Customer Relationship Management: A Rant


I don’t get it. Does anyone? At a time when it is easier and cheaper than ever for companies to ‘engage’ with their customers it seems – paradoxically – that they make it harder and harder for anything resembling ‘engagement’ to actually happen.

Here’s an example. I have just booked a holiday with Sunsail, part of TUI. I was struck by the efficiency of the person who organised things for me: she told me everything I needed to know, she handled my email incompetence with a smile, she was genuinely charming and a credit to her employer.

This doesn’t often happen, so I wanted to bring her good service to the attention of the company. Could I? TUI offers a blaze of ‘customer engagement’ options on its site, but the nearest I could get was leaving a message which, they said, might be considered for publicity purposes.

Perhaps I failed to spot the right feedback button. Perhaps there isn’t one.

Either way, it surely ought to be an obvious priority for firms who live or die by the quality of their service to make it very easy for people to tell them what they think – good or bad.

When they don’t, you start to wonder about the disconnect between the service you receive and the real values of the management. How will the TUI person ever know that she is providing an exceptional service? If TUI are lucky, she will carry on doing a great job because she wants to – but if I were TUI I wouldn’t bank on it.

End of rant.
 

Contact:

adrian@worldwidewheeler.com

07785 363515

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