The importance of leeway

Now, this week's story involves a hotel chain's Call Centre. I'm not going to highlight the hotel chain - it happened to be Holiday Inn. Rather, I thought I'd make a point about empowerment, and how giving power away can often bring more power to your elbow. Especially if that elbow's holding a phone.

(Well, I mean, the hand at the end of the arm's doing the holding, but you know what I mean...)

An old friend - let's call him C - was a pretty loyal customer of Holiday Inn. Over the course of a year, he stayed at the same hotel more than thirty times. Sometime between his 30th and his last visit, he found it necessary to cancel a reservation. 

Only trouble was, he was an hour after the cancelling deadline. And when he protested to the Call Centre agent, she wouldn't budge.

Fair enough. An hour is an hour. But we all know how business works. For a customer with a thirty-stay record with the company... a loyal business traveller with that hotel on his itinerary practically every week ... the Call Centre agent could have made an exception. In fact, in today's ultra-competitive marketplace - where a single bad review on TripAdvisor can empty your rooms in a jiffy - understanding when to be flexible is a basic part of doing business.

And she wasn't allowed to do it. That's the other side to this story: it was obvious to C that she really, really wanted to cancel the one-night penalty fee. She was desperate to do it, because she knew exactly what the customer was about to do: cancel his next stay, and all the stays after that, forever. He could tell from her tone of voice. But she just didn't have the authority.

Holiday Inn was perfectly within its rights ... but sticking to them lost it a customer. Forever.

A lot of investors and managers consider this "business risk". Well, only if all you look at is the risk factor or empowering a junior staff member, it makes sense. But if you look through the other end of the telescope - at doing whatever it takes to satisfy the customer, rather than fencing in your Call Centre agents with rules and limits on their responsibility - it looks a whole lot more profitable.

So there's a thought for Call Centres across the industry: maybe, just maybe, you could empower your workers a little? In C's case, he was perfectly aware of what was happening, even confirming with the agent that she was, indeed, not authorised to be flexible in such instances. A good Call Centre agent, prevented from doing the thing she knew she had to do. The hotel chain missed a trick there.

C hasn't stayed at that hotel since. And - probably - will never do so again.

The folk at Rapide work with a few hotels (not, at the moment, Holiday Inn, but you never know) and recently put together one of their Thought Bubbles about Call Centres. Why not click over and take a look? I did.