Making an Impact
In this issue:
Experience or Expense?
This is the section where I share with you the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the customer experience, the impact everyone can have on it - in either direction, and the resulting impact on image, reputation, brand, customer relationships, your whole organisation and your bottom line. We have all been customers at some point, and we all give customer experiences to others, whether it's in work or out of it - so our neighbours, friends and relations can all be viewed as our customers too.
I have a growing list of just such experiences which I am looking forward to sharing and in some cases, venting! You'll see that I do rather get on my soapbox about some of these!
Draining Experience
A few months ago I had to make a relatively late hotel booking in London. As the hotels I normally would stay in were either full or only had the honeymoon or massive suites available at prices that could have got me a mini break in New York including flights, I decided I was going to have to look at other options.
I found a hotel in the West End that was really quite near the various places I needed to get to, and which had a special promotion available. Their 'rack rate' was apparently normally £149, but the special promotion for the few remaining rooms was a bargain £59.
I looked at the photos on the internet, and thought it looked fine, on top of which, this hotel was a sub group of a major chain, so I thought I would give it a go, despite being slightly wary.
Prior to my arrival, I needed to ring them to clarify something about the booking, and the chap I spoke to couldn't have been nicer or more helpful, so I was hoping for the same when I arrived.
On entering, the reception was clean and tidy and reasonably furnished, and the rest of the staff were as nice and helpful as the chap on the phone.
Whilst my room was nothing flash it had everything I needed including free Wifi. Again the bathroom was nothing extravagant but it was clean (my top priority) and had everything I needed and everything worked.
The breakfast was billed as 'continental', so I had expected a couple of pieces of dried up toast and something disguised as coffee. However to my surprise, it turned out to be better than some of the continental breakfasts in some of the larger hotels, and included freshly hard boiled eggs – so it was verging on a hot breakfast too.
All in all, to my surprise, this was turning out to be better than I had expected for the money, considering it was virtually central London.
So when I needed to stay in London again last month, and again didn't have long to find a hotel, I decided to see if this one had anything available again. Sure enough, it did, and for the same rate. So I decided to book again and give them a second go, feeling confident I knew what sort of experience I was going to get. I rang to ask if I could have the same room as last time, and they said they would do their best.
When I arrived I walked into reception all smiles, expecting to see the same on the faces of the reception staff. Disappointingly though, not a smile in sight from either of the two chaps at reception. In fact one looked positively miserable and was oozing an air of 'I hate every minute of this'. When I casually asked where one of the chaps was who had been so helpful last time I stayed, I was told that he had left to go to another hotel in the group, as had the other reception chap.
No matter how hard I grinned at these two and made the odd amusing observation, neither could even manage a mild smirk. As I was early, I asked if I could leave my bag in their luggage store whilst I went off to my first meeting. Rather than come round from reception and take my bag to the room, as the very nice chap had done during my last stay. The stern faced receptionist, without saying a word, plonked a key down on the counter, grunted and pointed in the direction of the luggage room. Yes, I was expected to wrestle it in there myself this time.
When I then asked if they had managed to book the same room for me, they said they hadn't as they were quite full, however they were upgrading me to a better and bigger room. Fabulous I thought! So, looking forward to this better and bigger room, I went off to my first meeting.
When I returned to the hotel to check in properly, the same very miserable member of the reception staff gave me the key card, and off I went to my better and bigger room.
When I opened the door to my room, it was instantly obvious that the only thing that was bigger and possibly better than the single room I had requested, was that there was a double bed in this one. However, it was squeezed into a space that was so tight, that it would not have been possible to inch down the side of the bed had my legs been any fatter, as there were all of a few inches between the bed and the wall. The remaining space I had in the room was actually less than in the supposed inferior room.
I unpacked some of my things and ventured into the bathroom. Well this certainly wasn't bigger or better, as you couldn't open the door fully, as it jammed against the toilet seat, and the bath was only big enough for a child! This bathroom wasn't as clean as it could have been either, and definitely not as clean as the other room.
I decided to have a bath anyway, and when I had finished and turned the dial to let the water out, there was a series of very loud gurgles, following each of which, water bubbled up through the grid in the bathroom floor, and not only through the grid, but also between the tiles of the floor too! It wasn't going down any pipe, it seemed there was no pipe, it was merely forming a pond underneath the floor and then surfacing. I looked down to see that the bath mat and my slippers (yes I never go anywhere without my slippers – you never know what you could be treading in!) were busy soaking up the water that was oozing between the tiles. Excellent I thought, in what way was this room better?!
