Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 112 - Why Travel Advisors NEED the personal touch
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in your podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel advisor as well and I just do this random podcast. also have Elevate with RachelK.com that has courses and things that help travel advisors build the business that builds them up. And day 112 is where we're at, if I didn't say it already. So. Day 112 is an expansion upon day 109, which are like business strategies for your travel agency, right? And this one's gonna be, believe, yep, this is combination of a couple of things discussed in day 109's episode. So I have very little notes written down for this episode, so please bear with me. So we're gonna talk about how much more the personal touch is needed. with regards to building relationships, partnerships, your service and your CRM. All right, and I've done past episodes with client relationship building, partnership building. I haven't really done one on service and CRM. Okay, so your business strategy. If you've been listening to the last few episodes, day 109, I don't need you searching through 100 and... 11 other episodes. Day 109 are like business strategies for travel advisors. And I've been kind of expanding on that. So day 110 goes deeper into why you need to specialize into a niche and exactly what that means. Not just saying, I do romance or I only do Norwegian cruise lines. Like, no, let's understand the why behind it. Not just, oh, I've been told to do this. Day 111. It's kind of aligning your online presence. So we're kind of building this whole podcast is like slowly building on everything. So, if you are doing this and you are like, okay, I'm gonna niche down and I have my ICA and I know where I'm aligned with the ICA in terms of online presence, now we're gonna talk about the in-person presence and the service for your ICA. This is not what you want, this is not what someone else says this is cool by my version of it. It could work, I'm not lying. Like, it could work. but this is what your ICA wants, okay? People want the personal touch. I have heard on a few different calls, like some little concernicus about, you know, the world being on fire right now. It's been on fire basically since I graduated from high school off and on. Like there's like two okay years and then something crazy in my experience. So I get it and it scares you especially if you are self-employed slash entrepreneur because you are in charge of your own income. But that's also so much opportunity. We're not going to get into all that stuff, but. The personal touch I think is super important to focus on in your business. And not the personal touch like I'm sending you a magnet with a picture of me on it in my website. Thanks for booking a trip. But really building the interpersonal relationships with your clients, with your preferred suppliers, BDMs, or just the suppliers in general, management teams if you can. like the real deep relationships. Like to the point where you're like congratulations on your new baby, not a comment on a Facebook post, but like actually like WhatsApping, your favorite, I do a lot of destination weddings, but like your favorite destination wedding coordinator. You find out they get married, you find out they get pregnant, and your friends on Facebook, but. You actually have their personal WhatsApp and you can be like, congrats, and you can send them a gift because you have that information because you've actually built this relationship. I think it's imperative not only with the companies, the management teams of whatever products you decide to go into to develop those relationships, but also really focus that on your clients as well. Now, if you're doing a lot of large groups, it's a lot harder. So I'd focus more on the group hosts specifically rather than every random person who signs up. But you could if you really wanted to. If you're that social, you could. But this brings to mind the 80s. I feel like what we are going through right now is straight up 80s. feel like being able to meet for service-based businesses, like travel agencies and advisors, being able to meet us in person and know that we are a human being is going to be a huge advantage over just the overall, everyone's doing everything online. Okay. I also think building those relationships in person the same way you would online, well, and a little bit deeper than you would online even is really gonna help your business as well. And back to the 80s, I'm imagining the Rolodex. If anyone remembers, do you remember the Rolodex? My grandpa had a really cool, it wasn't a Rolodex, but it was like a metal clipboard and you could flip down and push the letter of their last name and it'd go boop and it would just have a whole page of all this information. I thought that was the coolest thing ever, but that's what I'm picturing in my brain. And he would have like notes of everyone that he had on that contact page. Man, I really wish I had that thing. Like it was so cool. ⁓ But he would have notes on each person, which yeah, you can put that in your CRM, but just like, are you putting that in your CRM? Are you putting this information in your CRM? Like they had a baby, like your honeymoon couple. They had a baby. They just bought a new car. They're buying a house. Like, are you doing that? Like they used to, the sales reps used to do in the eighties, nineties and early two thousands. Are you doing that? Let's add a little personal touch. Or do you have the note cards that when you call, this is so cheesy. when you call up those people to follow up and you're like, oh, their daughter's 12, but the age is wrong. And they're like, no, my son is 14. And then you're like, oh. You probably have their children in your CRM. But I'm just saying like, do you have that information and can you pick up the phone and call, like do your clients know, like and trust you enough that you can pick up the phone and call them and say, hey, I was just checking in. How are you doing? How are the kids? How's the husband or wife? How is your business going? How is your job going? Like, can you do that with your clients? Maybe you can't. I know a lot of travel advisors when they first start out book friends and family. But if you're doing a lot of like social media lead generation, ⁓ these are the advisors I'm