The phrase ‘to measure is to know’ applies particularly well to customer service and sales departments in travel companies. Without setting strong metrics for your customer service and sales department and measuring them accurately, it’s hard to make sense of data and use that data to improve your service.
The following are some essential metrics to track.
1. Average Response Time
In this fast paced world, customers are no longer satisfied with long waiting times and delays in getting a response when they call or send an email. There are too many competitors out there, so if your company is not responding quickly, it’s easy for them to switch and book with someone else.
It’s therefore crucial to measure your Average Response Time (how long it takes between the time a customers sends an enquiry or calls and the time a representative responds). This is usually measured in minutes in call center environments and in hours in email/helpdesk environments. The quicker, the better obviously.
You can measure the ART by partnering with a trusted call centre provider (such as Genesys) who can measure this for you automatically or helpdesk software such as desk.com that keeps track of this. The Aberdeen Group of Research measured how response time affects customer retention. They concluded that companies with an Average First Respnse time of less than 10 hours have customer satisfaction ratings of over 90%. Within the travel industry however, it’s even more important to be quicker. Hotels Tonight, a last mnute hotel booking site, aims to provide a response time of less than 10 minutes via email.
2. Customer Retention
Another important metric is customer satisfaction. How many customers are repeat customers and how long do they do business with you? The longer customers do business with you and thus the more often they return to book with you, gives you an indication of how good your service is.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Average Response Time and Customer Retention are good indicators of the quality of customer service, however, it might be that customers are still not happy with your service even though your customer service department is highly responsive and even though customers have a long lifetime, because it might be that customers come back to you because there is no other alternative. As soon as there is a competitor, they will switch over. Think about energy companies. You might not be very happy with the service, but you might stay with them because you need them.
It’s therefore important to measure how satisfied your customers are with your service, what they like and dislike and what the percentage of customers that are satisfied? Knowing this will help you ensure that you’re on top of the factors that negatively influence your customers and solve those and build upon existing strengths. A good way to do this is by measuring satisfaction through surveys. After someone books with you, you might want to ask them on the phone or via a survey how satisfied they were with the service. If done consistently, you can get a good picture of how well your customer service department is performing and what can be done better.
4. Complaints
Last but not least, is measuring complaint volumes and resolutions. It’s important to be aware of how many complains your company gets, what the complaints are about, what percentage of complaints get resolved and how long an average resolution takes. Customers have a very low tolerance for bad service and if their complaints are not taking seriously, they will not hesitate to go to review sites such as Tripadvisor and Trustpilot to share their bad experience with the world and warn others about your company. Customers that receive good service may not talk about it to others, but customers that received bad service are much more likely to talk about it to others which can create a negative reputation for your company.
Setting the right metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your company, measuring them effectively and acting on the insights will massively improve your customer service, help you get more repeat customers and maximize your sales and business.
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