It just gets my goat when some of these on-the-spot newscasters, usually sportscasters, put a microphone in the mouth of a coach or a player and asks them, after a hard-fought loss, “how does it feel to get beat by an extra point at the last second?” The coach or player is extremely vulnerable at that moment to say exactly how they feel, and it might not be too pretty a public pronouncement. Or the politician who had just lost an election gets the question concerning his feelings about the loss. What do you expect them to say?!!
What got my thought process going on this issue was a quote I read yesterday by Maya Angelou, the American author and poet. She quoted: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
It is evident that people do have feelings and those feelings are based on a lot of factors, not the least of which is how they were treated. It could have been by a brash interviewer, or it could have been by a person in a service-type business, like a travel agent. Here at The Travel Factory, we visit about our interaction with our clients and how we need to go overboard in making sure they are treated right, with dignity, and honestly. . . like we would want to be treated, or like we would want our mother to be treated in a similar situation.
We belong to the Abilene Better Business Bureau, and their primary tenant is trust on behalf of the belonging members of that association. A lot of that trust is developed by how the client is treated by the employees of the business, and the quality of communication between the agent and client. Most of the complaints that the BBB gets is because of a communication breakdown between a client and the agent or business.
Since we do not have a widget or an item to sell our clients, our sales item is service and experience of the travel product in which the client is interested. That means that our communication has to be clear and understandable, but sometimes that client only heard what they wanted to hear and discarded other important information that was disseminated. In those cases, it has been our policy to work hard in behalf of our client when a perceived miscommunication happened. After all, their feelings about how we handle a potential contentious situation they will never forget. And no matter the outcome, whether good or bad, they will tell all their friends, so the best thing we can do is to make the situation really good.
That’s my tip for today. . . do all you can do to make people feel good, because like Maya Angelou said, they will never forget how you made them feel.
Give those professional and experienced travel agents at The Travel Factory a chance to let us help you feel good about going somewhere. Our physical location is at 4150 Southwest Drive, our phone location is 698-1421 or 800-760-4040, and our on-line location is www.thetravelfactoryabilene.com. Make a contact; we’ll make you feel good!