A friend of mine travels regularly for business and usually stays in the same hotel in each city.  She works in a similar industry to me and we share an interest in sales and marketing and delivering good customer service.

A couple of weeks ago she stayed in a hotel in Sydney.  A few days after checking out she received an email from the hotel asking her to complete a short survey to provide feedback about her stay.  The survey asked all the usual questions and asked her to rate various aspects of her experience.

She told me that she was happy with the stay at the hotel.  Nothing went wrong, nothing bad happened – it was just a ‘usual’ night at the hotel.  In the survey she rated all aspects of her stay highly except for one.

She elected to have breakfast in the room and mentioned on the survey that the toast was a bit soggy and bent.  If you’ve ever ordered room service you’ll know this is a reasonably common experience, usually because of the time it takes from when your meal is prepared to when it is actually delivered.  Of course there can also be a further time lag from when it’s delivered to when it’s consumed.

The soggy toast wasn’t a big issue – she’s used to it happening and only mentioned it because they asked if there was anything they could improve on.

A few days later she received a letter from the hotel manager thanking her for the feedback, and apologising for the soggy toast.  It goes without saying that she was very impressed with the responsiveness of the hotel and the effort they took to respond to her feedback.

A few points we can learn from this story.

1. Always ask for feedback.  I’ve stayed at the same hotel and received the same survey.  It’s not something they do sometimes, it’s something that happens automatically, all of the time.
2. If you worked in the hotel and knew that every guest would have the opportunity to rate their experience, you’d make sure your customer service was as good as it could be.  What gets measured gets done!
3. When you receive feedback, show the customer that you’re listening.  They did this by sending my friend a personalised letter acknowledging her feedback.  She made it clear that the soggy toast wasn’t a big issue, but the hotel has shown that if it was important enough for her to comment on, then it’s important enough to apologise for.
4. Always ask customers about things you can improve on.  She likes staying in the hotel and was happy with her experience.  If she was upset about the toast she would have said something.  By asking the question in the survey the hotel is finding out about things that are less than ideal, but aren’t bad enough to make guests complain.
5. Poor experiences are a good opportunity to exceed client’s expectations.  I’ve said it before on this blog that if there’s a breakdown in service, it provides you with an excellent opportunity to exceed your client’s expectations by fixing things.

My friend is looking forward to staying at this hotel again.  She’ll make sure she orders room service and I’m sure she’ll check the toast!

What can we learn from this?

• Do you have a formal client survey program?
• Does it ask the right questions?
• What happens when you receive bad feedback?

Let me know what you think.