How to Resolve a Bad Customer Service Experience Jul 22nd 2013, 23:45
When selling luxury travel, one of the most important lessons I have learned is that when a problem arises, it’s not the problem itself but how you fix the problem that clients will long remember. This is actually a lesson I continue to learn, not only in dealings with my own high-level clients but as a consumer and frequent traveler.
I had the opportunity recently to experience a fantastic example of how one large travel company, a U.S.-based airline, took serious steps to regain my faith, my loyalty and long-term business. Days later it sticks with me as the story I will keep in mind when I need to play “problem solver.”
The scenario—which involved over four hours of my valuable time on the phone with four different people (including two who hung up on me)—should never have escalated into a serious problem. But after one of the agents mishandled my initial request to change my outbound ticket date, she rudely told me that I would just have to hold on and wait on the phone while she found someone who could help her fix it. As surprised as I was with her tone and obvious lack of respect for my time or my loyal business, I had no choice but to hold on the line while she attempted to correct her error and fix my ticket.
Two hours later, the ticket was still not fixed and the connection either got lost or she hung up on me. Despite the fact that all of my details (including my home, office and cell phone numbers) were in my frequent-flyer profile that she had access to, she did not call me back. This left me in a position where I had to call the airline again and speak to someone else, since my original tickets no longer even showed up in the GDS or in my profile on the airline’s site as upcoming trips.
At this point, my entire afternoon had now been ruined and I had to cancel several appointments. Fast forward two hours later and the very kind agent at the executive support desk found a way to salvage my original tickets cancelled by her colleague and reinstate as well as change them at a cost of a few hundred dollars to me. At this point, I hardly even cared about the cost, all I wanted was a confirmation that my tickets for my upcoming weekend trip had been redone properly and showed as “open” tickets in my profile.
After thanking this woman profusely for finding a way to solve the problem that her colleague had created, I sent a detailed email outlining my frustration over what happened to a company executive. I did not really expect much more than a return email to let me know that they’d look into it, but within a day I had received multiple emails and phone calls from top executives apologizing to me. One top executive even called me from his cell phone on the Friday of the July 4th holiday asking that I please call him back as he had seen my email and really wanted the opportunity to discuss it with me.
Those fast, attentive replies really got my attention, and it got me thinking again how important it is to communicate with our top clients on a regular basis, and to try as hard as we can to listen to them when there is a problem and come up with an immediate solution. This airline executive said the company would be sending me a refund check to cover the amount I ended up having to pay for the ticket exchange, would upgrade me on the next flight I booked with them as an incentive for me to give them another chance as my airline of choice (which they have been for several years now), and on top of it, he surprised me by having VIP greeters set up to ensure all went smoothly for me a few days later when I departed from LAX and when I landed at my destination.
The moral of this story is that yes, we all make mistakes. The key thing is to own these mistakes, apologize and be nice to your clients once you realize you have made a mistake. Most importantly, you must communicate to your clients that you are absolutely going to find a way to resolve the problem. The last thing you want to do is put your luxury travel clients on hold for hours without reassuring them that you will “fix” the problem. After all, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem!
Stacy Small, a veteran travel journalist, is president of Los Angeles-based Elite Travel International, a Virtuoso-affiliated travel agency specializing in luxury travel worldwide. Follow her on Twitter @EliteTravelGal. This column is adapted from one published in the July 2013 issue of Agent@Home magazine.
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