While the average banker may not be ready to don mouse ears, there’s still an awful lot he or she could learn from the Walt Disney Co., said Bob Spina, a program facilitator at the Disney Institute, the company’s business training school.

True, banks lend money and Disney entertains. Yet there are also important similarities, said Spina at a Monday workshop entitled “Quality Service, Disney Style.”

“You are trying to deliver great service to your customers and we’re trying to do the same.”

Bank of America and Banco Popular have sent employees to the Disney Institute for training, as well as finance companies such as WFS Financial and AmeriCredit, Spina said.

The Institute offers on-site training at Disney World so that businesses can apply its systems and strategies to their own organizations. Whether they are dealing with budget constraints, scheduling problems or demanding customers, banks will relate to Disney’s story, Spina said. “Most of the challenges you have in the banking world, we have at Disney.”

Like the typical bank, Disney is profit-driven, faces stiff competition and has to deal with operational challenges. “A lot of guests visiting our parks think we wave that magic wand and everything is great,” Spina said. “But what you don’t see is behind the scenes.”

Disney, which calls its employees “cast members,” has great cast members, good ones and ones that are bitter about everything, with budgeting, scheduling, outsourcing and downsizing issues, Spina said. There are 19 different unions and 11 collective bargain agreements. Even Mickey’s a Teamster.

“It’s a real company,” Spina said. “We have 55,000 people here. And behind the scenes, when we pull the curtain aside, it’s crazy. Hopefully what you see on stage -- in what we call our ‘guest areas’ -- is a great experience.”

To produce that experience, Disney has mapped out a “Guest Compass,” which collects customer information in four areas: needs, wants, stereotypes and emotions. The company’s service standards then try to meet metrics based on that information. The standards revolve around safety, courtesy, show – Disney’s presentations – and efficiency.

For banks, Spina said, security and accuracy might replace safety, but courtesy and efficiency remain common threads.

The Disney Institute was founded in 1986, after Disney World received an appreciative profile in Tom Peter’s popular book, In Search of Excellence. Other corporations asked Disney to train their own people in the Disney style. “We would say, ‘We don’t do that,’” Spina recalled. “But then after a while we said, ‘Maybe we can do that.’”

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