Over the past decade, the experience of booking a trip has changed considerably. For many travelers, that experience has shifted away from travel agents and moved online.
With so many websites dedicated to helping travelers find the best prices and times to buy, it can be tough for customers to work out which experience is best. Therefore brands need to find ways to stand out in a crowded market.
The most obvious way of doing this is by offering a customer experience that is better than the competition. This isn’t just about the added extras; it’s about the way brands handle problems. And to do that, they need plenty of customer feedback.
Harnessing the emotions of the silent traveler
Travel is an emotionally loaded experience, so there are a million and one moments in which customers can be left delighted or distraught. Surely customers would be more than willing to say how they’re feeling about a once-in-a-lifetime travel experience?
In reality, this isn’t the case. Feedback typically reflects the extremes of an experience. If a customer spends six hours delayed on the tarmac, they’ll be chomping at the bit to complain, using whichever mode of communication is available.
But when things run more or less as they should, customers are much less likely to bother giving any feedback at all. Time can also diminish the desire to rant or rave, so sending out a request for feedback two weeks after a trip is unlikely to yield great insight.
This leaves brands with a lot of "silent travelers," making it difficult to understand customer expectations let alone exceed them.
Accommodating the silent traveler
To target the silent traveler, brands need to encourage and empower customers to share honest, real-time feedback. To do this, brands should ensure it’s easy for customers to leave feedback, in their own words, and on their channel of choice.
Tools such as SMS notifications, which allow customers to provide unfiltered feedback on their experience, are a great way of carrying this out.
To target the silent traveler, brands need to encourage and empower customers to share honest, real-time feedback.
Rant & Rave
As a starting point, brands should plan for moments they know will happen. There are certain points in every customer journey that have to happen, like returning from a holiday. These moments are the ideal place for triggered feedback, where businesses can target travelers during specific times on their trip.
But there are also many key moments that are a bit more unpredictable, such as delays or baggage going missing. To capture sentiment at these times, brands need to let customers give feedback in a way and at a time that best suits them.
That’s why listening posts, which allow customers to give feedback by taking a picture, sending a text or scanning a Facebook messenger code as they please can be invaluable.
It doesn’t need to be verbal, either: More than five billion emojis are sent over Facebook Messenger every day, so there’s no denying their popularity as a medium for self-expression. The technology exists to analyze the sentiment of a simple emoji and play that back to the customer experience team at a company, making it a viable form of customer feedback.
Acting on feedback
It’s important to make it as easy as possible for the silent traveler to give feedback, but of course, this feedback means nothing if brands can’t turn it into actionable insight.
Subscribe to our newsletter below
That’s why it’s vital that travel brands invest in customer experience software that captures the emotion of not only their customers, but also their "could-be" customers, no matter where they are on their path to purchase.
By capturing their feedback in real-time, brands can take instant action that will delight customers and present this back to employees to help improve their service offering.
As a result, customers will be more satisfied and may become brand advocates, which is extremely beneficial to a company's reputation.