Digital Drums’ Steve Dunne believes the industry needs to change its approach
Here’s a question for you: if you get great customer feedback, what do you do with it? Use it in your marketing material? Send it round your colleagues to collectively celebrate? Perhaps even crow about it by quoting it on your website?
And who would blame you? In 2023 one of the best things you can use to promote your brand is positive customer feedback; a happy customer’s feedback is what other consumers find reassuring when considering buying from you.
But what do you do if you get negative feedback? I would suggest that if you are similar to many travel companies you might just ignore it, sweep it under the carpet and perhaps pretend it was never mentioned.
I can imagine many travel marketing managers, on hearing that remark, are shaking their heads and saying, “No, not us”. But sadly, I think that is very much the case in the travel, leisure and hospitality sectors.
Every time I use a service these days – be it having a Sunday lunch at my local pub, booking a car parking space, or going on a cruise, flight, package holiday or staying at a hotel – I get an email shortly afterwards with a title such as: “How did we do?” The demand for feedback from brands can be quite insistent, almost bordering on bullying in some instances. If you forget or ignore one of these emails, you soon get another one, and then another. Slowly but surely they clog up your inbox, cajoling you to respond.
Indifference to feedback
Now you might be surprised that a marketing man such as me would be writing so negatively about feedback surveys. So, why am I so sceptical about the industry’s commitment to acting on feedback that is less than positive? It’s because I’m convinced human eyes don’t read the feedback forms.
In my time I have filled out hundreds of customer feedback surveys. The majority have been positive comments that I’ve shared with the travel brand. But there have been several occasions where, due to poor service I have given negative remarks and, most strikingly, when I have expressed something less than desirable, I’ve received no reaction from the brand in question.
I once wrote, in response to one of those emails, an extensive piece of feedback to a well-known tour operator about what appeared to be some sort of scam involving its staff overseas. To this day I have never had an email or call to follow up that observation.
Lack of response
When I go on a cruise with a certain well-known cruise line, I know that on the last evening nearly every staff member will remind me to fill in the survey form, while at the same time asking me to give a high mark. Now most of the time I would deservedly give them the top mark, but it seems a little disingenuous to have the staff of the cruise brand telling me what mark to give them. And on my last cruise with that brand, I made an observation in the feedback form that I had thought would prompt a reaction from management – instead, I heard nothing.
Be it hotels or airlines, whenever I experience their service and they ask for feedback, I feel I owe it to the brand to do so. I don’t expect to hear back from them if it is great feedback, but I do rather expect a reaction if it is less than what they would want.
The problem with this automated, tick-box management approach is that eventually it kills off the very thing it is supposed to be helping – allowing us to improve our brand or service.
Consumers will just ignore the feedback forms. Instead, they will vote with their feet, by which time it is likely to be too late to take remedial action. You have lost the customer for good.
My mum used to have a saying: “If you’re going to do something, do it properly or don’t do it at all.” The same could apply to feedback in the travel sector. If we’re going to do feedback surveys, let’s do it properly or let’s not do it at all.