Bad Service Will Cost You

My good friend, Kevin Donahue, who works in the hotel sales industry, posted a story today that talked about how much bad service costs a hotel versus all the other things guest might complain about.

But there is one problem – over and above all others – that causes not only dissatisfaction, but a complete break in a hotel customer’s trust.

What could negatively impact hotel customer loyalty so greatly? According to data-analysis firm Market Metrix, staff-related problems in hotels can lead to a whopping 26.2% drop in guest loyalty 

As Kevin explains in his post, there are lots and lots of things guests complain about at hotels. As someone who spends a fair amount of time in hotels as part of my job, I can see that. As someone who works in a service industry, training, I can see that as well. The fact of the matter is, if you stay in enough hotel rooms, or do enough software training, things will occasionally break. I think most people understand that.

What is harder to understand, is when your staff just doesn’t seem to care. Again, the same holds true in the training industry. During the course of a class, things may go wrong. Software running on a Windows machine, inside a web browser, is probably going to crash once or twice, right in front of the whole class. It’s inevitable, and most people understand that. What ruins the trust between a company and it’s customers faster than that is when the customer feels like the company, through the staff interactions, simply doesn’t care or isn’t capable of overcoming those small problems.

So, for me, the takeaway from reading Kevin’s blog, is that being a good trainer is not about avoiding things occasionally breaking, it’s about being able to not panic when they do, and make sure you can get it fixed and move on to providing a quality training class for your customers.

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