Your Brand and the Promise of Value: Being Client Service ec-Centric
Amazingly enough, customer service is in very short supply. While we think of business as incredibly competitive, more often than not businesses fail to deliver not on product and features but on simple customer service. The truth of this presents your travel business with a great threat and a great opportunity:
1. There are potential clients in the marketplace longing for a great travel consultant who will treat them like valued clients; 2. There are great travel advisors in the marketplace looking to make your clients their own. |
If you are truly client-centric and provide an outstanding set of services for your clients, you can create evangelists for your travel practice. At the same time, however, a failure to live up to the promises of your brand can result in a steady migration away from your travel practice to competitors with a keener sense of what it takes to maintain a client-centric practice.
While there may be too few client-centric companies in the marketplace, your clients have certainly been exposed to enough great businesses to recognize superior customer service when they experience it. In relatively short order, your clients will decide whether you do, or you don't, provide great customer service. From the outset of your relationship and for every step of the way thereafter, you must prove yourself to be as great as your brand promises.
The Origin of Authentic Customer Service
Is it hyperbole to say customer service is an act of love? Certainly good customer service benefits our business and the client mutually and has great utility. But there are times, no doubt, when customer service feels obligatory, something we have to do even if we have a momentary inclination to see the client depart permanently from our sphere of influence. But I want to suggest here our love of humanity, our love of travel as an activity, and our love of the travel community is a wonderful place for customer service to take root and thrive. At the center of your company is you and the client in a relationship. Your business does not exist without the client, and we enter into the relationship knowing the challenges each faces. If we take on the tasks of nurturing the community of travel as a real leader, if we practice a sincere empathy for the traveler, then the rewards and stresses of our profession are better understood and appreciated.
Be Client ecCentric
Many times throughout this course the term "client centric" appears and for good cause. Your clients are the very essence of your raison d'être: your reason for being. In the same way marketing is a mindset, and so is customer service. The importance of placing your client at the heart of everything cannot be overstated. Dealing with your clients in an authentic manner, developing a relationship of trust and delivering on your promises will keep them in your center of gravity.
As we have discussed in other contexts, however, it is not enough simply to do what all other travel advisors do. To rise to the top 20% of the profession, you have to combine your intense knowledge of the client with your industry knowledge and to be continually developing new ways to impress your client.
Realize your clients not only have options, but also there are other businesses and opportunities in the market clamoring for your clients' attention. Great client-centric customer service is the glue capable of holding your clients in place as other companies vie for their business.
Your understanding of your clients' likes and dislikes, the intimacy with which you know your clients' interests and hobbies can serve you well. You want your questioning to move outside of travel. What else does your client LOVE? Why is this question so important? When you know the answer to your clients' passions, then and only then will you truly understand what they value and how to make your relationship with them valuable in turn.
A credo of authenticity seeks to fulfill every explicit and every implicit promise made by the travel agent. Making good on your promises is important – authenticity without stellar performance means little. The consumer wants your performance to be well above the norm – to be exceptional to such a degree, in fact, as to be unique. That is why the small services provided to a client throughout the relationship are so important – they can potentially set the authentic travel agent apart from all others.
If we are not careful, however, we begin to die the death of “value add.” We add first one little service and then the next, increasing our own overhead without really bringing exciting, tangible value to the client. For example, how often do you hear the claim/promise of “excellent customer service.” Perhaps you make a similar promise to your clients in your own marketing collateral. Businesses repeat the phrase so often it has lost much of its meaning. How do you bear out this very important promise? The bottle of wine in the cabin, the destination report, the thank you note – these are all no doubt important, but they only keep you at a level all other travel agents stake out. These only represent “the norm.” The danger with each of these “great customer services” is the possibility by performing them you are only incrementally better (or worse) than the next travel agent.
What are you doing that is truly, amazingly different?
While there may be too few client-centric companies in the marketplace, your clients have certainly been exposed to enough great businesses to recognize superior customer service when they experience it. In relatively short order, your clients will decide whether you do, or you don't, provide great customer service. From the outset of your relationship and for every step of the way thereafter, you must prove yourself to be as great as your brand promises.
The Origin of Authentic Customer Service
Is it hyperbole to say customer service is an act of love? Certainly good customer service benefits our business and the client mutually and has great utility. But there are times, no doubt, when customer service feels obligatory, something we have to do even if we have a momentary inclination to see the client depart permanently from our sphere of influence. But I want to suggest here our love of humanity, our love of travel as an activity, and our love of the travel community is a wonderful place for customer service to take root and thrive. At the center of your company is you and the client in a relationship. Your business does not exist without the client, and we enter into the relationship knowing the challenges each faces. If we take on the tasks of nurturing the community of travel as a real leader, if we practice a sincere empathy for the traveler, then the rewards and stresses of our profession are better understood and appreciated.
