Become a Home Based Travel Agent

 CLIENTS FOR LIFE - PART 3
THE DOLLARS AND SENSE OF CLIENT LOYALTY
By: Mitchell J. Schlesinger
President
MJS Consultants

The concept of “Clients for Life” is simple and starts with understanding just how essential your clients are to your business success.  The key word is essential.   With the absence of a loyal client base, it is very difficult to build a thriving, long term business.  This series of articles will focus on the importance of client loyalty and the myriad of steps required to insure that you are achieving this and benefiting from it financially.

Lets start with the basics.  If you don’t do this now, but have actually have the data somewhere, make sure you have an organized file for each and every one of your clients reflecting:

·         All of the trips they have booked with you

·         The number of days of each trip

·         The ticket cost per person for each trip

·         The destinations to which they have traveled

·         The categories of travel (cruises, tours, FIT) booked

·         Types of accommodations purchased

·         The time intervals between trips purchased

·         Special requests they have made when booking trips

·         Personal information you know about them  

·         All  social and civic organizations to which they belong

·         Hobbies, passions etc in which they are involved

·         Birthdays and anniversaries of all family members

·         Contact information for siblings and relatives (irrespective of where they live)

·         The names of everyone they have ever referred to you

One of the great clichés in the business world is; “Failing to plan is planning to fail”.  And while it is a cliché, it is one businesses great truisms.   Regardless of which software system you use, or just create files in your computer, if you are not accumulating the information above, you are planning to fail.  This information is the lifeblood of your business because of what flows from it. 

For those with very up-to-date records, you have the ability to calculate the value of every one of your clients in terms of their impact on your annual revenue.  And the impact they provide not only comes in the form of their own travel, but much more importantly, the business they refer to you.  Think of client loyalty like a legal pyramid scheme.  Every time they refer someone to you who books a trip, it creates another branch system on a tree with the next generation of referrals from the original ones.  And this is crucial as it costs significantly less to generate business via repeat and referral clients compared to the cost of generating brand new customers.

A theme of this series that will be repeated over and over and over is the concept of managing your clients travel over time.  This is all about your focus on their demographics and psychographics which are inextricably linked to what they buy and when they buy it, and how that changes as they age and go through the various stages of life.  The travel they purchase when they are in their 30s with  2 young children at home will be very different than what they will want 25 years later as empty nesters.  It is up to you to effectively manage the travel purchase pattern year after year and decade after decade.  Of course, this presumes that you performed the necessary steps to insure that they will still be your clients as time passes.

This attempt to inject concern comes from three specific standpoints.  The first is simple.  If you don’t dote on your clientele, they have no real reason to be loyal to you, or consider you “brand centric” as a service provider and therefore purchase trips from other agencies.   The second, are all the outside sources playing siren songs to your clients attempting to lure them into purchasing their travel through alternative resources.  This includes not only other agencies, but more obtrusively, product suppliers attempting to enhance their direct sales.   

The third is financial.  For the better part of the past 20 years, through a litany of educational venues, there has been a consistent effort to convey the concept that your clients are like an annuity.  Just as investments grow and generate incremental interest income, the same can be said of longtime clients as they age.  As they reach empty nester status and get into their 50s & 60s, these clients begin to travel to farther flung destinations, spend more time traveling, purchase more expensive travel alternatives, travel more frequently and book their trips well in advance of the actual travel.   All of which results in commissions which continually grow over time like interest on investments.

I wrote this first article presuming that those of you who are reading it and have gotten to this point, are divided into two main groups.  The first group has the information above and either realizes now or is calculating immediately and will quickly recognize the actual value of existing clients.   The second group I hope are in some form of panic because they do not have the above information in an organized fashion and are not taking full advantage of what value their clients provide.   The goal is that anyone in group 2 is making a promise to move into group 1. 

The notion of “clients for life” is simply that your clients are worth more to you as they age both in terms of repeat travel and referrals.  It is your challenge to retain these “client annuities” as they continue to book travel through their lifetime or lose this lucrative business.   It is just common “sense” to protect these dollars.