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Is after sales service really applicable in your business, and why/why not?
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About Me
- James in Bologna
- Bologna, Emilia-Romagna region, Italy
- Thanks for stopping by and reading the 'bo-log'. In January 2017, I upgraded my MCA (Master of Creative Arts) at the University of Technology Sydney to a PhD. The project, 'Masculinity on Trial', looks for Australian masculinities lost in the establishment of the Anzac hegemony during WW1. From March to July 2017, I am being hosted in Italy at the University of Bologna on an ErasmusPLUS doctoral research writing scholarship.
5 comments:
This is an area of our business we could look at concentrating on a little more.
We generally do not approach our clients for feedback on their journey on their return. Most corporates dont have time or dont care to give us feedback unless an undesirable service or product was delivered.
We could possibly send a fairly generic feedback form to the clients email around there return to get some feedback and provide some measures on what are doing well - or wrong.
This will also prevent us booking hotels or products that we may not be aware are inappropriate.
After-sales service is critical but I agree with Nick, I don't believe we do enough of it. Too often the only after-sales contact we have with our client is when handling a complaint or concern, be it APX or supplier related.
I believe frequent travellers are happy to share their experiences-to the benefit of others. I think it would be appropriate if a member of the APX team - be it the consultant, CSM or CRM, make contact with travellers on their return and then share the feedback with the entire consulting team. Definitely something we need to look to do more frequently...
I guess this has a few different parts to it. The shear quantity of bookings we make would mean it would be a full time job to contact most travellers after their trip and collate the data received. Also as business people don’t really want to travel in the first place they are not as willing to provide feedback as most the time they have been told by their company the hotel/car they must use and don’t feel like they have much control over this.
I think we provide after sales service in the form of quarterly reviews looking at the reasons they stayed where they stayed, the reasons they flew on that particular flight and booking class which provides value to the organisation as a whole. They are then able to deal with problem travellers and those ‘breaking the rules’.
We used to call our VIP travellers on the return of their trip to see how everything went; this would be good to bring back in.
Hi Strivers
Over 98% of our business being corporate travel, which therefore means the large majority of our frequent travellers are repeat travellers who book with us as their company as an agreement/contract with us.
That said our after sales service is still important as it builds trust and ensures that we consistantly demonstrate to our customers that their needs are recognised and important to us.
Over time their needs may change, so if we don’t provide an opportunity for dialogue back from them we may miss an opportunity to better help them (or other customers) next time around.
We don’t do a lot of after sales service at traveller level, but we do provide contacts points at travel coordinator level and at contracts management level through our Customer Service Managers and Customer Relationship Managers.
Some of the ways we get feedback now is through:
* Customer surveys – generally every six months
* Trip feedback and APX ‘be exceptional’ customer feedback awards
* Quarterly reviews
* Quality Improvement/Issue resolution process
* Post implementation feedback
* Traveller profile audits
Perhaps getting the Team Leaders/Customer Service Managers/ Sales Support to call a sample of our most frequent travellers from some of our key customers every month would be beneficial both in terms of any relevant customer feedback about us/suppliers and enhancing the opportunity to build rapport with the traveller.
As everyone else has mentioned, in a corporate travel agency, like ours we probably dont do it enough. I think it is applicable to our business as it important to know how our clients feel about the service we provided them with. Without this information, how can we improve or up sell in the future to our clients.
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