Why customer service is important even for those who are not yet customers

I have recently been let down by local commercial hospitality providers. I run a breakfast group that meets weekly at a hotel. Before our Christmas break, I made sure we had our normal reservation on the first Tuesday morning in January. Everything was carefully written in the book. Imagine my surprise when we arrived before 7am on a very cold morning to find the hotel closed and completely locked down. Not only was it a great inconvenience for the group to have gotten up so early on a very cold morning to no avail, but I felt very embarrassed. Even though I had a reservation and confirmed it, it would be natural for one or two to think it was all my fault for not checking. Actually, I like to think that the members would be more understanding than that, but as the director and organizer of the group I felt responsible.

I later found out that the hotel had closed, which was very sad, although the deterioration in the quality of service did not make it surprising.

Since I was pretty fed up and actually before I had found out the truth about the hotel not welcoming us last week, I phoned two other local places to see if they could accommodate our weekly meetings and quote a price for breakfast and use of one of their meeting rooms. I stressed that it would be regular income every week. They both said their event manager/organizer would be in touch. Guess what? Either.

I can understand that in both cases the venues thought it wouldn’t be cost effective to accommodate us, or they just didn’t have the room or staff available or whatever. That would be fair enough. However, not returning calls and responding to my queries was very short-sighted. Since, from their point of view, I organize local networks, I could still have considered them in the future if this time they had politely refused the business for some reason. Why would they want to give the wrong impression by being rude enough not to call me to explain? Don’t want to attract new business? Let’s say you wanted to host an event at a different time of day, or for a gathering much larger than the breakfast club, which by the way has a healthy membership for such groups.

Our current provider failed badly in terms of customer service. The two places that had the opportunity to list also treated their potential clients very poorly and pretty much made sure that they would not have the opportunity to bid on my business in the future.

Have you had similar experiences? How did you feel about it?

© Jon Stow 2010