Know Your Clients

The first rule of insanely great customer service is deceptively simple: know your clients. How well do you know the people who travel with you? Certainly you know their names, probably the names of their children. The demographic information, ages, birthdays, anniversaries are certainly all important and you hopefully have record of those events and items. But what else do you know? Do you know where they have traveled in the past? Where did they go as children? What did those experiences mean to them? What is their favorite hotel in the world? If they could name their dream trip, what would it be? Where do they want to go next year? How about the year after that? What is their ten year travel plan? Where do their children want to go? Why do they travel? What do they like best about traveling? What is their least favorite part? If you know those items, you KNOW your clients.

Put your clients at the center of your travel practice. As a travel consultant, your primary task is to assist clients in achieving their travel dreams. To do so, your knowledge of their travel profile must be that of an intimate, not superficial but deeply empathetic. You have to take on their dreams as though they were your own. Moreover, you have to update your understanding of these important ambitions at least annually. Things change! People mature, desires intensify and mellow, goals shift. As a travel consultant, you need to stay on top of the movement of your clients’ travel desires. Take the opportunity to claim ownership of your clients by renewing your understanding of their travel ambitions. Invite them in for a cup of coffee and sit down with them, not to sell anything, but to get to know them. You will be one step closer to increasing your repeat business and referral base.

Most people have a checklist of “places I want to go someday.” As a travel planner, one of the most interesting and proactive ways to work with clients is to assist them in creating a written plan of their travel ambitions. Financial planners ask their clients about their retirement plans and financial goals to assist the process of better visualizing a possible course of action – the plan becomes “real”. Likewise, when clients articulate and write down the places they most want to visit during the next ten years, they are more likely to act on those plans.

By periodically reviewing your client files, you can determine how completely you know your clients. You will want client profiles to reflect not only basic demographics and where clients have been, but also where they want to go. This will allow you to be proactive in your marketing efforts, directing appropriate travel programs to the right clients. By assisting in this way, you open the door to many years of working with clients to help them to both plan and achieve their goals. As their travel planner, you thereby receive an open invitation to continue to send them travel specials and to communicate with them on an on-going basis.

Exercise:

Consider scheduling client interviews with each of your clients for which you have incomplete records. Review each of your client files. Draft a letter to each offering to meet with them over the next few weeks to begin working on a long-range plan to accomplish all of their travel ambitions. Explain you are doing so as a part of your mission to direct them in the best way possible. Establish a client interview that leads to long range planning as an integral part of all of your client relationships. By getting your client to invest time in planning long-term with you, a bond of ownership forms – you become “their travel consultant.”