Customer Service | Serving Up the Best

Customer Service Training Programs for Clubs and Venues

Whether it’s a small refurbishment or a large scale development, every club should be looking at their venue on a regular basis and making improvements in line with market needs and of course competitors. During these times, the trick is in keeping your patrons happy and coming back for more.

There is a two-pronged approach in reducing the risks of customer loss due to poor service and reputational damage due to online rants. Firstly, deliver exceptional service and secondly provide channels for patrons to provide feedback to you.

Deliver Exceptional Customer Service (Good or Great is Just Not Good Enough!)

Too often, venues and patrons alike confuse ‘staff friendliness’ with “great customer service” as synonymous. It is true that having good people is one of the key factors to an effective customer service program, but friendliness is just one element of that experience.  Consistently, great service outcomes will be driven by three factors – people, processes and physical facilities.

Let’s use these 3 P’s as a framework to talk about exceptional customer service.

People

Recruiting good people is a necessary first step. We’ve all heard the adage ‘recruit attitude, train skills’, and it might seem an obvious point to make, but the actual experience in many venues would suggest that recruiters are not following this classic rule of thumb.

The second factor, when thinking about hiring people, is the degree to which venues invest in training. This might sound self-serving coming from a training organisation, but the results speak for themselves. Venues that provide a quality induction, structured new staff training checklists, documented customer service standards and opportunities to upskill, will typically enjoy greater productivity and deliver more consistent service outcomes.

The third people factor comes down to your culture. This comes back to management being hands-on and visible when required, positive and future-focussed at all times and fair and reasonable in all dealings with their teams.

“Take care of your employees and they will take care of your business.  It’s as simple as that.” – Richard Branson 

Processes

The second ‘P’, processes, complements the people factor.  The happiest, smiling faces in the world will not necessarily deliver ad-hoc positive customer experiences if they’re directionless in their work.

Venues need to engage their teams in a process of workshopping customer service standards, documenting those standards, training to those standards, measuring those standards by using mystery shoppers, and then counselling team members who choose not to follow the standards.

Customer service standards can be as detailed as having operating procedures for every task or as broad as a set of customer service principles. Whichever method you prefer, the documentation is critical.

Physical Facilities

Physical facilities is the third ‘P’ and encompasses factors such as comfort and ambience factors, quality of furniture, fittings and amenities and investment in technology. Focusing on patron comfort, efficiency and measurability is key. These things can be achieved with simple checklists for managers to take a critical look at the venue, and a monthly ‘innovation session’ to identify opportunities for new technology to be employed to improve efficiency or the patron’s experience. The best venues are utilising handheld tablet technology for restaurant ordering and providing online restaurant bookings and memberships, and payment technology such as app-based bar tab systems.

Get better at receiving complaints

If quizzed on whether they’d rather receive a noise complaint in person or via liquor licensing, ten of out ten venue managers would acknowledge that they’d prefer to receive the complaint first-hand. The same should go for customer service complaints.

Rather than a patron ranting on their own Facebook page about a negative experience, it would be preferable to receive a complaint on your own Facebook page/social channel so that you have the opportunity to resolve it.

Similarly, venues can’t control their TripAdvisor or Facebook rating, but a complaint received on their own channels at least gives venues the chance to respond to and resolve an issues.  Better still, a manager who is visible and accessible to patrons, who takes calls and who provides their email address to the punters, or is available in person in the venue, will receive complaints firsthand and be able to better defuse the situation. All of this hinges on managers having the skills and training to resolve complaints effectively.

With customer service scattered across an increasingly diverse number of channels, it’s inevitable that regular updating of skills and knowledge is required to maintain a consistently high level of customer service across all formats.

In a perfect world, we’d deliver customer service so consistently that complaints would be few and far between. Venues can only achieve this by focusing on people, processes and investment in their physical facilities.The reality is, we need to seek out and encourage feedback, positive and negative, so that we can reward staff, improve service and control the negative impacts on revenue and reputation. This is particularly true during a renovation period when disruption to the business is obviously greater.

Need assistance in your venue with developing the best possible customer service?  We can help you and your team serve up the best!

Aaron Bray, General Manager | CTA Training Specialists | 0447 464 333 | [email protected]