Saren Indah is a tiny fifteen room hotel in Ubud. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd in a market where amazing seven star resorts line up alongside cheaper than cheap backpacker accommodation. How do you differentiate when you are not the biggest, flashest or cheapest? Saren Indah should be lost in the mediocre middle, and yet year upon year this family run hotel is booked out months in advance and tops Trip Advisor rankings by excelling at customer service and giving visitors a story to tell.

The cost of poor customer service in the U.S. alone is $83 billion per year.

70% of our customers leave never to return because they were not made to feel like they mattered. Of course they don’t just vanish into the ether, they go to the competition. So poor service not only damages our bottom line, it also widens the gap between us and our competitors.

We spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to get people to notice us and once we get them through the door we don’t take care of them. In a world with so many choices it’s no longer good enough to show up and open the door. Smart marketers understand that it’s how the door is opened that matters.

Image by Seagers.