Episode #222: Customer Service Is Your Brand

You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed. Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients. Brands are there to decrease the buyer’s sense of risk. A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level. Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where “cheap and cheerful” is the brand promise. Another little gem from some industries is “all care and no responsibility”. At the opposite end are the major Hotel chains. They have global footprints and they want clients to use them where ever they are in the world. They want to be trusted that they can deliver the same level of high quality. There are plenty of competitors around, so the pressure is on to protect the brand.

When you encounter a trusted brand trash their brand promise, it makes you sit up and take notice. When I arrived at the Taipei WestIn Hotel check-in I was told there were no rooms ready. I asked when a room will become available. The young lady checking me in, tells me she doesn’t know.

I ask her for the name of the General Manager. This is where it gets very interesting. Her response - stone motherless silence. Not one word in reply. Nothing! So I asked again. More total silence. I elevated the volume of my request to try and illicit a response. More pure silence. This low level of client service has now morphed across to the ridiculous zone. Finally I get a whispered “Andrew Zou”.

So what am I thinking now? Wow, this Andrew Zou character is a lousy General Manager, because his staff are so poorly trained. There is no room ready for me and no indication of when it will be ready, so in that great Aussie tradition, I head for the bar and wait.

Any number of things can go wrong with the delivery of a product or service. We all understand that. The problems arise when our client facing team members are not properly trained in how to deal with these issues. Hotels have guest complaints all the time, so they should be absolute gold medal winning, total geniuses at dealing with them. This would have to be a key area of training in that industry. The poor training is a direct result of poor leadership. If the leaders are working well, then the staff service levels will be working well.

The Westin brand is global and I have stayed in a number of their properties in Asia. The Taipei property was killing their global brand and that is an expensive thing in the world of cut-throat competition amongst leading Hotels.

From this experience, I realized that I need to be very vigilant about the service levels in my own company. Are we fully geared up for trouble, should it arise? How do we protect the brand across 220 locations worldwide? Can people get to me easily if there is a problem? Are we doing enough training in client complaint handling? The Westin Taipei leadership did a poor job. We should go back a take a long hard look at our own operations. We may be incorrectly assuming things are working, when they may not be functioning properly. We have to protect the brand at every touch point with the clients. That is the job of the leadership team, starting with the boss.