Be Client ecCentric
Many times throughout this course the term "client centric" appears and for good cause. Your clients are the very essence of your raison d'être: your reason for being. In the same way marketing is a mindset, and so is customer service. The importance of placing your client at the heart of everything cannot be overstated. Dealing with your clients in an authentic manner, developing a relationship of trust and delivering on your promises will keep them in your center of gravity.
As we have discussed in other contexts, however, it is not enough simply to do what all other travel advisors do. To rise to the top 20% of the profession, you have to combine your intense knowledge of the client with your industry knowledge and to be continually developing new ways to impress your client.
Realize your clients not only have options, but also there are other businesses and opportunities in the market clamoring for your clients' attention. Great client-centric customer service is the glue capable of holding your clients in place as other companies vie for their business.
Your understanding of your clients' likes and dislikes, the intimacy with which you know your clients' interests and hobbies can serve you well. You want your questioning to move outside of travel. What else does your client LOVE? Why is this question so important? When you know the answer to your clients' passions, then and only then will you truly understand what they value and how to make your relationship with them valuable in turn.
A credo of authenticity seeks to fulfill every explicit and every implicit promise made by the travel agent. Making good on your promises is important – authenticity without stellar performance means little. The consumer wants your performance to be well above the norm – to be exceptional to such a degree, in fact, as to be unique. That is why the small services provided to a client throughout the relationship are so important – they can potentially set the authentic travel agent apart from all others.
If we are not careful, however, we begin to die the death of “value add.” We add first one little service and then the next, increasing our own overhead without really bringing exciting, tangible value to the client. For example, how often do you hear the claim/promise of “excellent customer service.” Perhaps you make a similar promise to your clients in your own marketing collateral. Businesses repeat the phrase so often it has lost much of its meaning. How do you bear out this very important promise? The bottle of wine in the cabin, the destination report, the thank you note – these are all no doubt important, but they only keep you at a level all other travel agents stake out. These only represent “the norm.” The danger with each of these “great customer services” is the possibility by performing them you are only incrementally better (or worse) than the next travel agent.
What are you doing that is truly, amazingly different?
Here’s the problem. Those extra services have value only if your client views them as valuable. An example – many of your clients may not even care about that bottle of wine you send. It might not be up to their standards (if it costs less than $50 at dining room prices, that is a real possibility!) Your client may not even drink! But if your client loves local, authentic dining opportunities, a little research to make restaurant suggestions just for that particular client could go a long way. That’s real value to the person to whom it matters most – the client.
What if your client loves antiquarian books? Would a list of first edition bookstores add value to his London trip? What are the client’s interests? The client’s hobbies? That is where real value-added services are to be found. |
Ask your client! Discover their passion and provide them with a taste! You will be their hero. I can almost promise you no other travel professional will have done this for them!
Instead of thinking first about the services you offer – move to a completely client-centric perspective. Engage your clients in a two-way conversation of their perception of value. Do you know what they perceive as valuable? During the course of the year the engaged travel consultant not only sends information, but solicits it as well, in a back and forth engagement with the client. Asking for feedback, suggestions, testimonials and referrals incorporates the client into the life of the agent and humanizes the agent’s travel practice. Conversation suggests open communication and a concern for the needs of the client – and that includes their interests, hobbies, and reasons for travel. Travel agents who engage clients at this level soon hear clients begin to describe the agent as “their travel agent.”
Surprise them with what they value most – your attention to client-centric detail. In fact, don’t just be client-centric; be client-eccentric!
Genuine. Honest. Open. Authentic. Most of all – client centric. These are the qualities consumers look for in their consultants. The travel advisor who can embody these characteristics gracefully will earn the loyalty of many clients for a long, long time.
Instead of thinking first about the services you offer – move to a completely client-centric perspective. Engage your clients in a two-way conversation of their perception of value. Do you know what they perceive as valuable? During the course of the year the engaged travel consultant not only sends information, but solicits it as well, in a back and forth engagement with the client. Asking for feedback, suggestions, testimonials and referrals incorporates the client into the life of the agent and humanizes the agent’s travel practice. Conversation suggests open communication and a concern for the needs of the client – and that includes their interests, hobbies, and reasons for travel. Travel agents who engage clients at this level soon hear clients begin to describe the agent as “their travel agent.”
Surprise them with what they value most – your attention to client-centric detail. In fact, don’t just be client-centric; be client-eccentric!
Genuine. Honest. Open. Authentic. Most of all – client centric. These are the qualities consumers look for in their consultants. The travel advisor who can embody these characteristics gracefully will earn the loyalty of many clients for a long, long time.