Forget racking up Facebook fans what you need is an ongoing dialogue with real-world consumers who are willing to back your brand, says travel industry mentor Don Birch in this exclusive article for EyeforTravel.com. To achieve this you need to listen to your critics, agree with them and respond quickly. Take these steps and your worst critics will soon be flying your flag

Customer commentary on the web is sometimes negative and occasionally deliberately malicious. But there is, as they say, no smoke without fire. So one has to ask this question: what prompted the comments in the first place?  After all, the customer - or in some cases your competitor down the street - is speaking to you and you had better listen.

To deny customer feedback in the customer service industry is surely the beginning of the end.  While the customer is not always right, his perception surely is and this is the basis of your ‘brand’.

So what exactly is a ‘brand’? Let’s be clear, a ‘brand’ is not a hip logo or clever slogan, it is your promise to deliver value to your customer.  Your success building the strength of the brand over time depends on consistently delivering that customer promise - not as you would wish it to be but as it is perceived by your customer.  Call the customer stupid if you will but if he does not assign the same or greater value to your brand, as the investment you have made in it, then it is game over. It is unlikely that you will able to keep pouring money into a brand that underperforms.

In our ‘always on’ world, the customer is now able to report on his perceptions in real time.  In the customer service world this is critical because a large proportion of brand value is not ‘beds and buildings’ or ‘airplanes and seats’ or ‘mountains and sunshine’ but consumption.  Your customer creates the product in large part through emotional consumption. If he is giving you negative feedback, then it is time to act both at the individual level and collectively at the brand level.

Customers are definitely not stupid and these days they know more about your brand than you do.  This is because they consume it; you the entity only set up the framework designed to channel their emotions.  In the words of Shakespeare: ‘the truth will out’.

Take for example the thousands of reviews that are written in several languages in a consistent format. Using semantic analysis we can identify different but not necessarily independent sentiments in each observation. Here is an example: The room was lovely but the bathroom a mess and the shower was dripping. Here we have three concepts of which one is positive, one strongly negative and a third mildly negative.

In most of these reviews customers identify on average about seven concepts. Of these around a third are positive and a quarter are mildly to strongly negative.  Significantly, however, they almost always make positive suggestions about how things could be improved.

Think about it. You can’t buy this sort of advice or data, so pretending it is wrong or somehow misconstrued does not make it go away!

Speaking from personal experience

I recently worked with a hotel that was being pilloried on-line by customers, but the management response was that they were mostly foreigners and so they did not understand local standards. In isolation this is perhaps an immature attitude but when the competition in the same city accepts and is addressing these same issues, then it surely spells trouble.

Earlier in my career when I was a junior manager working in airline customer service, I quickly learned that with genuine empathy 100% of customer problems can be solved. Moreover if you take this approach frequently your worst critic becomes your strongest advocate.  My colleagues and I used to joke that we should create a small problem for every passenger and then quickly respond. By doing so we could quickly turn all our customers into fans.  Forget FaceBook fan pages, this was the real world.

The emergence of social media reporting has now added a critical layer to the traditional ‘inspire, research, validate, purchase, consume and report’ travel cycle.  Customers (and not just tech-savvy 25 year olds), now have the means and the peer group incentive to report on all aspects of the travel cycle and so provide valuable clues on what is important to them. 

The single most quoted reason for writing reviews is to provide feedback to friends.

This social media data is now readily available, but because of the volume, it requires tools to analyse the data and trends and then applications to manage the down-stream customer recovery. After that, comes on-going brand fine-tuning. These tools exist today and I don’t doubt that as a travel professional, you have the knowledge and the skills to fix the issues once you better understand what your customer really perceives.

But as Yoda says, ‘much to learn, you still have’.