Startups Can't Skimp on Customer Service

The online travel industry doesn’t exactly have a reputation for great customer service. A cursory glance at Twitter will tell you that. A lot of companies look at customer support as a cost center – a necessary part of the business, but something that should be done as efficiently and cheaply as possible, or something that’s only worth an effort when a critical mass of customers has been reached. I think it’s the reverse. A great reputation can actually help you grow your customer base – each customer service inquiry is a touch point with a potential customer or a potential promoter (aka word-of-mouth marketer).

From the beginning I knew that great support would be a differentiator for HotelTonight, and that it needed to be available at all hours (last-minute hotel bookers need resolution in the moment). So in the early days, even before we built out our support team, COO Jared Simon, CTO Chris Bailey and I were receiving CS calls on our mobile phones 24/7. There were definitely times we had to step out of a restaurant (or get out of bed) to help out a customer. While it was a sacrifice, it set the bar high for the importance of quality customer service in the HT organization.

Our world-class Customer Support has since grown to a full-fledged, ‘round-the-clock, multi-lingual team, and I believe it’s one of the major factors that sets us apart from other travel companies. Here’s what we do differently – and why you should, too.

Knock ‘Em Out With Service

If someone’s taking the time to contact a company’s customer support, it’s probably for good reason. And more times than not, I’d bet you they aren’t fully expecting to get a warm response or the resolution they want. Everyone’s had a bad experience with customer service (if you haven’t, I’d suggest you start playing the lottery now) and many go into the situation a bit jaded.

Set yourself apart by surprising them, with both empathy and a prompt resolution. Be personable (our CS team is trained on our brand voice, and pepper their interactions with situation-appropriate humor). Be personal (invest the time and money to allow for tailored, not canned, responses). Take responsibility when something goes wrong. Be willing to fix it. Hear the customer out, even if their issue is something out of your control. Have a team motto. Ours is: get ‘em in a room, knock ‘em out with service, let ‘em sleep happy.

Your customers should leave the interaction feeling positive about your company, no matter the outcome. The customer might not always be right – but they do have a right to be heard.

Set Aggressive, Measurable Goals

In our weekly all-hands meetings, each team shares their goals and progress, and our CS team has objectives as aggressive as the rest. I’m exceptionally proud that as a result of such goals, our support ratings are consistently sky high, our email response time is incredibly fast (so fast that at first we had trouble finding tools and services that could keep up) and we’ve drastically reduced our call abandonment (customers hanging up before someone answers). Our phone calls are answered nearly immediately, because we’ve made sure to always have a team on standby for every single call coming through – in 5 languages.

Integrate Customer Feedback into the Product

Tracking customer comments, questions and suggestions helped us predict potential issues, and make changes to the product to head them off before they ever happened. Among our many customer-driven product updates: prioritizing the launch of certain cities, adding a traceable h-bed (our logo) to the booking confirmation screen to prevent accidental bookings and designing a badge key explaining what our hotel categories mean. All have been enormously beneficial to the product’s success – and to our customer’s happiness.

Build Your Team Differently

Turnover is high in the customer service industry. So we went about hiring differently, with the goal of recruiting happy and long-term employees. Here’s what we did: we went straight to the work-from-home model, which allows team members flexibility and a calm workspace (rather than often-hectic call centers). It also afforded opportunities that might not have been otherwise available in our team members’ hometowns, and since we didn’t need to find people who were all in one place, we could afford to be picky and find the best of the best, no matter their location.

Since our team is remote, we’ve worked hard to make sure they feel connected to the rest of the HT team, and to each other. We use HipChat company-wide, and the CS team is constantly logged into it, sharing not only CS issues and strategies for handling them but also their personalities. When a new Support Ace starts, they’re paired up with a mentor from the CS Lead team, who trains them and checks in with a weekly 1-on-1 phone call to review metrics, see how the week went and hear the Ace’s feedback and suggestions. We take the time to figure out what the team is excited about – each of our CS Senior Leads, for example, has taken on a speciality based on their interests. And monthly peer- and Lead-nominated awards reward those who’ve gone above and beyond, taking on the toughest requests and bringing an endlessly positive attitude to the team environment.

As a result of these hiring and team building strategies we’ve had a very low attrition rate, and grown a team of passionate, efficient people who care about the company and product.

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Great support keeps our bookers happy, our social media interactions positive and our partners pleased. It’s even gotten us good press. Hearing rave reviews from a hotel partner that a member of our team helped her less-than-tech-savvy mother book a room on the app, or getting an email that another Support Ace helped a family caught in a blizzard find the last room available nearby is enormously gratifying, and validates all the time and effort we put into our support strategy. Happy customers often become return customers, and advocates of your product and brand. That’s marketing you can’t pay for.

Who’s doing it right: what’s the best customer support experience you’ve ever had?

Photo: HotelTonight