About 4 years ago, we were in the market for a travel agent to assist with planning our wedding in Mexico. Although I’ve had a significant amount of experience in wedding planning, doing so internationally wasn’t quite my thing, so I knew that I needed an experienced travel agent. With all of the do it yourself options online nowadays, coming across an experienced and dedicated travel agent seemed almost impossible.

I recall that some dear friends of ours, the now married coupled, Mack and Linda Ornsby Hendricks, had just hosted a beautiful wedding in Costa Rica, so I reached out to see if they had used anyone to assist, and luckily they did. Now, at a first pass, I’ll admit, I was skeptical. Brenda has an email address that ends in comcast.net, which always makes me a bit eerie. I always expect that in business, a company or person should have a non-public domain name, but I digress. I pushed that piece of information to the side and took the recommendation at face value and reached out to her and I’m so happy that I did.

This is where the, now 4 year relationship, with our travel agent began. Mack and Linda referred us to a woman named Brenda Stock, who has been our consistent, reliable and dedicated travel agent since we’ve met her. While I take recommendations from my friends seriously, Brenda has surpassed the recommendation and went above and beyond proving that she is a highly qualified resource. She has even planned trips for my friends and family because of our recommendations. I was recently doing a brief tally in my head of how many trips she has planned for us or from a recommendation from us and that number is quite impressive.

But why? What has made Brenda’s service so outstanding and even caused me to push some usually, baseline business basics to the side. It really boils down to 4 things:

• Consistence
• Responsiveness
• Professionalism
• Industry Knowledge

Over the past 4 years, every encounter with Brenda has had the 4 components above. Unlike many professionals, who get used to your business, then begin to be a bit more lax in their responsiveness or professionalism, this is not the case for Brenda. The even more ironic and partially amazing things about this business relationship is that I’ve never physically met Brenda before; all of our encounters have been either via phone or email, which is completely against how I prefer to do business. Brenda gives her perspective of industry specifics and recommendations and she consistently meets or exceeds our expectations. In an industry where most people take to the Internet to “self serve” their travel needs, it’s nice to have a reliable professional who consistently exceeds expectations and does so with professionalism, industry knowledge and impeccable response time.

Scarlet Says… Customer Service has one key word that should be kept in mind – “customer”. The success or demise of a business is strongly indicative of how the customer is treated. If you want your business to succeed and thrive, take special care in how you treat your biggest asset – your customer.

Until next time,

Scarlet 

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