Tom Dusing wants his customers to go away, but he
also wants them to return to his business.
And the president of Carefree
World Travel ensures that his
customers keep coming back
by building relationships with
them.
“Stay in touch with your customer,” Dusing says. “Talk with
them a lot to find out how
things are going, and always
look for opportunities in your
industry to provide a service
you’re not providing right now.”
Dusing says you must provide
value-added services to your
customers to maintain a competitive advantage, something
he does at his $14.7 million
company by educating his corporate clients about managing
their trips and by studying their
travel expenditures to uncover
cost savings.
Smart Business spoke with
Dusing about how he establishes partnerships with clients and
how he keeps the lines of communication open.
Q. How do you build partnerships with clients?
We try to establish a relationship at each level of the customer’s company. Personally, I
try to establish a relationship
with the executive team, the
owner, the president and the
(chief financial officer) within
the company.
Our salesperson is very good
at getting in and meeting the
travel coordinators and the people that deal with the management of the company’s travel
program on a day-to-day basis.
And then the agents work on a
daily basis with the people actually doing the traveling.
If something goes wrong, we
have that relationship and are
able to identify the problem and
get it fixed fairly quickly. There’s
an open level of communication
at each one of those levels so
that if something does happen,
we know about it.
Q. How do you keep the lines
of communication open?
We meet and talk with them.
It’s not through e-mail; it’s a personal relationship that we try to
develop. If we have a new company that comes on board, we
identify the people that we need
to get to know, and then if
there’s an opportunity, we’ll
take our agents out and get
them to meet the people on
the other end of the phone.
Don’t depend on one relationship because when that
person leaves, you have
none.