Coach Hire In August and For The End Of 2012

So we are over the crazy season in the coach industry and we have all enjoyed the Olympics.

This is a great time of year for the coach hire industry because we can focus on getting everything done for 2013, planning our marketing, looking at customer service improvements and general business planning.

What would we say the industry needs to look at doing in 2013?

1. Continued focus on customer service, improving service levels and complaint handling on the day.

2. Customers will keep on getting more demanding and they are more likely to complain online, so get a good complaints process.

3. 2013 is going to be an important year for the coach industry with changes to the way we market ourselves, more comparison websites, more social media activity, mobile and data integration.

An interesting time to be in the industry.

Review Websites & Coach Hire Comparison

I was looking at a number of review sites this week for general market research and a few things really struck me. 

1. It is amazing how many company generated reviews are live on the websites, customers always complain about service and praise people.  Talking about business models and over elaborate descriptions are a sure sign of spam. 

2. The companies providing the review websites make a big noise about the usefulness of reviews but don't take any real care about where the reviews are coming from. 

3. How useful are the reviews? We often find that the reviews are from both extremes, very happy or very unhappy but 80% of the customers get a satisfactory service and don't feel the need to talk about it. 

4. It is said that happy customers will generally tell one person and unhappy customers tell 8-16 people; so the simple maths give you an idea of the distortion people see on review sites. 

Customers are making decisions based on a small percentage of people making a lot of noise. 

So we have a market open to exploitation by business, full of spam and one that is distorted by a small group of people making a lot of noise. 

CoachCompare.Com only collects coach hire reviews for customers we know have actually booked a coach trip with the company.  We also make sure that the overall score reflects the customer feedback but that the review is useful for the customer. 

So when customers use CoachCompare.Com they can compare coach hire companies on service, price and quality.