However, that wasn't the end of it. On the final gurgle as one last lot of water burbled up from the grid and then receded, I could not believe my eyes when from the grid, a cockroach jumped out onto the bathroom floor and started scurrying towards the corner behind the toilet! For a second I just stared in disbelief. This was the first time I had ever seen vermin in a hotel room, and I've stayed in a lot of different hotels in different countries too.
The thought of it escaping and me lying awake all night wondering where it was, was not something I was going to tolerate. So I hopped out of the bath, worried is was going to change direction and head towards my bare feet, lent over the toilet, grabbed the plastic bin from the corner and squished it with the aforementioned weapon.
A small pang of guilt came over me as, at home, I humanely capture spiders and other insects and then release them outside in an eco-friendly conservation way. Then realising again what it was, I resigned myself to the thought that I didn't have any option. However, it then occurred to me - where there's one, there's more. So I took a spare plastic liner from inside the bin, and tried to weld it over the grid to prevent any fellow roaches following in its footsteps. I can't tell you how many times I kept looking down at that grid waiting for another one to appear.
I quickly got ready to go out, put everything that I could back in my case, zipped it up and put it on top of the desk, in the hope that any subsequent cockroaches may be too lazy to climb up there. Who was I kidding?!
I didn't have time to complain before I went out to meet some friends, and anyway there was only the miserable chap on reception now and the back office was in darkness.
I told my friends of my wildlife encounter and the babbling brook in my room. They winced as much as I had done and were equally horrified. I told them which hotel it was so that they could warn anyone else they knew who was coming to London not to stay there. To think, based on my first visit, I might have even recommended it to someone, now I made sure I would recommend people not to stay there. One cockroach is one too many!
Nervously I returned to my room that night and felt compelled to do a thorough search of the bathroom. I couldn't see any more wildlife, but also thought that didn't mean they weren't there lurking somewhere else.
The next morning I went down for the 'better than expected' breakfast, but all I could think about was how contrasting this stay had been compared to the last. Having returned to my room and packed, I went down to reception to complain about the state of the bathroom and wildlife encounter. I began to calmly tell the chap (different one) on reception how disappointed I was, and about the plumbing and cockroach problems.
As I was relating all this to him, the phone rang on the reception desk, and to my amazement and annoyance, he reached down, picked it up and started talking to the caller - whilst I was still mid sentence! I was astonished that he thought it was ok to do that. I couldn't believe no one had told him in his training that the customer in front of you is always the first priority.
Whilst he continued with his phone call, a couple who were waiting in reception to check in, expressed their incredulity that he had picked up the phone whilst I was talking, and said they were now having second thoughts about staying there having heard my experiences.
When the reception chap finally put the phone down, he didn't even apologise to me, but just stood there, blank-faced, obviously expecting me to pick up where I left off. I did finish explaining about the problems with the room, by which time he had glazed over and then robotically said, "I'm sorry about that madam." I waited for some other, more sincere reaction and also some good will gesture – however small, just to acknowledge that I should not have had to put up with those conditions, and that I would not be expected to pay the full price of my stay, even though it was a discounted price. However, nothing was forthcoming except silence – which only served to worsen an already unsatisfactory treatment of the situation.
So I had to ask him if I was still expected to pay full price considering the experience I had endured. He said he couldn't authorise that, so I asked to speak to the manager. He asked me to wait and disappeared off into the back office. Eight minutes later and I was still waiting. When he did appear, he said that the manager hadn't come in yet and he couldn't get through to head office either. As I was going to leave my case there whilst I went off to other meetings, he said it could be sorted out when I returned.
When I did come back later that afternoon, there was a very nice duty manager there who did apologise in a far more genuine and sincere way, and offered me 20% discount, as that was all she or any other manager could authorise, and added that I would need to write to head office to increase that reduction.
Well I was happy with that. All I was looking for was just some appeasement and something to acknowledge that I had endured a worse than average experience in their hotel, and that they recognised that. She was very nice about it and said she would close off the room until the problems were rectified, and hoped that she hadn't lost me as a customer to that hotel. Hmmm…I think she just might have done, but mostly because of the encounters with the staff rather than the wildlife.
Whilst very unpleasant and unacceptable, the physical aspects of the hotel could be rectified relatively quickly. The fact that the employees were dishing out such varied customer experiences from one stay to the next would take longer to put right – if indeed anyone decided to do anything about it. When a physical problem does occur, it's how the employees deal with it that makes the major difference to the customer, more so than the physical problem itself.
I told her how the various reception staff had behaved when I arrived, then dealt, or rather not dealt very well at all with the ensuing problems, and she did apologise a lot. I told her too how different my first stay in the hotel had been, and it seemed she was unaware of the contrasting behaviour of the staff.
I wondered if anyone else at a management level had noticed this prior to me pointing it out. If not, they were in serious danger of not only having leaky plumbing, but seeing customers drain away too. Maybe that's why their rooms were on offer at a vastly reduced rate, because their customer experience was sinking along with their bathroom floors.
