Recently I have become quite focused on the issues of customer trust -Â primarily I am saddened by the trend to take advantage of the consumer.
We are all consumers and customers of one or more products and brands and, yes, we make decisions based on some irrational quality of why we like one product over another.
But has the trust been lost?
The common way to riches seems to be, firstly, present yourself as a consumer focused service – then once you think you have that – to misuse that trust.
We can cite cases from Google to Airbnb’s recent faux pas as illustrations of this trend.
It seems to me that there is a series of assumptions that “sellers”, whether they are product owners or intermediaries, have in dealing with the customer:
- The customer is stupid and we need to tell him what he needs because he doesn’t really know. Eric Schmidt of Google is famous for making such an assertion in public.
- The customer doesn’t need to know and what he doesn’t know will not hurt him. Treating a customer like a mushroom is the best policy.
- The customer owes me a living.
- Customers will flock to anything new no matter what it is.
- Customers have short memories and forgive all the time.
Are there real customer lovers who have never strayed from being the customer advocate, that you can rely on?
There are companies out there that adhere to a strong customer focused set of principles – for example, in presenting the truth even when its bad, how they handle bad situations.
So, this is my search – find a true customer-loving business in the travel industry.
I am looking for companies who can demonstrate that they do go that extra mile, which don’t abuse their customers and will not knowingly break that that trust.
Two companies immediately come to mind. One is the UK retail store John Lewis Partnership. The brand’s slogan – Never Knowlingly Undersold – has underpinned a trust that extends throughout their business relationships. Southwest Airlines is the obvious example in travel.
If you can name a company or are one – then I want to know, here in the comments below. Furthermore, WIT In Singapore in October will give an award to the company who best exemplifies in true customer love.
I believe that there needs to be a trend towards a better appreciation for the customer. Consumers are, after all, a heck of a lot smarter than they have been treated in the past.
Now let’s see who can grab the claim of being the best. Big or small, it matters not. Check the rules and then let’s see who is the best.
About Timothy O'Neil-Dunne
One company that impressed me was GAP Adventures. Not just because their customer service reps are called “CEOs” (chief experience officers) because these are people truly representing the company to outsiders, but also based on the many examples the founder cited during his talk at TDS in London last year, and his heartfelt belief in good customer service.
Outside of travel, it’s hard to beat Zappos.
I am really impressed by the customer service of LoveFilm. These guys answer enquiries very quickly and always go the extra mile.
My real pet hate is all the masquerading of ‘being there for the customer’ – bank TV adverts are a great case in point. Just abject nonsense.
Thankfully customera are becoming more savvy in the main, and just don’t fall for this stuff. Bur large corporations especially abuse their power, almost to a tee, and that power game simply can’t be counteracted effectively. Big business is in business for profit and to satisfy shareholders. Lets take IHG as an example – despite 90% of business travel customers saying free wi fi is their most important motivator to book, IHG singularly fail to acknowledge this and charge for wi fi. There are many other examples of putting shareholders before customers. My own pet hate is hotels that charge for car parking when i stay there, I just stop using them and go somewhere else (as i have done with IHG properties because of the wi fi issues.
One representative of one of my client hotel groups said to me re the wi fi issue – ‘we charge for it because otherwise they (customers) come in an sit all bloody day and use it, buy 1 coffee then leave’. That’s a typical view of a customer I come across, a million miles away from the concept of customer lifetime value – I’d make sure mine is zero to these people!
Like them or hate them, Trip Advisor often exposes this hypocrisy of ‘putting the customer first’ that is flouted around all over the place. It is hardly a surprise that many hoteliers don’t like them.
There is a model out there you know that can make profit maximisation and customer satisfaction maximisation converge.
At the same time, and in line with this, many customers do have to be educated, it is perfectly reasonable for a supplier to ‘demand excellence in a customer’
Great question, Timothy – it’s something I’ve thought a lot about today. I feel the best measure of how much a company loves their customers is the degree to which they implement customer feedback.
A wrote a few of my thoughts about this here:
http://www.reviewpro.com/true-test-of-customer-love-5126
I tried to keep this focused on the customer in Travel. The old joke about customer service being an oxymoron has applied in Travel far too often. As a big consumer of Travel products and services for business and leisure – I find there is more focus on the window dressing and appearance than on the actual service itself.
