Do Not Call list

Coming into effect in the next few days in Canada is the National Do Not Call List. Developed by the CRTC, but managed oddly enough by the largest telecommunications firm in Canada Bell Canada, this is a very water-downed version of what most of the public had been asking and looking for.

In an article in today's Toronto Star they cite a poll of Canadians that state 64% intend to register for the do not call list. I do hope for the sake of bitter irony that this poll was conducted over the phone

Certain organizations such as companies that have current business with you or charitable organizations are exempt from following the registry (you register your home phone number and organizations aren't supposed to call you). The overall number of calls that a person receives may not be reduced however as companies work to re-direct their telemarketing work in an effort to continue sales (yes telemarketing works).

Under the companies that you have current business with I know of a couple of the larger Canadian banks that are going to respect customer's wished to not be called under Do Not Call guidelines in an effort to improve the overall Customer Experience and Customer Satisfaction. Companies should respect the registry and the rights of individuals to not be contacted, but only the test of time and the strength of enforcement will determine how effective it is.

Please share your do not call list stories with me. To register yourself visit this site.

Response Received

As promised - below is the response I received from the hotel I was dealing with. They are in a difficult position - I have already left - and they have limited opportunities to win me back.

Companies should do what they can to try and restore an overall customer experience though. Dealing with the customer service department or help line is as much a part of the experience as staying at the hotel itself

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Well Hello There Mr. MacDonald,

Thank you very much for reaching out to us. My name is Denny &&&&& and I am a Welcome Desk Manager at the &&&&&. I have received a copy of your customer service file and wish to offer my assistance from this point forward. Firstly, I like to offer my deepest and sincere apologies for the low level service you received while with us. Our goal is to ensure that every minute of your escape with us is pleasant and memorable (in a good way of course). If we have not done that then we have failed our job miserably. We appreciate that you have taken the time to offer this feedback because it gives us the opportunity to rectify and work on these areas that need work. There is no excuse for bad service which is why your feedback is so important to us.

To recover from a bad experience such as this is truly never easy. I am certain however that we can offer much better service than this and I am hoping that we can get this opportunity in the future. I have reviewed your reservation and indeed you did not receive the points that you should have rightfully earned. I would personally like to offer you a total of 5000 bonus points as a token of goodwill. My hope is that we can welcome you again and offer you the quality of service that I am sure we can offer you. I would also like to offer you a complimentary upgrade to one of our suites on any of your future visits. Please provide me with your &&&&& Preferred Guest number so that I can immediately add the bonus points to your account. Please feel free to contact me at any time if you have any questions or if there is anything else that I can do for you.

Warmest regards,

Denny

Response from Customer Service

Following up from my previous posts in my complaints to my recent hotel stay I received a response from the Customer Service desk just within the promised 24 hour window.

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Dear Devon MacDonald,
Thank you for emailing us. I welcome this opportunity to assist you.
Please be assured both &&&&&Hotels & Resorts Worldwide and &&&&& Preferred Guest strive to maintain the highest quality of customer service. I apologize if your experience has not been an example of this and would like to assure you that it was the exception and not the rule.
I have forwarded your comments to the hotel's General Manager on your behalf. This matter will be fully investigated and you will hear from the hotel within five days.
In the meantime, should you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us either by replying to this email or by phone at 1-800-###-###. Your reference number for this matter is #####.
I hope your next stay will be more enjoyable.

In order to ensure that we deliver the best customer service to our guests, I would like to ask if you could take a minute to complete our brief customer feedback survey. The survey consists of eight quick questions and should only take a minute or two to complete. We welcome your comments and thank you for your participation.
We appreciate your patronage of &&&&&Hotels & Resorts Worldwide. If you have any further customer service questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at &&&&&@&&&&&hotels.com.

Best Regards,
&&&&& &&&&& Specialist,
E-Communications Department
&&&&&Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

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Meeting established customer expectations within the Customer Service field is an absolute must. I had mentally prepared my post in which I would stress the importance of meeting set expectations with customers, particularly when dealing with a complaint issue. I will save it for another day.

I appreciate the opportunity to submit further feedback using the links provided (hyperlinks from message removed to prevent identifying information), but I will admit to finding it a little premature and untimely. The type of feedback that they are looking for will most likely be jaded by my experience with Customer Service or addressed in my previous complaint. Companies should request feedback from customers, but it should be at dependable and consistent times within the customer lifecycle.

I look forward to the response from the Hotel Manager within the promised time and will share the response with you.

