Travel Industry Forums

1. What value do you place on your customer's experience?
a. Identify customer needs by knowing the timeing required;
Knowing the service time requirements for your operation is very important for quality customer service.

b. Anticipate customer needs by being one step ahead;
to ask ourself'
1. Have we considered all of the customer's needs?
2. What will the customer need next?
3. How can we improve service now for our customer?
Then provide that extra mile service, without waiting for the customer to ask for it!

c. Identify customer needs through our attentiveness;
1. Be attentive to what our customer may need and want.
2. Put ourself in the position of the cusotmer. Ask ourself "If we were this customer, what would we want?"

d.Identify needs by understaining basic customer needs;
1. The need to be understood
The people who select our service need to feel they are communicating effectively. This means they send should be interpreted correctly. Emotions or language barriers can prevent proper understanding.

2. The need to feel welcome
Any customer who feels like an outsider will not return. People need to feel we are happy to see them and that their business is important to us.

3. The need to feel important
Ego and self-esteem are powerful human needs. We all like to feel important. Anything we can do to make a customer feel special is valued.

4. The need for comfort
Customers need physical comfort: aplace to wait, rest, talk, or do business. They also need psychological comfort: the assurance they will be taken care of properly, and the confidence we will meet their needs. We are proactive to know of their needs of mind.

e. Identify customers needs by skillful listening;
Hear are 5 ways to be a better listener:
1. Stop taling.
2. Avoid distractions.
3. Concentrate on what the customer is saying.
4. Look for the REAL meaning.
5. Provide feedback to the sender.

f. Identify customers needs by obtaining feedback;
1. Do we know what our customers want?
2. Do we know what they need?
3. Do we know what they expect?
4. Do we know how they feel?
5. Do we know what suggestions they have?
6. Do we know whether they are satisfied with our services?

2. What type of culture have you created within your organization?

a. Keep everyone interested and engaged;
It is estimated that up to 75 percent of organizational change processes fail because of people issues. Designing a change process to brand customer service is a relatively contained process. Implementing it is long-term and ongoing. We have learned that keeping everyone interested and engaged over the long haul is at the heart of the issue to avoid failure.

b.Overcoming Inertia;
Integrated branding results in brand tools that inject energy, direction and focus into an organization. The tools focus strategy on what is important to the customer experience, rather than on activities that are less relevant to the people who matter: those that give our company money.

c. Encouraging Long-term Thinking;
Because integrated branding starts a thought process that encourages increasing differentiation over time, people also get in the habit of thinking long-term. And long-term thinking provides companies with sustainable, rather than fleeting, advantage. When employees start to think about everything they do from a how can I act using our brand principle to continuously set us apart in the market?

d.The employee must understand what the brand is all about;
This doesnt just mean the employee simply understands and the products and services our business offers, although thats important, too. The employee must understand and internalize the essence of what our business is about how that essence authentically applies to the products and services and experiences our business offers, and how the customer brand articulates this essence.

e.Staff cannot deliver what they do not know.
Many customer-facing employees do not have a brand service lens to evaluate their service beyond good or bad generic service. They do not know the unique components of their brand, the brands DNA. This is probably why so many service representatives are convinced they normally deliver good customer service. Viewed through a generic service lens, service was good if it was speedy, polite, and perhaps friendly. However, these qualities do not necessarily deliver a specific brand experience.

f. For a hotel company that kept one eye focused on customers, the other focused on employees, the essential word was care, to help the team realize the key to customer satisfaction. One senior person told me, This business is simple, for the key to delighting the customer who pays is by delighting the employee who works. Part of the thinking was that if they teach employees how it feels to experience care, they will be more familiar and comfortable with what it takes to provide care.

We hope that our future growth and profitability may depend on it.

Thnak you for your kind share to us.

With kind regards,

Honey Thazin Aung (Ms.)
Director of Human Resources
Dusit Inya Lake Resort, 37 Kaba Aye Pagoda Road,Yangon, Myanmar
Phone +95 (1) 662866| Fax +95 (1) 665537| E-mail honey.ta@dusit.com|
www.dusit.com or www.globalhotelalliance.com

2008-01-16 Honey Thazin Aung