However – in the past few weeks driving around in Europe in particularly – I was gratified to see that Service is not just a static thing. By now all hotels should be offering Internet Access for free. I actually no longer book any property who does not offer free wifi. Even some of the smallest hotels do what they can to provide value for their guests in online and offline. All the hotels I could stayed in even in the smallest out of the way places offered it. Some cities have become very arrogant about the approach to internet access. (Pay attention London and Paris and you are not the only ones).
Great customer service does not mean loads of it. Too often volume is confused with quality. Us weary travellers are really much happier with less and of higher quality. Do the right things well.
I see QR Codes emerging as a great way to quickly impart information.
What is useful and has been visited on these hallowed pages is the advice in several areas – particularly Social Media. This can be very useful for the smaller enterprises.
Trust me in this. Show me the love and I will show you the money
Cheers
Great points Timothy. I suspect it’s a case of many businesses either not knowing what good customer service is or not having the will to deliver. Wi-fi/parking are cases in point and IHG among others know very well that it pisses off their customers to have to pay these extra fees – they’ll constantly get the message loud and clear whether on TripAdvisor or directly. It’s easier to disregard consistent feedback and make lame excuses than to actually step away and look at the whole customer experience from their perspective.
Customer service is not about having a 24/7 helpline who answer the phone (eventually) but have no authority to act on any feedback; it’s not about leaving out nice questionnaires on pillows and then ignoring the consistent criticisms received. And most recently it’s not about giving poorly disguised false smiles throughout your stay and then asking for a Tripadvisor review at check-out.
It is surprising to be still having this discussion after so many years – you would think especially larger corporations would have got customer service by now. It is quite simple: find out what your client wants, match or exceed their expectations, keep asking and listening, repeat to fade. Wifi and parking are red herrings. As long as you know what you are getting you can vote with your wallet. Maybe these just don’t matter to enough hotel clients so they charge. Only a foolish company would wilfully go against the wishes of all its customers. Capela trains in customer service skills and 2 companies come up consistently well rated by delegates: Pret a Manger and First Direct.
Disappointing tho’ it may seem, many big corps DON’T get it, or don’t want to get it, but they make a damned good job of pretending they do. They don’t wilfully ‘manipulate’ customers. Free wi fi is anything but a red herring if survey upon survey say its the most important modern hotel travel and technology need and yet corps like IHG seek to ignore this and charge.
I challenge all to try a Royal Caribbean cruise, and get a masterclass in how to manipulate and rip off customers, its real and its blatant. And then they try to lock you into expensive gratuities of course, to make up for the menial wages they pay their staff. I resent this, every bit as much as I hate the way the greedy HMRC (the taxman) treats tips and gratuities in this country. Don’t even start me on service charges!!!
For me it’s National Trust. They are committed to preservation for the enjoyment of their members. that second part is key. Whenever at a property I feel special they recognise my commitment as much as I recognise theirs to English heritage.
Hey Robert, you sound very bitter! What did RCCL do to you?!
Here’s my point about wifi: provided the hotel is honest and clear about not including it then you, the consumer, has a choice. Just go somewhere else. For some customers wifi is important, especially the twittering classes. But for others a restaurant, bar, gym, parking or the right location is more important. If wifi is included that revenue has to be replaced elsewhere ie in the room rate. Don’t get me wrong – I like free wifi too but hotels can differentiate themselves by what they include according to what their customers want. As for surveys – of course people will say yes to free stuff but not if you asked them to pay £5 more on their room rate.
As cofounder of a travel company, putting ourselves forward here as a customer-focused organisation could be setting us up for a fall, but I’ll stick my neck out and say that from the very beginning, Mr & Mrs Smith has set out to be responsive, transparent and friendly in all our dealings with customers.
In fact, we set Smith up precisely because we felt that other guides weren’t being honest with us as customers – you could say that Smith is a reaction to what we felt was a lack of customer focus in the hotel guide industry.
Obviously we’re a lot bigger these days, we’ve gone beyond hotel guides to become a booking service too, and we have a lot more customers to focus on, but we’ve strived to keep customer satisfaction at the heart of everything we do.
