Seven Steps to Enhance Your Customer Service Ethic

We arrived at our hotel in Pilsn, Czech Republic, to a warm greeting and a cold champagne. The hotel was farther from the city’s historic center than we had thought and the current heat wave made the un-air conditioned rooms not so appealing. We took a deep breath, headed back to the front desk and delicately suggested that the hotel was just not for us.

The reaction of the manager was totally unexpected.

She apologized and asked if she could reserve a hotel closer to the historic area. Then she asked if she could call a taxi for us; when it arrived, she gave us a voucher to cover the taxi fare to the other unrelated hotel.

Talk about customer service!

And then I think of a recent visit to a grocery store where at checkout, the clerk didn’t acknowledge me at all while scanning my purchases. She pointed to the debit card machine when it was time to pay and handed me the receipt—all without saying a word.

These are two extremes of customer service. So what exactly do customers expect from travel professionals? And the even bigger question: Are you up to providing it?

Here are seven points to ponder.

1. Protocol every client and track every incident.

Create a customer service protocol—an official procedure for everyone to follow. This sets the tone for your business, allows for updates and documentation of incidents as they arise, and provides a platform to train your staff.

Include as many situations as possible: phone and email etiquette (how long should a client be kept on hold, how long should a client wait for a reply), how to respond to complaints, how to deal with errors you’ve made, how to handle difficult people, etc. The more clients and the longer you’ve been in business, the more valuable a protocol becomes; you can easily review how you handled a tricky situation five years ago because, guess what? The client is back again!

2. Greet your future.

Greeting a client—whether in person, on the phone, or through email or texting—establishes a relationship. Until you know more about the client’s way of communicating (see “social mirroring” below), the emphasis should be on a proper, friendly hello, a real or virtual smile and handshake, addressing the client by name (Mr. or Ms.—at least until they say “Just call me Betty”), and establishing a level of comfort for the client to want to entrust you with his or her travel plans.

3. Beware information over- and underload.

Travelers are looking for expertise that adds value, while at the same time saving them time, money, and avoidance of the inevitable mistakes that would occur if they attempted to make their own arrangements.

But travelers have different levels of “need” and understanding. Information overload results when you don’t properly qualify your clients and end up spoon-feeding them information they probably discovered on Google a long time ago. On the other hand, information underload dangerously assumes that clients have done their homework and therefore omits critical details (e.g. travel documentation, travel insurance, possible upgrades for accommodations and flights).

Either of these situations will result in a negative customer experience and challenge the goal of making each experience the prologue for the next. Instead, interview your clients to find out their travel history, how they research, what they dream of doing and how you will work together to accomplish this.

4. Talk to the hand.

When a client has a complaint…take it to heart. Listening is one of the strongest skills a travel consultant can possess. Remember when you complained to your cell phone company or cable provider and after all your time and effort you received a reply full of meaningless motherhood statements? It’s easy to project how your clients will react when you do the same. Complaints are the portals to future business! Solidify customer positivity by breaking down the complaint and responding to each sentence or paragraph…and do so in the spirit of conflict resolution: Strive for the fairest and most empathetic way to deal with the situation.

5. Use social mirroring.

My email opened with “Hi Jane” and I signed it “Regards, Steve.” Jane responded with no salutation and signed it ‘j’.  

Many clients who use social media and texting have their own language of text-talk: jargon, shorthand, and emoticons that keep “conversations” minimally precise. Mirroring your client’s preferred means of social communication is one way of cementing the customer service relationship. A 140-character Tweet may work for some, but not all.

6. Be human.

The one characteristic that separates internet technology from travel consultants is humanity, that unique combination of compassion, empathy, emotion, and feeling. There are thousands of travel apps for everything from finding a private jet to tracking the Wildebeest migration in the Serengeti—but travel consultants excel as human travel apps. They too compile information that adds value to the travel experience.

Remember also that while travel advice sites, discount hotel, vacation, and flight sites may project an image of helpful, friendly savings, they are based on ratings by mysterious unknowns—many of them paid by the company itself. Your advice and counsel, based on your reliable (and credible) experiences and those of your clients, take the customer service equation to the next level, based on trust, confidence, accuracy—and humanity.

7. Engage your clients.

While some travel speakers, writers, and trainers use the term CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to cover everything from constructing a database to qualifying clients, the 2.0 version of this is CRE—Customer Service Engagement. Management implies a one-way structured approach to handling clients. Engagement implies a mutually beneficial relationship that is value-driven, customer focused, and long-term.

And that’s exactly what a healthy customer-service ethic should include.

Steve Gillick is the Active Ingredient at Talking Travel, http://www.talkingtravel.ca, a consultancy in Toronto, Canada that specializes in writing and speaking about destinations, niche markets and travel trends. Contact Steve at: steve@talkingtravel.ca.