Our Boston hotel experience is providing amusement for our son, Eric, who enjoys watching the Suite Life of Zack & Cody, a Disney series set in a fictional Boston hotel. Ironically, the external shots for the “Tipton Hotel” in the series are actually of the Hotel Vancouver — shades of small-world deja-vu (as I grew up in Vancouver.)
We arrived in Boston about 10 p.m. last night to the beginning of an unanticipated saga that will test the principles of client service and the “customer experience”. I won’t name specific hotels here yet because of my general practice not to speak negatively about individual businesses and because this story is still unfolding.
To say the least, after getting a little lost in the downtown Boston traffic grid, we finally arrived at our prepaid hotel to find two friendly bellmen waiting to take our bags to the lobby. Then, on check-in, the night clerk handed me a letter and said, because of flooding earlier in the week, the hotel could not provide the level of service it expects as a standard for its clients. We would receive accommodation at another hotel and the bell staff would help us in the transfer. The night would be free (and our pre-paid room would be reimbursed). We could move back into our pre-paid room the next day. The letter of introduction from our home hotel to the replacement hotel said I am to receive a free night plus one phone call.
As the first hotel’s bellman drove our car to the alternative location, I learned some things and obtained some insights into how to handle the situation. I won’t discuss the specific details publicly here but they showed the wonderful undercurrents of possibilities when you listen, connect and communicate.
Certainly, things haven’t been perfect so far at our back-up hotel. When we were showed to our assigned room, we found it hadn’t been made up! I’ve been charged $9.95 — twice — for high speed Internet here when it is free at the original hotel. My wife had a restless and uncomfortable sleep. She also will be stressed today as she must execute the transfer back to our original hotel with our son in tow while I attend the SMPS Build Business Conference (the business reason for this trip, of course.)
If you’ve correctly guessed that I now expect our four day hotel stay in Boston to be VERY inexpensive, you are 100 per cent correct.
I’m sure in the end we will be treated fairly and respectfully. (That is why I am not naming names, now.) But are we “owed” this level of service — and if you are a contractor, do you owe your clients what may seem to be over-the-wall and expensive accommodations when something goes wrong which isn’t your fault at all. (Our original hotel cannot be blamed for exceptional rains/flooding in downtown Boston a few days ago.)
I wish I could have a simple answer to this question. It is fascinating how many people with disabled accounts on the Google AdSense forum complain about terrible “customer service” since you can’t readily reach anyone at Google to resolve issues or solve problems when you lose your AdSense account. As a volunteer on the forums, I often remind these people that they are not actually Google’s customers, since Google pays publishers for AdSense, not the other way around, and it is their job to provide great “customer service” to Google. How should you then provide “customer service” in the AEC industry context, where suppliers and clients often intermingle in less-than-obvious hierarchies and things are never as clear cut as they seem?
(Brief interruption — someone just walked up to me and asked for this hotel’s wireless password and I gave it to him without question. What am I doing? Don’t I remember that saga involving a two-week click bombing attack which occurred on my account from a free hotel lobby public WIFI access point?)
While this story is jsut beginning, I think you can rarely go wrong by being extremely pro-active in client service and you might wish to extend the same level of courtesy to your key suppliers. Certainly, you are wiser to take a portion of your marketing budget to improve your service and responsiveness than to pour it into advertising, sales calls and the like. You don’t need to be a wimp, in my opinion, for the con-jobs and gimmicks that “dissatisfied clients” can play on you — you have the right to value some cients more than others (and some suppliers better than others) as long as your decisions are not based on illegal discrimination categories.
Take some lessons from the hotel industry in your business/client service practices, however, and you’ll be far ahead of the majority of AEC businesses when it comes to marketing effectiveness.
The late Sonny Lykos introduced me to Steve Yastrow, whose insights into the client experience have shaped my views here.