The travel industry can
be as unpredictable as a
casino’s slots, but John Colwick strives to provide
consistency for his customers.
As founder and chairman
of Colwick Travel Corp., he’s
stuck to the many principles
that have helped grow his
$35 million corporate travel
company, but one tenet
stands out above the rest —
providing excellent customer service. And because
he can’t oversee every
client, he empowers and
trusts his 30 employees to do
what’s necessary to satisfy
each customer.
“If they want to waive a fee
for anything, it’s never questioned,” he says. “It gives
them total control over how
the relationship is being conducted.”
Smart Business spoke
with Colwick about how he
stays on top of client needs
to keep his business growing.
Q. How do you stay in touch
with your customers’ needs?
The first person that knows
that they’re being short-changed is the client. It may
not be the reality, but it’s still
the client’s perception that
they didn’t get what they
thought they were going to
get.
The easiest way we find
out about that is customer
complaints. We do pay attention to those because those
have a lot of merit. [Even if]
it’s strictly a client perception, perception is reality in
the eyes of the beholder. Pay
close attention to those scenarios. Solicit feedback,
especially negative feedback.
We used to send out surveys,
and they can be very beneficial, but about 98 percent we
got back were glowing
reports. But glowing reports
are not what you want in a
survey. What you want to
find out is where are the mistakes being made. What are
the perceptions out there
that are negative?
If we send out surveys, we would send
them out to a large universe of our clients,
and they would
respond. We were really looking for the ones
that had not-so-glowing reports and were
fishing for areas that
we needed to improve
on.
We pay a lot more
attention to the bad
news than we do the
good news. Good news
is great. Everyone
appreciates a compliment, but where the
surveys really help you
are flying below the
radar.