Maybe they thought they knew what their customer experience was like, so hadn't bothered to keep re-checking it. What a waste though, having had a good experience during my first stay and raised my opinion of them, to let all that drain away too in disappointment, along with my loyalty and custom. I wondered how many other customers had received an initial good experience only to receive a second bad one, or indeed a bad one during their first stay, never to return again – despite the low prices. How many people had they then told about their experience and warned off staying in that hotel?
Through our own day to day priorities putting us under pressure, it can be easy to miss what's actually going on around us. Even if we have noticed and are monitoring issues in our own area, are these the same issues that are happening elsewhere, or are different negative experiences happening in different areas, which are only serving to compound the problems for customers in dealing with us, as their experience moves from one department to another? Or if you feel your department is indeed giving a good customer experience, are other departments doing the same, or doing something to let you down?
It can be easy to forget to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of what's going on at different times, and in different areas of our organisation. The question is – just what are we missing?
Whatever the organisation, the customer experience can't rest and be left in the hands of just a few people who by chance happen to be better at it than the rest, or who happen to have the words 'customer' or 'marketing' in their job titles. To customers, this will be so obvious that the experience is being dictated by a few individuals, and not by the whole organisation.
If an organisation isn't monitoring the range of experiences it is giving and taking measures to create a more consistently good experience across the whole organisation, then customer loyalty and business will drain away too, to the point that customers will sooner or later pull the plug on their loyalty to the organisation.
Observation Post
Treble or Quits
Why is it when you receive an unwanted telephone call trying to sell you a new kitchen, for example, and when you tell them that your whole kitchen is quite new and you have no intention of replacing it in the foreseeable future, if at all, do you then get another phone call a couple of nights later, from the same company, asking you the same question?
When you then repeat what you said on the first occasion and politely ask if you can be taken off their phone list, why does the same company then phone you again later in the same week?!
It's as if they think they can annoy you into buying a kitchen, very wrongly believing this to be a strategy that is bound to work. It couldn't be more of non-starter! So why do they do it? Is it that they just refuse to listen, or block out the word 'no', or are indeed going on the premise that pester power will win over? Or is it that they just can't be bothered doing the right thing and taking you off their sales list, so that your number gets passed from one sales person to the next, resulting in further unwanted calls?
The result is not only no sale, but massive annoyance for the customer and a determination to blacken this company's name at every opportunity. It might have indeed been a greater selling point and have paid to listen to the customer in the first place, when they said they were not in a position to buy from them.
Making Your Mark
Plugging the Leaks
How many contrasting experiences are you giving across your organisation? Do you really know? Try undertaking your own mystery shopping and taking notice of how different the experiences are across your organisation. Or better still, also ask your customers to undertake some mystery shopping for you.
It doesn't need to be anything complicated to start with, but just initially to give you a picture of variations you might not have been aware of before in the way customers are being dealt with. Even seemingly little things like eye contact and smiling will make a huge difference to the impact on customers' perceptions. Crucial though is your people's attitude to your organisation and its products and services. Are they giving off an air of wanting to work for you or just wanting to go home? Are they giving an enthusiastic or indifferent experience? Are they even able to answer the customers' questions you would expect them to be able to?
There are so many criteria you could use to measure your variations in experience, but even if they are only small variations in some areas, these could still be a huge drain on your customer loyalty, your reputation and the amount of good referrals you're getting.
Speaking Events
I speak at a range of different corporate conferences, both all-staff and management, on the customer experience and Whole Organisation Marketing - living and delivering the brand promise and customer experience, and promoting/ celebrating your organisation through all your people. The emphasis is on improving the whole customer experience, referrals, reputation, your brand, effectiveness, business and bottom line success. I also speak at industry and professional body conferences and events. For example, I have spoken for the Institute of Customer Service, the Institute of Sales and Marketing and the Chartered Institute of Housing.
See the showreel on my website from one of these events.
If you would like to know more about these or the other types of events and conferences I speak at, or indeed have one you would like me to speak at, then do get in touch. If you would like to find out more about the workshops and development sessions I run for organisations, which include ones to develop individuals and teams to improve the customer experience, then just give me a ring or drop me a line. You can see a summary of my workshops on my website too.
Thanks for reading, I hope you found it useful and thought provoking. If we haven't spoken or met already, I hope we get to do so in the not too distant future. If we have, then I look forward to chatting to you again.
See you next time.
Mob: 07787 573539
carolyn@carolyndallaway.com
www.carolyndallaway.com
Subscribe to Making an Impact!
Copyright © 2010, Carolyn Dallaway Ltd. All rights reserved.
|
