Your No. 1 goal is to enhance your customers’ experiences. They come to your property and expect to be treated well, but you want to exceed their expectations. You want people to leave your property excited to come back.
Although you’ve taken care of the big things—such as investing in important training and team-building days for your employees and expertly managing all the issues and incidents taking place on your property—are you paying attention to the small things? We mean this in the literal sense!
What’s happening to a customer’s wallet or purse? An umbrella or coat? The possessions that mean something to your customers? It’s the stuff they feel they can’t and don’t want to live without.
Do you have lost and found processes for your property to mitigate the times when your guests’ belongings go missing? If not, let’s change that for the better.
You're Missing What Matters to Your Customers
We’ll start here with a critical question: Why does your property need lost and found software to exceed your customers’ expectations?
Let’s consider how your operation is currently operating. You’re probably operating in one of these two likely scenarios:
- You don’t have any way to manage lost and found items at all. Items are just collected in a box in someone’s office.
- You’re using software, but it’s cumbersome and requires too much time and effort. Your employees must wait a few seconds for your slow tool to capture and store the item name before you can input the customer’s name.
Both scenarios end in disorganization and nothing getting returned to customers.
Even if you have some type of lost and found process, it’s a mess. And even if your team has invested a great deal of time to establish the process, it still takes forever to report, manage, and return items.
If you’re not using a system designed for your operation and with the customer in mind, your lost and found process will never be as efficient as you want it to be.
The platform you use needs to be developed with the input of industry experts—experts who know what the customer needs and wants. When you’ve worked in the industry as long as we have, you learn that your customers’ needs start and end the process.
You need software in place that has evolved from the input of your peers—the ones that understand your property’s operations—and, most importantly, the customer.
The Best Lost and Found Software
At the end of the day, the customer is most important. Satisfaction ratings, revenue, and your career are all affected by your customers’ perspectives. Keeping them happy should look effortless, and you can do so with a proactive approach.
No one likes to lose their stuff, so put software in place that covers these three points of the lost and found process:
- Reporting
- Managing
- Returning
Reporting is your secret weapon to averting customer frustration.
We’ve never met anyone that likes losing their cell phone, wallet, glasses, or umbrella. The feeling is even worse when they get home and realize they lost something.
The best software lets your customers get over their bad moods in a productive way. They can report the lost item through your website from the comfort of their home by providing you with the details of the item and their contact information.
With all this information saved directly to your software, your staff members don’t need to do anything until the item is identified as a match on your platform. From there, they call the lost item’s owner.
Your employees spend significantly less time on the phone dealing with customers who’ve lost their possessions, and your customers spend less time clogging up your phone lines. A crisis is averted, and everyone’s happy.
Managing is where the magic happens.
As we said earlier, you’ve got to make the lost and found process look seamless to your customers—no matter how hard you work. The good news is that the best software reduces work and increases customer satisfaction. A lot of that occurs when you use software that helps you manage your lost and found items effectively and efficiently.
There are three aspects of managing your lost and found department we want to highlight that might resonate quickly for you:
- Capturing valuable data
- Tracking lost and found items
- Matching items quickly
1. Capturing Valuable Data
What do you capture when a customer reports a lost item? What happens when you return the item? Does customer service end?
Reports and analytics let you know how often you’re receiving new items, what those items are, and how long these items have been in your possession. This information gives you the insights to make important decisions on what to do with your unclaimed items. Do you throw them out or donate the items to charity? There is a high chance that this number will decrease with the right software in place.
2. Tracking lost and found items
Struggling to find items is something all operations are up against without software in place. That’s until they introduce lost and found software to their team:
- Your employees no longer need to spend useless moments searching through your lost and found storage bins.
- Your customer receives a receipt once they report their lost item.
- Your employees print an associated storage tag to organize and track a found item.
You can now track, locate, and communicate details efficiently.
3. Matching Items Quickly
Knowing when a found item matches a lost item is the first struggle when storing possessions on your property. Software removes this problem from your process.
Do you have a found item with specific characteristics? Maybe the item:
- Is a black iPhone 12 Pro Max
- Has a background picture of the family Labrador, Spike
- Was lost in restroom 234-B
The software automatically recognizes the details of the found item and matches it with a lost item reported by your customer. Grab the details from your software and locate the item in seconds.
Returning items is the most rewarding.
We bet you’re trying to figure out what we’re going to discuss here. Well, the beauty of using the right software is ... not much.
You’ve put top-notch software in place on your property to turn the most challenging aspect of lost and found into the most fun part. Now, returning lost items to customers is easily the best part of the whole process because you’ll be doing it so often now.
Learn More About Lost and Found Software
Many properties are focused on handling their day-to-day operations. They’re so focused on issues, incidents, and maintenance that they often forget the importance of their customers’ needs.
Your customers hate the feeling of losing something, so you’ve got to do everything you can to get their lost possession back to them, or all the hard work you’ve done everywhere else won’t matter. They’ll only focus on what went wrong.
It’s time to make your best move to exceed customer expectations. Are you ready?
Request a demo of our lost and found software today!
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and freshness.
