Building Trust with Customers
“From an “on-line pet travel agency” prospective”
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Who are you? Can I trust you? These two questions underscore all business transactions. But they are particularly important when it comes to conducting business on the Internet where face-to-face interaction is eliminated. On the Internet, it has been very difficult replicating the varying degrees of trust that businesses and individuals have with each other in the ‘real world.’” Liberty Alliance Project
The distribution of travel services has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. When I first entered the travel industry 23 years ago, 90% of all airline tickets were sold by travel agencies. You used your trusty travel agent to plan, book and issue your travel. It was a common thing to visit your travel agent, talk travel, look at brochures and purchase your trip. Times have changed. Most consumers today surf the internet in search of travel information and make the majority of their travel purchase ‘on line’. Many of the online travel sites are very informative and easy to maneuver. When I dreamed of owning my own travel agency 4 years ago, I knew that I needed to offer a service or niche in travel that could not be accomplished easily on the World Wide Web. I decided to become a ‘pet travel agent’ because you cannot book your pet’s travel unless you call the vendor or find a travel agent to do it for you. I knew that for Puppy Travel to be successful, my potential customers were not within a few miles of my office, they were all around the world. The challenge: to establish creditability with clients through e-mail and the telephone. People’s pets are now considered ‘part of the family’. Helping a person ship a pet is the same to me as helping them ship one of their children. It is a HUGE responsibility, one that requires a tremendous trust relationship between the client and the ‘pet travel agent’ -me. Building confidence is very important. I can help people plan travel with their pets or ship pets traveling alone. Sometimes I have ‘escorted’ pets to destinations and transported pets coming and going from the major airport in the city I live in. Just this week we had a client who needed us to pick up his daughter’s cat and ship it to him in Boston. Talk about trust. My employee [whom I would trust with anyone’s pet on the planet] drove an hour and a half to where the cat was to collect it. When she arrived, as luck would have it, the cat was not to be found. We both knew that the cat was ‘hiding’ and would surface eventually, but not on our schedule. I called and advised my client of the situation. Luckily he was cool about it. Twenty four hours later, we were called, told that the cat was back and to come back and get it. We did. Because the cat was to depart on a very early AM flight to Boston, I had to take the cat home for the night. The cat seemed just fine with coming to my home. I fed it, watered it and gave it a cozy spot to sleep for the night-away from 2 very curious dogs. At 5AM I packed up the cat, put it in my van and drove it to the airport to ship it. Bottom line-my client had to trust me with his cat and I had to trust the client and his cat. I have never met this client, will more than likely never meet this client but I know his cat very well. I have slept with client’s dogs, traveled with other client’s dogs half way around the world and driven in pouring down rain storms to deliver pets to wanting owners. Many years ago I heard the golfer Gary Player lecture on what his keys to success were. The only one that stayed with me was “there is no substitute for personal contact”. So the greatest challenge any person with an internet based company is to find a way to create some kind of ‘personal contact’ through email, and the telephone. One of my conditions on doing business with anyone is that I have to at least hear their voice and have a phone conversation before we begin pet travel services. Even if it means getting up in the middle of the night to call a potential client in Australia or Africa, it is worth it.
Besides the pets, the thing I love the most about my client’s is getting to know them and providing for them unparalleled pet travel service. When they trust me and I trust them it is a great thing for everyone-including Fluffy.