If you have recently experienced amazing customer service somewhere I would love to hear about it – please take a moment or two to comment below!
If, as is unfortunately quite likely in the U.K., it is a while since you experienced great customer service, you may be wondering what can be done to improve standards of customer service in the U.K. Well, in my opinion, there are a lot of things that can be done. One of them is for retail, leisure, hospitality and transport providers to stop concentrating on doing business with their customers once, and focus more on creating an experience that people will want to come back to.
Many companies spend millions of pounds on advertising campaigns that attract us to go and do business with them, and then when they have enticed us through the door of their store, hotel, cinema, gym, aircraft or train, they provide us with an experience that is guaranteed to make us stay away from them, and what’s more, tell all our friends to steer clear of them as well!
You will be pleased to know that help is at hand. People 1st., the sector skills council for the Leisure and Hospitality industry, has brought the WorldHost training programme from Canada to the U.K., in time to develop better customer service standards here for the 2012 Olympics. I am going to be one of their Quality Assured trainers for this programme, and we have the goal of putting 200,000 front line customer service people through a one-day Principles of Customer Service workshop between now and August 2012.
If you are interested, please watch this space. I go on my training course to qualify to deliver this workshop at the beginning of March and will be all fired up and ready to deliver from the second week in March.
Please don’t forget to comment on the AMAZING customer service experiences you have had before you go!
As someone who works very closely with the hospitality and retail sectors I agree with you entirely Graham.
Unfortunately they are sectors that have one of the biggest staff turnovers and as a result lack consistency and continuity.
Family run businesses suffer less from this sad decline in service for obvious reasons.
Trevor,
Thank you for your comment. I don’t believe that the leisure and hospitality industry HAS to be like that. People leave jobs largely because they are unappreciated, and it doesn’t necessarily cost money to make people feel valued.
I heard a presentation from a gentleman who employed a team of domestic cleaners. The training they received was extraordinarily detailed, and he would personally take them to hospital if they had appointments, and that kind of thing. I have met a number of great managers in my time and they have all treated their staff almost like their own family. People stay where they are appreciated and helped to develop, and that’s something I want to help people to do!