I can’t see how we couldn’t. I can’t understand how any company could seriously believe, as Tim puts it, that ‘the customer owes me a living’, when the reverse is always true: the company owes their living to the customer.
Any company that doesn’t deal fairly with its customers is living on borrowed time. And now that the user-generated web and (searchable) social media are here to wash everyone’s corporate linen in public, there’s less time to borrow than ever. People talk about bad service all the time; they talk about good service some of the time, and they don’t talk about mediocre service at all. You really do have to go the extra mile – your reputation (and consequently your revenue) depends on it.
Of course, the bigger you are as a company (and Smith is pretty big now, comparatively), the harder this is. Taking us a case study, the more hotels we have in our collection, the more customers we have, the more chance there is of someone being disappointed or something going wrong. We mitigate this by curating our collection fastidiously, personally visiting and revisiting all our hotels, and sending our reviewers anonymously, to experience the hotel as a customer would. We care about our own service, because our job involves constantly assessing other people’s.
We do get complaints – when you’re sending thousands of people away for experiences they’re looking forward to, every month, it’s pretty much inevitable – but those are far outweighed by positive testimonials. When we do get negative feedback, whether that’s connected to a hotel we represent or our own service, we do our best to address the issue quickly and fairly. It’s in our own interest that everyone we deal with hangs up happy.
Complaints are great. Seriously. They tell you that the customer expected more; they trusted you and you let them down. They’re absolutely vital in telling you how to improve your service, how to train your team, and they help us ensure that only the best hotels remain in our collection. Complaints are a step-by-step guide to how to make your company better. What business owner wouldn’t want that?
The customer isn’t always right – it’s time we admitted that. They can be unreasonable, unsympathetic, unrealistically demanding or just downright unpleasant, but even if you can’t fix their problem (and, in travel, some problems are unfixable), you can always be fair, human and friendly in your response: listen, understand, sympathise, explain.
Finally, I think part of the problem Tim identifies is to do with the language of the travel industry in general. As travel insiders, we talk about ‘brands’ and product’, ‘rate parity’, ‘BAR’ and ‘consumers’. We surround ourselves with a bubble of jargon which doesn’t really speak to people and separates industry from customer. Everyone in travel – hotel manager, pilot, tour operator, booking agent – should remember what all service businesses boil down to: a bunch of people doing things for another bunch of people. The whole process is much easier when both sides of the equation talk the same language.
Sorry for the long comment but it’s a topic close to my heart.
Tamara
I read and reread every bit of this absolutely wonderful article from a clearly very successful person, and your point re all the jargon is extremely well made. Travel was never cut out for the academia and all the cliches and big words, you should not need an MBA to understand some of the stuff that’s flying around. I have one, and I struggle sometimes.
Your wealth of practical experience and proof of concept shines thro’ the whole article and I am indeed privileged to share your thoughts.
Love this article! This is exactly the sort of thing we talk about all the time in our company (CaboVillas.com – Earth, Sea & Sky Vacations)—that is, differentiating ourselves in an increasingly crowded travel industry by providing the sort of customer service that makes people feel valued and cared for. We are a smaller company specializing only in Los Cabos, Mexico vacation rentals and resorts—so we try to make ourselves stand out by making close personal connections with our clients, getting to know them and their needs clearly before they ever travel so that their experience is completely personalized for them. When something goes amiss, we respond quickly, transparently and with integrity. I agree with Tamara’s comments above that it’s in everybody’s interest that the client walks away feeling that they’ve been treated fairly.
Tamara – this is exactly what I had hoped would emerge. The notion of what a “Brand” comprises these days is more direct and measurable but that does not alter the fact that it is a not a real thing. It is a sentiment.
Today we have companies who relish the anti-brand. Ryanair is a good example of this. However Ryanair is both consistent and honest in its proposition. Its about cheap fares. You take it or leave it.
Creating true customer love is not easy. But step one in my book is creating consumer trust.
I note that Airbnb is doing a major push with its “40 New Trust and Safety Features”. That it needs 40 such new features begs the question why they didn’t do this before. I am reminded of Newton’s second law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Cheers