MSC Cruises’ Giles Hawke sets out his recipe for success following last week’s Travel Weekly Business Breakfast on customer service
Having attended the excellent Travel Weekly Business Breakfast where three very clever people discussed Customer Service, I left feeling that I’d learned a lot.
But I also felt a little bit like you do after eating a Chinese take away; after an hour or so I was feeling that I wanted more.
More clarity, more tangibility, more certainty.
None of the panel absolutely defined what customer service is and nobody clarified how excellent customer service benefits the bottom line of a business.
This is a perennial challenge for any business and neither question is easy to address simply and clearly.
Taking the first point of “what is customer service?”, I would challenge most organisations to go and ask all of their staff (and a selection of their customers) to define good customer service and the strategy for their business to deliver it, without getting as many different answers as they had respondents.
We all have our own views of which companies deliver good customer service, and many of these coincide with national opinion.
Have a look at the UKCSI, which was published in January of this year by the Institute of Customer Service, to see which companies over 41,000 UK customers viewed as offering the best customer service in the UK.
Just for fun, write down your list first and see how many you got in the top five or top ten. What I found really interesting is that there are very few travel companies in the top 50, which offers an opportunity for all of us to do better.
This doesn’t really answer what customer service is though, and I would suggest that customer service isn’t a department or a buzz phrase, but an ethos that runs through the best organisations to deliver amazing and consistent customer experiences, to understand their customers and offer them what they want at the price they want and with added “wow” in every transaction and interaction.
The other question, around the impact on the bottom line, is a much harder one to answer, as good customer service doesn’t come cheap or easy and needs to be hard-wired into the DNA of a company and its employees.
Having said this, in a world where the customer has access to information at their fingertips and where word of mouth is no longer one-to-one, not delivering excellent service is a risk companies can’t afford to take.
Equally, in travel, where a good hotel is a good hotel and a good cruise ship is a good cruise ship, service becomes the real differentiator. Genuine service, not the “have a nice day” approach.
Empowering people to offer customer service, whether it be through amazing websites that do everything, or dealing with issues quickly and efficiently, makes the customer feel special throughout their contact with the company.
And adding extra touches of magic at every opportunity provides genuine customer service which focuses on how we can make our business work for our customers rather than how we can get our customers to fit in with our business processes.
Customer service as part of a company’s DNA will be the route to true success and will stand out in the future. Those who don’t achieve this will be the long-term losers.