How your hotel can save thousands with improved customer care?

How often do you get emails saying — “I’d like to book a double room for 5 nights, is there anything available”, “do you have an inside pool”, “how can I find your location” and so on? After those emails, the fun part starts. You send numerous messages back and forth, and a very simple thing that would take 30 seconds in real life, instead takes days — and ends up in nothing. I guess it must be really troubling, especially for businesses that require extra care for single customer’s satisfaction — like an auto garage, beauty salon, personal trainer or hotel.
Time for a simple math. While having average revenue from the customer of $50, ten of ended-with-nothing contacts sum up to $500 monthly. That’s $6000 yearly, and it’s a lot of money that you could spend better.
Of course while emailing the customer you can take his or her details and discuss subject over the phone to speed things up. Nevertheless calling or texting costs money and what’s more important — requires time. Math time again — call ten customers a day, each call takes 5 minutes — that’s 50 minutes daily, summing up to 216 hours yearly! Remember that while calling or texting you are not able to work.
How to beat that and be smart with your job? How to avoid wasting money and earn more on regular customers? How to get new clients? Below you will find a list of simple tricks that will help you:
1) Be organised
Are you writing everything down on yellow cards and put the everywhere? Having customers scheduled for the same room? Forgetting about major and minor tasks? It’s time to end that once and for all. Do you happen to get lost in floods of messages? Do your customer need to wait for a reply and keep on asking additional questions to set up the details. Maybe it’s time to move into real-time conversations that will speed things up? What’s important — you need to answer your customers no matter what. Just find the way that suits you and them best. Do not leave customers unanswered, trust me.
2) Give them the ability to schedule online
Do your customers call you to schedule a visit? Do you take those calls while having a different client at the same time? It’s a bad practice to leave the customer unattended while scheduling the next visit with a different customer. Do you email them back and forth to set up the details? If so — give them the ability to schedule visits online — both from desktop and mobile devices. It will save you and them a lot of time. Usually, it’s a matter of few simple questions — name, email, date, requirements. If you do it in real-time — it takes 2–3 sentences and a minute of your time. You can simplify that and bring real-time conversations to your website — just put on a chat tool, a small widget that does real magic. And what’s important — it works on mobile, both for you and the customer, so you can talk on the go, not being “attached” to your desk.
3) Save the data properly
When we know what’s the best way of contact, both for us and the customers, it’s time to save all the information. Not just the details of a visit, but all the customer’s details like first name, last name, contact number and preferably email. Each of those can be useful in the future — either for a reminder, simple contact or even sending a message with a current promo code. You can use a classic notebook or a digital version of it. It’s best to put them in a spreadsheet/file that will always be available online. In that way, you can avoid situations when your old PC is crashing and taking all the valuable contacts you worked for down with it. I prepared a simple Excel spreadsheet that can be used for saving customer details and scheduling appointments. All you need to do is to signup for a newsletter at here, and in the welcome email, you will get the spreadsheet.
4) Remind about scheduled visits
Now we have all customer details in once place. It’s about time to remind the customer of the scheduled visit properly. It can be few days or a week earlier. It’s worth sending such reminder, especially when living in times of remembering everything — kids’ appointments, in-laws’ birthdays, dog vet visits, etc.
You can try many different types of reminders — email, SMS, call. Different people react differently to such reminders. It’s a useful thing to simply ask about the type of contact they prefer while scheduling the appointment.
5) Take control, check statistics, improve your business
We now know how many people show for booked visits. We are aware of how often they forget about them. We were able to implement LiveChat tool for our website to speed scheduling up. It’s time to check if we are getting more money now — compare your revenue, check the sources where customers come from, count the conversations you had with them online, check if you receive emails — and if you spend less time on them. All that will make your business more profitable.
Going through the best business practices list will help you save at least $6000 yearly. Trust me on that.
What other activities do you do? Share your thoughts in comments below.
