Become a Home Based Travel Agent

CLIENTS FOR LIFE
 The Successful Customer Service Action Plan Needs the 3 "R"s
By: Mitchell J. Schlesinger
President MJS Consultants
mjschlesginer@bellsouth.net

Buildings are not constructed without a foundation.  Neither are successful customer service action plans that enable you to capture “Clients for Life”.    The complete foundation consists of the combination of the information presented in previous articles.  Further development of the action plan needs these key elements PLUS the 3 “R”s. 

Database

Everything you know about your clients travel history, personal preferences, hobbies, demographics, psychographics, etc. makes your relationship with them seem that much more connected.  Find the technology right for you to build a CRM model for each of your clients.

Managing the Client Relationship

Every point of contact with you and/or your team is a judged evaluation by your clients.  If there are team members, they must be properly trained to understand precisely the importance of each and every client in terms of purchasing their own travel and more importantly their value as an unofficial member of the agency’s sales team by virtue of their referrals.  Conveying the importance of understanding consumer behavior is crucial in managing the customer relationship and having clients build trust that you are providing travel recommendations based what you know about them demographically and psychographically.

Implementing the 3 Rs

Recognition

As part of managing the customer relationship, recognition is highlighted by the critical aspects contributing to the process of retaining client loyalty.

Engagement:   Your opportunity to create a “connected relationship” with your clients and provide a personalized level of service far superior to anything they can receive from online or mega agencies.  Travel sellers ask all the time; “what can I do to compete with these big agencies?”

You can insure that you establish a service standard that cannot be duplicated and by creating a connected relationship only you can provide personalized travel recommendations that come from your knowing more about your clients than anyone else. 

Part of the team:  Invite loyal clients to speak on your behalf at cruise nights and agency sales events.   Also, use their pictures and testimonials on your website after they return from the trip.  It personalizes your agency and strengthens the relationship with your clients.    

Communications:   Think in terms of the amount and the style of communication your clients (and you) receive from airline or hotel programs they may belong to.  While the communication is personally directed, it contains no real personal connection.  They are also receiving direct mail and/or email communications directly from suppliers.    Make sure that as part of managing their travel over time, your communication does the best job of recognizing them and includes recommended travel based on previous history and personal preferences and aspirations.

Referrals

In an earlier article I referred to client loyalty as a legal pyramid scheme and that implementing an effective referral program can be the catalyst for aggressively generating new clients. Measuring the value of a client includes their own travel PLUS the number of referrals they provide to your agency.

   * The repeat travel metric is a function of how often they book travel with you, how much they spend and if the spend level increases with each trip, the percentage.
   * The referral metric is a measurement over time of the number of clients they refer annually and the calculation of the travel spending from the new clients.
   * This value recognition is an important distinction for clients providing you with significant referral business in conjunction with their own travel activity.

An effective referral program should be the result of two scenarios:

   1.  With the combination of superior service and travel experiences that have fully met and/or exceeded expectations, clients are compelled to tell others about their trip and your    agency.  Clients love to tell family and friends about memorable vacations.
   2.  You harness these positive reactions with a reward program addressed below.

Rewards

A successful rewards program should be implemented with two (2) targets in mind :

Clients: An effective referral reward program for existing clients should be simple,  tangible and cumulative.  It should also be scaled to reflect the expenditures of the products being purchased by referred traveler.   As an example, providing a $25 referral fee per guest is fine when  the new client purchases a travel product under $1,000 per person, however the rewards should scale up as the spending increases.   When an existing luxury client refers a new client who books a $10,000 trip, the reward should give your client the perception that you truly value their support.  

Team

Members: In order to insure that your customer service action plan succeeds, it must also reward agency team members for providing the level of customer service that meets and exceeds the standards YOU set.   An age old truism for managing teams is; tell them they will listen, show them they will look, involve them and they will understand. Remember, you must involve your team so that they fully understand the customer service standard and remind them that they are always an ambassador for the agency. 

Most importantly, rewards can modify and reinforce behavior and a variety of recognition components make for powerful rewards.  Reward incentives for teams and team members should be based on and structured with several elements including:

   * Comments from clients
   * Recommendations from other team members
   * Your own observation
   * Bonuses for bookings, scaled by expenditure.
   * Agency productivity weekly, monthly, quarterly etc.
   * Service recognition that includes a PR release to a local newspaper and in a newsletter you send to clients.
   * “On the spot” mini-rewards (i.e.; gift cards)for individual service performance
   * “Surprise” team awards (lunches or dinners together) for positive results
   * Individual rewards for sales and service over designated periods of time

Successfully implementing a customer service action plan that retains clients for life requires treating customers as lifetime partners, insures team members fully understand the customer service standards and implementing the 3 R’s.