Best Practice - Customer Care Champions

Customer Care Champions visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk

Health and wellbeing tourism

Visitor Experience

Driving up customer ser vice standards resort-wide Research from Visitor Surveys showed that standards of customer care varied across the resort. This scheme was created to recognise, reward and inspire a good standard of customer care everywhere.

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visit coastaltourismacademy.co.uk

Customer Care Champions

WHAT WE DID Standards of customer service varied widely across the resort. We recruited a cohort of ‘Customer Care Champions’ to inspire good service resort-wide.

The NCTA enlisted a cohort from local industry, people who lived or worked in Bournemouth and who regularly frequented local restaurants, cafés and customer-facing businesses. The group comprised more than 120 champions, many of whom influenced customer service in their own businesses. All were recruited on the basis they were passionate about customer care and how it could enhance tourism.

In its first phase, a ‘confetti’ award scheme was created, these were awarded to staff who demonstrated good examples of service in action, and their manager would then be informed by the NCTA. However, it quickly became clear that a benchmark was needed to avoid excessive subjectivity – one person’s understanding of great customer service differed significantly from another’s. To remove this, an AEIOU (see diagram below) acrostic was introduced. This was tested in the resort by Bournemouth University students to ensure it was robust.

Awards were publicised on social media, which proved extremely popular as individual businesses gained publicity.

A Champion of Champions was announced at the NCTA’s first year conference, generating wider media coverage.

WHAT WE LEARNT Frequent communication with Champions was essential to encourage nominations, this included regular emails and networking events.

Think -----------

A small group of Champions became passionate about the scheme making regular awards but maintaining momentum among the wider group was difficult. Although the AEIOU framework helped, subjectivity remained an issue.

Costs / Resources: Overall costs were less than £2000 but significant staff required to recruit and motivate champions. (min 0.75 fte)

CONCLUSION Staff who received awards were undoubtedly thrilled, the scheme successfully publicised the importance of good customer care to the town. Businesses were hungry for publicity, but generating unique and outstanding examples of service proved difficult and the scheme was time resource-heavy. The Champions were all professional working people with limited time. If we repeated it, we would suggest recruiting a small team of mystery shoppers tasked with spotting examples of best practice.

AEIOU ----------Did your nominee:

A

Anticipate the customers needs?

E

Exceed expecations, and provide a positive experience?

I

Make an instant connection and empathise with the customer?

O

Take ownership of an issue and ensure it was resolved?

U

Understand that everyone is unique and standard policy may not apply?