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Which Hotel Chain Does...
Which Hotel Chain Does Customer Service E-Mail Best?
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(E-WRITE)
It’s the height of travel season,
so we decided to conduct a (non-scientific)
experiment to find out which hotel
chain does customer service e-mail best. Here’s
what we did. Using the clever
pseudonym “Jane Doe,” we sent this e-mail query
to hotel chains with properties
near Chicago’s Midway Airport:
Subject: Request for info - room for
disabled traveler
- Labor Day 2008
Hello -
I'm interested in making a hotel
reservation for my brother near Midway Airport
in Chicago on August 31 and
September 1, 2008. (He uses a
wheelchair.) Does the [insert hotel name
here] have rooms for
handicapped travelers? If so, how do I
make a
reservation?
Thanks –
Jane
Doe
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Within two
days of sending our query, we’d
received responses from five hotel
chains: Best Western, Marriott, La
Quinta,
Hyatt, and Hilton. The quality of the
responses was uneven, to put it
politely. To see which hotels provided
excellent service and which bombed,
download the hotels'
e-mail
responses and our comments (PDF).
Here’s a quick overview of
customer service e-mail winners and
losers.
Winners:
- Quick
response: Best Western and Marriott
answered within two hours. La Quinta was
the quickest, answering within just
one hour. Check our comments to see
whether La Quinta’s response was quick
and
good, or just quick.
- Clear answer to our question:
Marriott wins. Here’s the third sentence of
Marriott’s reply: “Handicapped
accessible rooms are available at all Marriott
hotels in the U.S.”
- Polite, professional tone: All
five hotel
chains used a customer-friendly tone. In fact,
four of the five began their
e-mails by thanking the customer!
Losers:
- Grammar and spelling:
Embarrassing errors
slipped through in Best Western’s, Hilton’s,
and La Quinta’s
e-mails.
- A no-answer reply: Hilton never even
mentioned accessible rooms or
rooms for handicapped travelers.
- Incomprehensible “from”
lines:
Customers should be able to tell
who’s writing to them by looking at the “from”
line. But some of the hotel
chains we tested included unfamiliar
abbreviations in the from line or used a
sender’s name customers won’t recognize. (Who
is internethamp@hiltonres.com,
anyway?)
For our
complete analysis of the hotel e-mails’
customer service quality,
download the hotels'
e-mail responses and our
comments (PDF). A
disclaimer:
we haven’t flagged every error in each
e-mail; we’ve focused on the ones that affect
customer service
quality.
Whose customer service
e-mail should we test
next?
Insurance
companies? Online retailers? Software vendors?
We’ll run another e-mail
experiment this fall and we’d love your
input. E-mail us at
info@ewriteonline.com
and let us know which industry we
should test
and give us a rough idea of the query you’d
like us to send. In return for
using your suggestion about industry and query,
we’ll give you a free (and
private) critique of the e-mail your company
sends to customers.
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(c) E-WRITE, 2004 - 2010.
Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan are partners
in E-WRITE, a training and consulting company that specializes
in writing for online readers. Rudick and O'Flahavan are authors of Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A
Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents
You're welcome to reprint this article as long as you include the above credit and copyright information, notify E-WRITE at info@ewriteonline.com,
and you do not change the text. E-WRITE retains copyright of this material.
