Me with some of the lovely ladies from Context Travel
Context Travel knows customer service.
Offering a wide variety of walking tours for the “intellectually curious”, they guide their customers through areas chock full of history. With such intricate detail, you feel like you are receiving a personal tour from a local.
I have had the pleasure of experiencing one of the Context Travel tours in New York City over a year ago. It was a generous gift they gave to our company to say “Thank You” for the service we’ve provided.
Phone.com provides Context Travel with the platform to run their phone system in 21 cities around the world; all from under one umbrella.
So, when Context Travel reached out to Jeremy and I to talk about customer service at their company retreat in New York, we felt extremely honored and jumped at the awesome opportunity.
Since Jeremy is far, far away in the land of sunshine, I took the reins and met up with the lovely Context team.
In a super casual atmosphere, we talked about:
- The approach we take to our communication with customers and how we are script free and encourage uniqueness and leave a lot of the personalization of the customer experience in each individual’s hands.
- The challenges of dealing with difficult customers and using the tools of empathy, active listening, ownership and gratitude to help pull you through it.
- Treating each negative situation as an opportunity for improvement.
- Taking care of yourself to ensure that you can take care of others.
- Proactive customer care and notifying customers of issues before they become bigger problems.
- The importance of thanking and appreciating your customers with simple acts as remembering their names, phone calls, check in emails or fun hand made cards from an Appreciation Station.
Customer service is an art form and there are so many ways to fine tune it, no matter what industry you are in.
There is something truly powerful in being able to inspire others. Afterward, I felt incredibly inspired from the discussion we had about customer service and the experience we give to others. So, thank you again Context Travel, for giving me this opportunity!
So, to everyone in customer service–let’s keep walking the walk and talking the talk!
