Wish upon a STAR – customer care training.
Written by Jenny on 28th July 2010What do we all wish for when we go on a UK holiday? Nice weather? Good Food? Comfy rooms? Lots to see and do? Attentive service?
Well, here at TLH Leisure Resort, we can’t guarantee the weather, but we can make sure that you have the best holiday you can wish for!
Our own in-house TLH STARs Customer Service training programme has gone from strength to strength over the past 18 months. It only seems like yesterday we were discussing the design of the course with our teams, yet here we are, nearly18 months later and we have just run the first batch of refresher sessions!
We wanted to make sure that our teams were motivated and enthusiastic about providing that consistently excellent customer service we are known for, even during the busy summer months. So, to make sure that we covered everything we needed, we asked staff what they wanted to be included. The feedback was amazing, with everyone supporting the idea of refresher sessions. So with comments in hand I started to design the session. Running for 2 hours I included information on product knowledge, a customer experience exercise (to get everyone thinking like a customer), how we interact with our guests, showing how much we care, teamwork, internal customers and finally those all important last impressions.
The first session was on the 29 June with the last one on 27 July. During this time there were 20 sessions being delivered to nearly 300 staff, covering all departments from kitchens, bars and restaurants to recptions, accounts, sales and marketing. I got them into the restaurant for their coffee break where they witnessed excepionally good and bad service, working in groups to identify how we can get to know our customers more and how we can demontrate good teamwork between different departments, and finally interviwing each other to find out more about different each other and people’s different roles in the business.
The feedback has been fantastic, and I love it when I hear reports from staff and guests at how everyone is putting the session into practice. It’s also nice to see staff that didn’t know each other before, chatting to each other during the day!
Customer service is so important to us here at TLH Leisure Resort that we are constantly looking at ways to improve. I hope everyone agrees that these STARs sessions have really had an impact on the service all of our guests receive. I’d like to take all the credit, but without the support, input and enthusiasm of all the staff here, the training would not have been a success.
The picture below shows some of our teams enjoying a good experience in our lovely Victoria Hotel Restaurant.
Jenny
Outstanding service in the Victoria Restaurant
