This year we broke an old Chain Gang habit and canvassed everyone for feedback on our bike tours. And I’m glad I did. Most of the comments were very flattering, and that’s lovely, but some weren’t.<\/p>\n
I recognise that I find criticism hard to deal with. Our tours are very precious to me, and I feel very protective towards France, Italy, and all the tours we run. When someone doesn’t enjoy themselves I find myself thinking very defensively.<\/p>\n
My first response is typically from the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ school of customer service, also known as ‘French-style’. But the truth is that I usually know the bits of our tours I’m unhappy with, or the weeks when things went wrong, so negative feedback usually just serves to remind me of errors I already know I’ve made. And I hate that.<\/p>\n
But, getting all the feedback in together serves to emphasise both the unacceptable and the wonderful. Added to which, if Clare sees all the feedback emails in the office, I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. So, we’ve turned into a responsive Tour Operator, just like that. We ask our customers what they think, and then we see if we can’t meet their expectations.<\/p>\n
Wow! Put like that it makes us sound like a wonderful business that loves its customers and treats them well! A long journey, but we’ve taken the first step. Feedback. It’s brutal, man!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This year we broke an old Chain Gang habit and canvassed everyone for feedback on our bike tours. And I’m glad I did. Most of the comments were very flattering, and that’s lovely, but some weren’t. I recognise that I find criticism hard to deal with. Our tours are very precious to me, and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,10],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-the-business-of-running-a-travel-company","tag-customers","tag-feedback"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thechaingang.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}