talking about. The ones who are like straight up social media, don't have any friends and family that they really work with. Can you call your clients up and just say, hey, how's it going? Are you, if you do book a lot of friends and family, or have their contact info. Are you regularly calling them? Hey, how's it going? That's what I mean by the personal touch, not like a branded calendar or whatever my insurance company used to send me once a year as a thank you with a picture of my agent. I'm not a fan of that. you can do that if you want. don't care. so. Also, with that in mind, and we've talked about the niche, and we talked about highly, highly specializing in your niche and possibly developing service packages, and then aligning your online presence with your ICA, and now we're doing the personal touch. So, when it comes to your service with your ICA, what kind of personal touches would they want? back to can you call your client and be like, hey, did you buy your house yet? How'd that closing go? Or hey, relocating for your job? And I wouldn't. I wouldn't rely on like being friends on Facebook or whatever to be that, I mean it's fine, I guess you could do that. But I feel like the phone call is far more personal than thumbs upping or hearting some post on Facebook about their life. Because it shows you actually want to spend time and listen to them rather than scroll, scroll, scroll, ⁓ like. Hey, you need a trip now you got a raise? Like, don't do that. Maybe you can, I don't know. You can do it as a joke. I'm just, I totally blanked. ⁓ my gosh, I totally blanked. But does your service align with your ICA and do you have the personal touches for your ICA that they would want to be interested in getting? So maybe your ICA doesn't like phone calls, but maybe they like text messages. Maybe they do like the DMs on Facebook. I know for me, and I'm not your ICA, I can guarantee you, I'm not. But for me, anything I ever posted on Facebook, which I rarely ever post anything, so I'm like, what's the point? You know what I mean? When I had Metta. ⁓ I was happier when people would DM me than tag me in a comment or something, which I didn't care about being tagged. I don't understand meta, it's fine. I wasn't made for that platform. So maybe you have your ICA online presence all lined and you have a lot of followers on your platform or like a lot of friends on Facebook with your travel agency page or whatever. ⁓ Send them a DM if it's like TikTok or Reels or I don't know if YouTube shorts can do this but. ask them like, can I stitch this? Can I stitch this like random, hilarious content you made? I want to share this. I want to stitch it and give you my perspective too. like share their content. That helps kind of build that relationship so that they are, even if they are clients, but that they've traveled and it's been a few weeks or months or whatever. ⁓ But they're not at the level where you can just text them or call them. Like those are some ways to help build those relationships if your clients are coming from strictly social media. Like that's a good way to do that too. And if they aren't, you can still do it too because people like being like, ⁓ I'm kind of a celebrity. This person wants to stitch or tag me. Great. You know what I mean? I'm not trying to sound manipulative. I'm just trying to like get you to understand, build these relationships. Okay? have your personal touch. When it comes to any templates that you do purchase, are for like your workflows, I highly recommend adding everything in as your brand voice. And I believe, I think it's Teak will do that for you. Like, I think, don't quote me on this, but I think if you purchase their workflow templates, they will put them in your CRM and tweak them to your brand voice. So if you want their templates, I would pay for the upgrade package, honestly, if they do all of that ⁓ to save you time and frustration. Now, if you do just buy random templates, you have to still personalize all of them. If you ask Claude, write out this workflow email in this voice or whatever, you still are gonna wanna tweak them to be really personable, like have your personal touch. Don't be afraid to have, I mean look at all my content, don't be afraid to have content that's not perfect because that's your personal touch. Have a typo every once in a while. ⁓ Don't be afraid if you look bad that day. If it's video content, don't worry about it. Everything is becoming like hyper, hyper fake is what I'm saying and not human. So to err is human. Have your personal touch. Do it your way a little bit. You can use templates to build those relationships. I really feel like it's moving the way of the 80s like I said. in terms of service-based businesses, they're gonna wanna revert back like no more Zoom calls, no more Google Meets, more can we meet in person? Can we talk on the phone at any time? Not like 24-7 availability, but can we talk, can I call you and I'm not gonna get some weird chat bot that's like, please enter your name. Please say your name. I didn't catch that. And then they're throwing their phone. in the garbage disposal because they don't want to deal with robots? Okay. This is why you have a leverage if you are like small and you're highly focused on service ⁓ to continue building your business. And it's important to start focusing. I know social media was like, ⁓ gosh, I think I had another business back in before I started work way before I started working in travel. I've had a couple. But I didn't need social media back then because it wasn't as necessary. It was like, have a website and a Facebook page so people know that you're a business. And that was the only, like I didn't post anything. I was like, not really posting on the Facebook page. People would just maybe post a review. And that was it. But now it's like consumed people so much and I think there's gonna be more of a pullback with like interacting so much with social media, especially once the data comes out about the effects on mental health with it. think it's, I don't know if it's anytime soon, but I do kind of feel like that's coming. And it would be good to develop your interpersonal skills and in-person communication skills. so that you can pivot. All right, that's my crazy episode for today. They're all crazy. I say it every day. like, there's my crazy rantage. Thanks for stopping by and I will see you tomorrow. Bye.