16, I had really a memorable moment that stuck with me through my career. Our property was hosting what was called the Commonwealth of Nations.
And we had individuals so notable like Margaret Thatcher, the Sultan of Brunei, Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney. all gathered at our property. And it was remarkable looking around the room to see these people that I'd only ever seen on the news before actually sitting in our establishment.
And I realized at that young age just how amazing hospitality can be to be able to interact with individuals like these. And none of my friends were doing anything nearly as cool as that at their age.
I mean, I can definitely imagine that that was an extremely formative experience. And how has that then kind of shaped your view of the industry as you've moved on to build and grow and lead some very large hotels that are really aiming to provide an excellent experience? What have you taken?
What are the insights or lessons maybe that have really stood out to you as you've moved on through your career?
That time in my life was actually very formative for me because I really was set off in a whole different path. Hospitality wasn't even on my radar. It was a means to get me through school. And when I was graduating from college and I was on my way to law school, taking my LSATs, I realized that I loved the passion and the integration and working with people that hospitality brought to me.
So it really changed the direction of my career and And also gave me so much insight. And they say that we're so lucky to find your passion. And I found it so young and many people work their entire lives and they don't get that opportunity. But what it brought to me was that interaction with people and that ability to work with people.
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Chapter 3: How do luxury hotels create personalized experiences at scale?
And making sure that our team is not treating the guests the same because they all have different needs. Also, some of our guests may save six or eight months to be able to come here and make this a memorable experience. So making sure that the team understands how much control they have on providing that experience. I also would say training is incredibly important.
Making sure that you're not just throwing people out on the desk and letting them sink or swim. We have a very elaborate training program here to make sure that our team members are 100% prepared before they get out onto the desk. In addition, we assign them a mentor.
And that's something that is really a good practice to do so that they always have someone that they feel comfortable asking questions that they know are approachable. And they can they can balance different situations they may have off of them in order to be able to have success with the guests standing in front of them.
It's all about the team. It's about the team of people who are interacting with that customer day in and day out. And you mentioned something that I think is just so vitally important for client facing leaders is really empowering your team to know what decisions they can make.
And so can you give us some examples of how your team is set up so that they know I can do this and take an opportunity to make a customer's day with kind of some predetermined boundaries?
Absolutely. Empowerment is critical, especially, again, in a volume operation where the manager can't be with every individual checking in at the same time. So giving your team the ability to be able to have perhaps up to a certain dollar value is that they can make a decision to be able to solve that situation while it's right in front of them.
The most important thing for guests when they're looking for some fix to a situation that they're having is having it done quickly. And then they can get back to enjoying themselves and enjoy their vacation with us. If the issue is not resolved and they have to wait for a manager because that individual doesn't have empowerments, it can make that problem last for their entire stay.
It's really important as well that we solve their problem while they're staying with us because that way not only can they enjoy, but it also is more efficient and less costly often. for the hotel to make it work during the stay than having to deal after the stay where the guest has lost their trust in a property because we didn't follow up the way that we needed to.
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Chapter 4: What role does technology play in modern hospitality?
Delays impact the trust of the customer. When something takes a long time, when the person that you're speaking to, when the person the customer is speaking to is not able to make a decision, where they have to go back to someone else, you start to degrade the customer's trust minute by minute.
And I think it's just so vital that organizations, again, in any industry, think about the cost of that long-term decrease in trust. Because like you said, we want to close something up as quickly as possible so that that guest can then move on to having a good experience. We need to do that quickly. And I know I've taken the Ritz-Carlton customer service training in the past.
As an example, they have a $2,000 amount for each employee. And of course, that's a lot of money and not every business can do that. But just that fact of you are able to spend this money to make sure that something gets resolved, you are empowered to resolve it. enabling employees to do that builds trust and drives revenue in the long run.
And we just have to think beyond that initial dollar amount and really look at the total lifetime value of a customer.
I can't agree more. And again, it's, It's about building the confidence in your team that is on the front lines. And when they know that you're standing in their corner, no matter what the decision is. And again, we shouldn't Monday morning quarterback and tell them that they should have done this, this and this.
But we can let them know in the future, there's a few other things that you could offer in order to be able to resolve a situation and make it comfortable for them. And really build them up and thank them for taking the time to work with that guest to resolve their problems.
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I'm curious to know, how do you run your meetings with your team? Just in terms of having them, one, be comfortable to make decisions and then also learn from their peers. I'm just, I can tell that you're such an impactful leader and I'm just curious to know what are some of your methods, tips, tricks so that our listeners can learn from you?
You know, we're very fortunate to have a great leadership team at the property and we always track all of the great comments that our team members have. And we have a practice of posting those great comments up on the wall. So the individuals say at our front desk can read what other people did in order to take care of our guests.
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Chapter 5: How important is employee engagement for customer satisfaction?
And I think learning from others is huge because you don't always get all of the different variety of items that come to you to be able to learn from. So being able to do that and saying, oh, I didn't know I could do that. Oh, this is great. I can take that path. It really helps to be able to have that variety. We spend a lot of time.
Chapter 6: What advice does Shannon have for customer experience leaders?
really now in the social stage, looking at social reviews, feedback that we get on Google or TripAdvisor or other ways of communication that our guests have to be able to not only look at the individual comments, but we have a guest relations team that actually tracks them and reports on them so that we can also see maybe if there's trends in in what's happening.
Are there common things that our guests are not happy with? Are there common things that our guests are happy with? And then we look at root causes for those in order to be able to create a long-term solution that will fix the majority of what the issue may be.
So it really is a great way to analyze not only the amount of dollars that we're spending on recovery should we need to, but then also is it going up or down year over year? Or month over month. And did we have a unique issue that maybe affected our guests in the short term that won't repeat?
So it's really about using the data that you have in order to be able to supplement that guest experience and be able to look for permanent fixes and not band-aids.
It's like continuous learning and enabling our teams to continuously learn and gain insights and inspiration around what they can be doing differently. What's working, what's not working, what are people liking, what are people not liking? It's so, so, so valuable to gather those insights from all the different channels and bring them back so that that client facing team can really learn more.
from what has happened. Because it is so often that we help a customer or a client and we don't actually know what their outcome was or what they're feeling about it was later. And that feedback, if we can help our teams get that feedback, it will really support them in their growth. And speaking of growth, I wanted to talk about training.
I know you mentioned you have a very robust training program for your team. Tell us a little bit about what are the key components of that training program?
Well, we're a big property. We've got 50 restaurants and lounges. We've got a loyalty program, actually, too, because we're with Hilton as well as our Genting Rewards. So there's a lot of information to take in. Our training is about three weeks for our new team members. And we have speakers that come in from different areas and
to be able to share their knowledge about all of the different programs and the food and beverage outlets and safety and security to really make it as engaging as possible. And as well, we do have technology training, which allows them to know how to work the functionality that we have. But then we move into like that modeling that I talked about where
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