Also, after my wife read this post she let me know of a couple of other issues with the service that I had either a) forgotten or b) not been a part of;

• the wake up call that we requested for Sun morning never came (which is potentially very serious - we could have missed our flight)
• the front desk staff (who claimed to be on loan from another &&&&& hotel) didn't know where Bloomingdale's was - this is a major tourist attraction and I think that all staff should have a basic knowledge of the major attractions in the area
• no coffee maker in room, no restaurant open early to get coffee from and no coffee station in the lobby for early risers/departures
• the bathroom in the suite was quite shabby and not at all up to the standard that I would have expected for that calibre of room

I will pass this additional information on the Customer Service desk and Hotel Manager

Automated Confirmation Message Received

10 minutes after I had submitted my online comments to the hotel I received the below automated response from the hotel.

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Dear Valued Guest,

Thank you for contacting &&&&& Hotels & Resorts Worldwide.

This is an automated acknowledgment of your message to let you know we have received your email and that we will reply within 24 hours.

This message is not intended to answer the email that you have just submitted but we do want to confirm that we have received your message.

One of our E-Communications Specialists will read and address your comments personally. This often requires some time for research before replying but please be assured we are working very hard to get back to you as quickly as possible.

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I am looking forward to their response!

Message Sent

As promised in my earlier post I will be sharing my communications with myself and the hotel regarding my past stay. In a search of their corporate website I was able to submit a complaint through a free formed box and select the "Compliment or Complaint" category.

I first drafted the submission in MS Word - a better way to few the overall message and execute spell / grammar check rather than within a tiny box - and a web pop-up notified my of the message being sent. I did however receive a message received confirmation in my email inbox - which is a simple step that companies should do.

The full text (minus rates or identifying information) of my message is below:

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As a frequent business and leisure traveller and a Customer Experience professional I was looking forward to my weekend stay in one of the suites at the &&&&& Hotel in New York. The overall size and comfort of the room was good, and while it was expensive it was decent value. The service that we received at the hotel however will keep myself and wife from staying at a &&&&& Hotel again.

We did however find the staff to be unprofessional and inattentive to simple needs in a number of ways:
- I was not asked for my &&&&& card or membership and did not receive room credit for my stay
- We requested a standard sewing kit be sent to our room – it never arrived
- We tried to book usage of the complimentary car service but found the attendant to be generally uninterested in our request
- We were assured by the concierge that the adjoining lounge would accept us early and were turned away by staff

For a boutique hotel asking $### a night for a suite I would have expected at least basic services and requests as I have described above to be met. I have received better service at a number of other hotels that certainly don’t claim to have the prestige or pedigree as &&&&, but deliver quality service and deserve my business.

Sincerely

Devon MacDonald
&&& Number #########

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I will post their response (including response time) upon receipt

Style vs Substance

This past weekend my wife and I travelled to NYC for some fun and adventure. The preperation for this trip has been highlighted in my previous posts (here, here) about dealing with reward companies - we used points for our flight and for a portion of our hotel.

The hotel market in New York is very competitive and very expensive. With high rental rates and a demand for consumer dollars the level of service and comfort is typically quite high at hotels. The hotel that we stayed at was a higher-end boutique hotel that was part of a national chain. And while the room we had was fantastic - it was actually called the Fantastic Suite - the service from the different staff at the hotel left a lot to be desired.

As in previous posts (here) I can not stress enough the impact that front line staff have in delivering a positive customer experience to customers / guests. They have the greatest amount of contact with every client and have the most opportunities to positively and negatively impact the view of the customer on the product or service.

In the case of the hotel, the service and staff are a part of the product. The room is an extension of the service and is what is provided - it is the staff that deliver it. I will give this particular hotel credit for having a large volume of staff on hand, it was the service that they collectively provided that will keep us from going back again. Some examples:

• Requesting a sewing kit and it never showing up
• Being offered a complimentary car service that was managed by a clearly over-worked and under-motivated employee
• Being told by one staff member to sit in the lounge before it was opened only to be told by the lounge staff that they weren't opening for another 10 minutes and we could go down the street
• Trying to ask the concierge a question and being told that she was too busy

What all service based industries (and this hotel in particular) should do is put a greater emphasis amongst employees on the impact that they have on the customer (guest) experience.

This should be done through some simple training programs either on an on-going basis or as a part of the onboarding process. They should also provide feedback opportunities for customers / guests to provide employee level feedback - which seems to be a given in other hotels, but was glarlingly absent here.

I hope to provide a link to this post to the hotel manager and will post any reponse or feedback that I receive.

Follow Up - Rewards Programs

After my previous post I needed to call back into Company A to ask them to do something (send me an email) that they has said they would do, but didn't.

I knew what I was getting myself into so I waited until I had a good gap between meetings and phone calls to call them. After failing the voice authentication again and waiting on hold for 18 minutes (yikes) I was able to get through to someone and have them send me the information I needed.

