Hi, friends, Julie Cross here. Back up on stage in Adelaide for the first show of the year. Looking forward to that. But I just thought I’d stop by first and have a little chat about service.
I’m staying in this lovely hotel here in Glenelg, but I wanted to talk about another experience I had at a hotel in Mooloolaba over the holidays.
A beautiful hotel, five-star.
So, already, my expectations are high because they’re shouting about how good they are.
So to exceed any of my expectations, they have to be fantastic because I’ve already got a high expectation.
But I go there and it was all fantastic, right?
Service, beautiful room, beautiful view.
They were also advertising the local aquarium, so they had banners everywhere, there were signs in the lift, advertising that they sell tickets for the local aquarium, so obviously, they’ve got some sort of marketing thing going on with them where they will promote and you can buy tickets from them and get a discount when you go to the aquarium. So, very much shouting out about it. So, I was about to take Thomas to the aquarium one day and as I’m walking out, I thought, ah, that’s right, they’ve got this promotion on. So I went to the desk and said, I see you’ve got this promotion on, can I get tickets for the aquarium from you at a discount? And she said, yeah, I think we’ve still got that promotion on. First thing already, I think we still got that promotion on. There’s banners everywhere and signs everywhere. I’ve just come back off holidays, let me check. So, she goes at the back, she checks, she comes back, oh yeah, and then she’s flipping through this book. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, I still can give you something. I can actually give you a discount of 15%. So I say, okay, great, I need two tickets. Thomas is waiting for me behind me, so I need two tickets. Then the process starts. Okay, hang on. So, all right, let me just see how I do this now and what card I’ve got to put in. Oh, we just got this new computer system. I’ve just gotta go out the back and see my boss and see how I do this. So, I’m waiting patiently. She comes back. Now, I wanna just give her my money to buy two tickets. Comes back, okay, what we’re gonna do is go through this process here. So, then we start. So, what should, oh, for some reason that won’t go in there. What’s your address? What’s your post code? I just want two tickets, you see. You see how complicated this is getting? What was your post code again? I don’t know why that, now this goes on for about 20 minutes. Now, it’s almost starting to get stressed, like, what he thinks too, why can’t you just get two tickets? And so, in my head, I’m going, Julie, be patient, first-world problems. But the fact is that we shouldn’t have to be patient. It should be that easy. When did it all get so complicated? And at the end, I just said to her, I said, remember the days we would walk in and I’d say I’d love two tickets because you’re advertising that you do this, so could I have two tickets please, you’d give me the two tickets and I’ll give you your money because I really wanna give you my money. I’m just standing here trying to give you my money. And you’re making it so difficult for me to give you your money. Now, you need my post code, why? I guess for marketing, to do your research, but how does that serve me? How does that serve me as your customer? How is this giving me great service? And then she couldn’t print it out because she couldn’t. It wouldn’t print out properly because of the style or the format. Now, suddenly, I feel like I don’t trust you. And I had a chat with my great mentor, Amanda Stevens, who talks about bad customer experiences and marketing. She’s an amazing speaker, so go look her up for more on this. But she’s sort of saying that the catchword this year was trust. You see, I’m not trusting to do business with you now. I don’t trust in your process. I’m worried that the tickets aren’t actually gonna work because it won’t print out properly. So there’s no trust here now, and there’s certainly no trust for me to buy any tickets from you for anything else. And you’ve made it so difficult for me to spend money with you. So in our processes of getting more sophisticated with technology and more sophisticated in our processes, let’s not lose touch with we just need to serve the customer and what serves them best, what makes it easy for them to spend money with you. So I think the winners are gonna be the people that make it easy. We gotta get back to simple, make it easy for me to do business with you and to give you my money ’cause that’s all I wanted to do was give you the money and you advertised everywhere that that’s what you did. So, let us be aware of that as we move forward with more technology, more sophistication, that we’re still keeping that connection with our customer, making it easy and simple for them to do business with us. So, you have a great day. I’ll see you soon, bye.