“Just Think” - Customers are always right!

Customers are always right – accept that old adage and work with them to build a positive experience of your brand. 

Customer Experiences has been in the news in the past few months with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, among others, reporting that the company’s previous customer experience caused them to lose between 10-15 million passengers a year. A customer’s experience with your brand and with your customer services team can impact on how they feel about your company and whether they have the inclination to do business with you again, or will go out of their way to find an alternative. 

We recently had an interesting customer service engagement with a customer which we have highlighted to staff as the extreme reactions a bad experience can cause, and how we can best support our customers. The ticket that came in to our support system was in response to a fraud alert we raised to the customer and was entitled “Just Think” and the only text in the message read “You’re liars.” As a CEO this isn’t a nice insinuation about our company so I thought I would take up this ticket myself to see if I could understand what had made the customer so angry at our service. A cordial reply to the ticket to ask the reason for the comments elicited the response that if we contacted the customer again he would just swear at us. 

While I don’t wish to provoke anyone and, as I told him, if the customer felt the need to swear then so be it but I just wanted to understand the reason for his anger so I got back in touch. This customer was just lashing out but then customer dissatisfaction, especially in an industry like travel where people spend hard-earned money for a trip of a lifetime or a well earned break is prevalent when their expectations are not met. Selling a dream holiday can also be very subjective – one person’s dream could be another person’s nightmare. It is therefore crucial to understand firstly what a customer wants (and whether you can deliver it) and also if something does go wrong to ensure you can front up and appease your customer as best you can – they have plenty of tools at their disposal to make things painful – the likes of a chargeback or a derogatory TripAdvisor comment to name but a few. 

Sometimes it is not possible to even know the customer is unhappy until too late (e.g a chargeback appears on your account) but making yourself approachable, responsive and fronting up is a crucial part of effective customer service and a customer’s experience of your brand. You can not always get it right, and with some customers there is no hope of getting it resolved for them - they are simply not open to anything you say. We employ these simple steps and, on the whole, they work:

- Be Responsive – this doesn’t mean you have to be available 24/7 but get back to their messages/emails in a timely manner (for us 12 hours is too long). Likewise if you notice an issue has been raised through your bank or on review sites make an effort to make contact to try to understand why. You may not always see comments but if you are made are of them and they are not too historical why not reach out to understand what went wrong and what you can learn for next time?

- Be Approachable – are your contact details easy to find? If not why not? Also always try and make a reply from a person so they know someone specifically is taking care of it. Chatbots et al are great tools but customers expect a different response from an actual person, make sure if this is the case you deliver on that. 

- Track Issues – having a system your team can all share gives ensures that tickets are always dealt with and you can mark them when done

- Things happen but its how you respond that can set you apart from your competition

And “Just Think” - well it transpired it was regrettably an incident caused by one of our members and not by us. We were able to get an appropriate resolution for all parties but it did make us “Just Think” – customers make our business; repeat customers are the easiest customers to win so how we treat them and respond to them is critical to our existence and growth. How important are yours?

Will Plummer is CEO of Trust My Travel, which offers payment solutions specifically for the travel sector including merchant accounts, multi currency pricing, payment splitting and third party local payments.