Travel Articles And News On Vacations

Managing Guest Experience for B&B and Vacation Rental owners

Customer Service for Small Hospitality Businesses

What you need to learn from the big guys to thrive in your Bed and Breakfast or Vacation home rental, or self catered property

This series of articles helps an owner/manager of a small bed and breakfast or vacation rental property increase guest revenues and decrease operations costs by examining the guest contact points in a formal manner.

Part 1 Stages of ?Customerhood?

For years, Customer Service was the place where I returned my toaster when it made charcoal instead of toast. That?s just the tip of an iceberg. The largest companies have very solid customer service programs, including broken promise tracking, customer satisfaction ratings, customer contact management, and yes, return merchandise methods. Sears Canada received the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation?s highest rating for customer service in 2007 for excellence in customer contact because they have a commitment to a clear set of customer contact processes, and execute them well. And when they do something wrong they kick into a customer recovery process that wins customers for life.

This series of articles will examine how thinking about a formal customer care process will help you attract customers (hereafter called Guests), and increase their value to you by increasing the revenue derived from them and decreasing your customer acquisition and customer management costs.

Do you have to do a very formal process mapping to achieve the results for your three room bed and breakfast? Isn?t that overkill? Yes and no. Yes: It?s a lot of work to document and execute a customer process at the large corporation scale. No: By being aware of some of the principles, you can make some appropriate changes to what you are doing that are probably free to you that will increase your guest loyalty and decrease your costs.

If you are running a successful bed and breakfast or vacation rental property now, you?ll already be doing all of the customer contact. This series of articles simply allows you to be aware of what you are trying to accomplish at each level and very quickly evaluate if it is the best possible action, and this allows you to make changes that help guest loyalty and decreases your costs. Stages of Customerhood How can you take key lessons from giants like Sears and use them in a small bed and breakfast, vacation rental or self catered vacation property?

First, understand that everyone goes through phases of ?customerhood? that look like: 1. I?ve never heard of ?that brand?. 2. I am aware of the brand. 3. When I shop, I?ll compare that brand with others. 4. I?ll purchase something from that brand for some reason or 5. I?m a lifelong customer and it would take a big event to get me to defect from that brand.

Successful companies have a plan to lead a customer from ?never heard? status to ?lifelong customer? status and keep them there! Every customer contact is a chance to lead the customer towards ?lifelong customer? status.

Your customer service efforts should be geared towards moving customers from stage 1 to stage 2 and so on. If you try to create Stage 5 customers off the bat you will waste time talking to stage 1 customers who simply won?t commit to being a lifelong customer without going through the experience of building up

In the next article: Mapping your Processes

Phil is the host of Sailors Rest Cottage in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.

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