The interesting part was that I received a follow up questionnaire later that day from them asking questions about the last time that I called into their Contact Centre. These types of questionnaires are familiar to us all but I saw some unique opportunities within this particular one.

Some standard questioning about how everything went and what my customer service rep did and did not do was included. There was a heavy component on what is called advocacy questions -Would I recommend this service? Would I refer friends and family to this service? This type of questioning is used to develop the advocacy score - a common comparative measurement used to assess Customer Experience in a variety of industries - and is very useful.

There was some free-form space as well that allowed me to share my opinion (respectfully of course) of their voice-authentication and wait times.

The survey ended by asking me for my program number and email linked to the program for further follow up. I would normally not provide this information, but I believe that it provides company A with a unique opportunity.

They know I called them, they know who I am and they know what my impressions of the service are. By taking my direct feedback they should be able to link it to the information from my last call. From this they should be able to determine if my recollection of the call information (duration, authentication) was accurate.

Linking this information will allow them to see if the experience that their customers endure reflects what actually happened. Customer's impressions - and expectations - of certain services often vary widely from what they actually experienced. I knew I was going to be waiting long and was prepared for it, as a result I was not as outraged as I was the first time.

Reward Programs

On my to-do list today was a couple of calls into Customer Service lines for reward programs. Reward programs themselves are a CRM initiative. Designed to increase the buy-in that customers have with a specific brand and reward them with incentives and free stuff when and if they are eligible, they are standard practice amongst a number of industries (travel, banking, retail)

As a CRM and Customer Experience Professional I look at these interactions as ways to learn more about the different technologies and processes companies have in place to engage their clients. As a mid-tier member (by their ranking) with each company I was interested to see what they had in store for me.

With Company A I had redeemed some points for a weekend trip and needed to make a change to the flights. I called their 1-800 number and was asked to authenticate myself by saying my program ID (they had previously recorded my voice in an earlier call).

After 3 unsuccessful tries they program was unable to verify who I was. I was encouraged to either a) call back at a later time b) visit their web site or c) press 0 to speak with a representative. I choose c and started waiting.

While waiting I was on Company B's website and simply needed to change my mailing address (moved a while ago, but never changed my address with them) and noticed a click to chat button on the website. This allowed me to open a window in my browser and chat with a customer service rep.

After providing some identifying information the rep I was chatting with was able to quickly and easily update my information, send me a new card and make me a promotional offer for a new service - all within 4 minutes. Thanking them for their help - and declining the offer - I closed the window and put my attention back to waiting for Company A.

A rep from Company A got to my call after an 8 minute wait - which is an eternity. They were able to process my request and get me off the phone after another 3 minutes.

I recognize that there is limited revenue opportunity for these types of calls and as such these centres are viewed as a cost centre. If reward companies are going to provide rewards and recognize clients they should ensure that their loyal clients are treated in a fair and timely manner, otherwise the rewards become hassles - not benefits.

Having voice-authentication and bio-metrics in place for a call centre is great - if it works. Company A (and others) should look at less expensive and easier ways to interact with the clients to provide the most effective and consistent experience to reward their customer further. Going through repeated tries with a technology is expensive and frustrating for all involved.

Company B should look to expand their click to chat program to move the chat to an actually voice conversation if further interaction required.

Keep 'em Coming

After a month of either vacationing or working to hard (strange but true balance) I am back at my blog.

Over my vacation and the summer my family and I spent a lot of time at our family cottage and as such drove past the many seasonal businesses and tourist locations that survive on cottage traffic alone.

A particular restaurant (which will remain nameless - first person to guess correctly in comments gets a DVD copy of new release "Your Beautiful Cul de Sac Home" - email me directly once comment is posted with contact info) time and again amazes me because they have average food with high prices but the experience and service is incredible. People are so loyal to this particular restaurant that they actually had to build a dedicated pedestrian overpass on the highway so that people in the opposite direction would stop risking getting hit by high speed traffic just to get a burger and fries.

Their recipe to success? Simple and fresh food combined with excellent service.

All food is to go and the restaurant provides a fair sized picnic area for families and pets to stretch their legs and enjoy some shade. The line-ups for the two kitchens are daunting (never shorter than 20 people) but they move people through very quickly. The smartest thing that they do is that the order-takers work their way through the line to take your order - which commits you to staying even though you haven't paid.

Other businesses have opened next door, down the road, up the road and across the road to try and take some business away - but they all fail. The restaurant makes it easy for people to buy their food, they provide them with a relaxing yet energetic environment and they deliver quality food consistently.

Other restaurants (and those trying to compete) should look at these attributes when trying to emulate their success and keep the customer's experience front of mind.