One of the chief advantages of offering a superior customer experience is that you have far fewer customer service problems to combat. That said, there’s no way to entirely eliminate them because mistakes can and do happen, and some problems are completely external to your business. We must therefore admit that no matter how polished and efficient your sales and service processes are, nor how well trained your staff is, hiccups will happen. This is why it’s critical you maintain just-in-case procedures.
Fail to do that, and a problem can spin out of control and end up being reported on by media, get passed around on social networking sites, or worse. A sterling reputation can be quickly tarnished by an exception. We must all tread carefully!
A Travel Agency Horror Story
Yesterday’s article in The New York Times’s Travel section, titled “Help! A British Travel Agency Has Our $3,891 and We Want It Back,” details an example of a company whose poor conflict resolution procedures ended up resulting in large-scale blowback.
To summarize, a couple booked a trip to Iceland in 2020 using a travel agency, but they were forced to cancel due to pandemic-related travel restrictions. However, when the couple tried to arrange for travel credit to use at a later date, they weren’t getting any responses from the company. With nearly four-thousand dollars on the line, they were reasonably compelled to file a dispute with their credit card company. As you can imagine, when a bank gets involved, action gets taken; consequently, the agency immediately responded and gave the couple a credit valid for two years.
The problems didn’t end there, however. When the couple rebooked for a different trip, they faced fare increases that they didn’t want to pay. And the company remained slow in answering their concerns, further compounding the issue. To boot, the rebooked flight got cancelled, which the couple only discovered because they were researching the fares.
Here’s the rub, of course: the fare increases were reasonably outside the control of the company, and it’s an industry-wide practice to charge the difference when applying a credit towards a new trip. This reality doesn’t absolve the agency, of course; slow communication (taking weeks, according to the article) is unacceptable, especially in light of the flight cancellation.
This whole mess led to the couple passing their story along to The New York Times. And even with a travel reporter from the newspaper of record on the case, the company still took five days address the issue.
The good news is that the head of operations at the agency finally stepped in, refunded the customer, and even offered them a $200 travel credit if they ever decided to book another trip with them. (The couple declined that, if you were wondering.)
Here is the most salient part of the article: “‘The most important thing is to make sure the client is satisfied, and I’m so sorry,’ [the head of operations] said.” But the reporter wonders, “Why didn’t someone just nip this in the bud ages ago and keep a happy client?”
It Can Happen to Anyone
It’s easy to sit back and judge this travel agency from an ivory tower, judging them as a poorly run company that deserves the bad press. In truth, we don’t know all of the goings on behind the scenes, and the article even admits that the couple wasn’t entirely accurate in parts of their account. (They claimed to have not received a trip confirmation for their rebooking, which led to months of uncertainty, but the head of operations was able to refute this.) Furthermore, there’s a lot of evidence that this agency has been good at its work otherwise, notwithstanding complaints coinciding with the first couple of years of the pandemic.
The point is this: this travel agency might be great. But in the matter of handling a problem—one that was precipitated by an event, the pandemic, that was out of their control—they failed to deliver the superior customer experience we should also aspire to. And the problem ballooned into a large enough fiasco that it drew the attention of The New York Times. That’s a pretty big hit to a company’s reputation, even if the article does document their act of contrition. It’s a good bet that when a prospective traveler does a web search on this travel agency, they’re going to see this report.
A Look in the Mirror
You might be confident that your company wouldn’t make mistakes like the ones described in the above example. That might be true. But it’s also possible that your staff could trip up in other ways, creating a similar level of frustration in one or more or your own customers. While it’s unlikely such an event would lead to coverage by a major national newspaper, the omnipresence of online review websites like Yelp and Google Reviews, as well as social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, can just as easily leave your business’s reputation in shambles.
Your company’s sales and service flowcharts might make perfect sense from an insider’s perspective, but do they make sense to your customers? The Brandt Group can help answer that question, and many more. For over 30 years, we’ve aided our clients in their quest to offer the best customer experience possible using tools like world-class mystery shopping, customer feedback surveys, and leadership training courses. Our clients receive actionable data to improve their reputations and enhance their profits.
Your competitors are already doing it. Why shouldn’t your company also benefit?
