How do you know if your customers are satisfied? How sure are you that you’re still in touch with their needs? Post a comment based on the information contained in the Show-and-Tell in the Evaluate Customer Service learning pack.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Module 4 : Week 6
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6 comments:
Hello
Just getting in early on the blogs due to some leave coming up.
With the clients I deal with they run internal surveys rating our performance and gaining feedback from our travel bookers and occassionally travellers.
I am not sure if these are also created in conjuction with our Sales and Marketing team - one would hope so as this is crucial in gaining an understanding from our clients.
They say that only 1 in 19 customers will actively complain to the service provider. I feel in this industry that is not so much the case. Generally most cases are reported back to us via the traveller, travel booker or procurement team.
On many occasions the complaint is regarding one of our suppliers, in which we will research and try to gather an explanation from the supplier.
Its important to let these supplier know of the problems and work with for solutions to prevent future problems. As even though the problem may not be ours, it reflects poorly on us as we have offered the service.
I have looked through the content on the Show and Tell in the Evaluate Customer Service Learning pack and have picked up some good service monitoring tool.
Generally it is the Sales and Marketing team who apply the monitoring for our external clients. It would be good moving forward to get Operations also involved in this process so we have a clear understanding of what is being asked and ensuring the questions we want answered are being asked.
In both Op's and Sales we complete QIC forms which are a great method of recording issues that occur, however we may not use them as effectively as possible to review and analyse the data. This may help us pick up on trends to alter to improve our service levels.
In an operations capacity we treat our employees as customers and we use methods such as the PDR, regular one on ones to monitor their satisfaction.
Understanding the customers needs are the first step to ensuring we meet their needs.
To begin this we need to ask and listen for three things:
• their needs (must haves)
• their wants (would like to have)
• what would delight them (what if the other two are met would thrill them)
Once these are established and the customer has been using our services for a while, we also need to ensure we’re continuing to meet their needs. This could be done for various areas within their business (e.g. travel booker, traveller, procurement, finance etc) and could be done in a number of ways.
For many customers we conduct an annual customer satisfaction survey (travel bookers, procurement).
There are a number of other ways we can find out also:
• We can also ask when meeting face to face to customers
• we can also include a ‘trip survey’ in the ticket wallets for international travellers, and
• schedule a time to call their top travellers to ask about our service.
What’s important with these types of questions is to ensure consistency so the results can be measured, collated and compared to other people from their organisation (or others in a general sense) around the same question/topic.
Through our Quality Assurance programme we’ve developed a process called QIC (Quality Improvement Change). This is a documented process for issue resolution which enables us to maintain systems, records and reports to follow up and document any complaints or compliments we receive.
These could be related to our service, or the service of an industry supplier (e.g. hotel, airline etc). Through logging the QIC forms by company, we can report back to them on a quarterly basis what issues have been raised, how they’ve been dealt with, and how many issues there were (as a %) compared to how many bookings we completed for them.
If we do these things we’ll keep the lines of regular and meaningful communication open and be listening and looking for what satisfies and dissatisfies our customers
We work in such a competitive industry and can never be complacent. It's excellence in customer service that will win and retain us business.
We use Zoomerang surveys, plus I make courtesy phone calls at regular intervals to key travellers and travel bookers. Our sales team meets with travel coordinators to obtain their feedback, and anything at all good, bad or ugly!) is recorded on a QIC form (quality improvement and change) and can therefore be referred to easily.
Our clients are encouraged to nominate our staff members if they believe they have received exceptional service - the volume we receive each month is testament to our superb team and reaffirms the fact we are aligned with the needs, wants and wishes of our client base.
From the financial point of view again, when a client starts to be slow at payment of bills we know we are having issues.
As the others have mentioned, there should be constant dialog with the client - whether face to face at a meeting, phone catch up call, zoomerang surveys. Basically you need to ask the client - are we still meeting their needs?
Hey Team,
Cheers Nick - sounds like your making heaps of work for me!! (Only kidding mate). But your right in what you have said. In the S&M team we have a way of monitoring customer satisfaction by way of survey to the travel booker and/or traveller.
APX have let this drop in the last couple of years in the promise of a better survey/system to evaluate and monitor customer’s needs/wants and must haves. Although, our marketing team (note - NOT SALES!!) are working on collating data specific to our customers (and suppliers) so that we have an arsenal of information to help us understand our clients/customers and provide more of what they want.
On a different level, I often actually ask my main contacts if they feel travellers and travel bookers are happy and more often than not I feel I get an honest answer (this is easier when the relationship you have with your contact is a good one)
As already mentioned, satisfaction in Travel is very hard as we work with something intangible and very emotive. I would hazard a guess and say that probably 90% of problems/errors within our industry are feedback to us. With this level of understanding, it can help us to continually improve and hopefully change areas that may need changing.
Cheers
Hi team,
It is important for us to understand our clients needs as this can vary significantly from client to client.
Sales & Marketing send out electronic surveys each 6 months (ideally) to gain an understanding of this level of satisfaction from an Operational level and results from this is summarised and shared with the client and the team highlighting where we are meeting clients needs and any areas that we need to have in plan in place to improve our performance.
A survey is also sent out once a year to Procurement Managers to gain an understanding of their satisfaction level which is more based around Account Management and how well we align with their business strategies and understand their business.
Our Quality programme is an excellent process internally to log any supplier or client process issues as many of the team have explained this process above, thanks team. What I particularly like about this process is that we share the process resolution with our clients at each quarterly review which allows them to have a further understanding of our process.
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