Travel Scammers are Targeting Your Customers, and That’s Bad for Brand Reputation

How’s your brand reputation these days – good, bad, somewhere in the middle?

Your brand reputation is essential no matter what industry you’re in, but it’s paramount to success if you’re in the hospitality industry. And for your customers, you can guarantee it’s on their shortlist of important factors when choosing whom to trust with travel plans.

So with that in mind, how are you protecting your brand reputation? Are scammers taking advantage of your customers and ruining your rapport?

Let’s look at some ways your reputation can be tarnished and what you can do to stop scammers from harming it further.

You SHOULD Give a Damn ‘Bout Your Bad Reputation

Joan Jett can get away with not caring about her reputation, but as a hospitality business, you can’t.

Your brand reputation, including the customer experience clients receive when choosing you over the competition, has a ripple effect that can impact more than one area of your business.

Damaged Customer Trust

A recent First Orion consumer survey found that almost 30% of people had received a hospitality-related scam call in the past 12 months.

Scammers are bombarding peoples’ phones daily, calling from unknown numbers and spoofing your branding to make it seem like it’s you on the other side!

All of that scamming adds up to one thing – damaged customer trust. If customers can’t trust that it’s you on the other end, why would they answer your calls?

Negative Brand Perception

When customers don’t trust you anymore, it can significantly impact their perception of your brand.

Suddenly, instead of seeing your name and logo and associating it with positive feelings, customers will perceive your brand as toxic, leading only to negative experiences and wasted money.

And if scammers are spoofing your brand, you can forget about ever being the top choice again.

Increased Regulatory Scrutiny

What happens when phone scammers repeatedly target your business? You lose trust and damage your reputation, but you also attract the attention of regulators – like the FCC – who will crack down hard on your business if they see your brand as a threat to consumers. This can lead to pricey fines, penalties, or even legal action.

Financial Loss

A phone scammer’s primary goal is to harm your customers financially, and 1 in 5 people reported that they’ve lost money to a scammer.

But it’s not just your customers who lose out to scammers; your business is also at risk of hurting financially.

When customers hear from friends, family, or online reviewers that your brand is harmful and has a negative reputation, they’ll stop spending their travel funds on you and flock to your competition.

Brand Reputation Makeover: Hospitality Edition

So, now you know how a bad reputation can damage your business, even beyond a customer’s perception of you. But what are the next steps? How do you improve your reputation and prove to customers that when you call them, it’s really you?

Answer: branded calling.

Branded calling offers an extreme reputation makeover for any business – Ty Pennington not included.

INFORM is First Orion’s branded calling solution that allows any business to brand their outbound phone calls with the name of their business, the reason for calling, and even the department making the call.

Branded calling is more than traditional CNAM, giving businesses more control over their branding and allowing for double the amount of characters as traditional CNAM services – up to 32!

And when customers can trust that you are who you say you are, your brand reputation gets a significant bump.

One of our hospitality customers, a large travel management company, needed help getting clients to answer their phone calls. Because their calls were unbranded, they seemed suspicious to customers.

After implementing INFORM, the company saw a 15% boost in its answer rate. Not only that, they also experienced a 15% boost in engagement, meaning that when customers picked up, they were ready to talk.

There’s never been an easier way to give your reputation a makeover.

Get Started with Branded Calling

INFORM is easy to implement and can be up and running in minutes – no complicated integration is required.

It works across devices – including iOS, Android, and wearables – so you can hit your customers with your correct branding no matter which device they’re on.

Ready to turn your brand reputation around? Contact us today and get started right away to see branded calling in action.