«Entertainment Industry Catalog» magazine
Come in, you’ll be our Guest!
Everyone has his own favourite place, where he always returns to. Why can somebody establish long-term friendly relationship with a Guest, and other — can’t? And what influences on the way, whether we will comment favourably on this place or not? Generally, the secret is attention and sincerity. It’s necessary to treat Guests as best friends, who came to you to drink a cup of tea, or relatives, who visited you. It seems to be pretty simple, but how it should be done to create good experience of communication and to cultivate care for a Guest to each of 200 employees? Your place is hardly the only one, where people have come to. They have a certain experience, ideas of client service and, trust me, they have something to compare with. You shouldn’t give your Guests any chance to doubt the quality of your service. General impression is created by details — the temperature of dish, brought to the table, convenient lighting, volume of music and many other things. Let’s list basic steps on the way to providing quality service, that can influence clients’ return.
Step 1. Prejudge expectations
Regular Guests mean stability and additional earnings. And, above all, Guests used to come back because of service quality. The essence of service model is, to meet, or better, to exceed the expectations of Visitors. If you understand, the service quality leaves much to be desired, master to control expectations. Everyone is familiar to the situation, when an image from the menu differs from that one, the waiter brings finally. Sometimes, it’s enough to change the photo of meals to real ones, to reduce the level of negativity.
E.g.: Coming to be at the leisure center, Guests disappointed, having found one of attractions didn’t run. So, we decided to inform visitors about technical difficulties before they bought a ticket. It was enough to hang up a screen at the entrance to the leisure center, displaying all the accessible attractions at the moment. Buying a ticket, a Guest agrees, one of the attractions is out of order. In this way we reduce the expectation level taking into consideration services provided.
Step 2. Solve problems right here and right now
When questions, conflicts and problems arise, staff members, communicating with a Guest directly, have to solve this situation. It’s important for everyone to get help exactly at the moment, he faces difficulties. Why does a Guest have to wait for administrator, manager and, even, General Manager to solve the problem? Waiting and «pushbacks» increase negativity level. You can considerably save your time, by empowering your assistants of the first line.
E.g.: Guest is allergic to onion, so he asked to make pasta without it. Waiter took his order. Having got his meal, the Guest found, his request was not taken into account. He called up for the assistant to know, why they put onion into pasta, finally. It turned out, his request wasn’t relayed to a cook. So, the waiter must have the authorities to resolve the conflict rapidly, without involving the third parties. After all, it’s enough to apologize and ask the cook to prepare the meal, focusing on the lack of onion, in order to solve this problem.
Step 3. Give out compliments
Every assistant at our establishments has an opportunity to present compliment to a Guest. It can be cotton candy, ice cream, free ticket to the next visit or any other sincere impulse directed to the Guest. Compliments delight, and, at the same time, they perform one more function — compensate negativity.
E.g.: A Family comes to a leisure centre. Their child wants to ride the attraction, but his height is below allowed minimum. The instructor tells them about impossibility of participation. The child gets upset and bursts into tears. What kind of actions do we wait from the staff manager? It’s easy — he can give out a compliment! For instance, to present a balloon. It will calm down the child and win his parent’s favour — because the instructor has exceeded their expectations.
Step 4. Hire Mystery Shoppers
Have you ever wondered, that it’s possible to form a staff of mystery shoppers among the loyal Guests? It’s chipper, than cooperation with an agency, and gives more exact results. Loyal guests are interested in improvements. So, the question is — how to find out such persons? The simplest ways are — to hold voluntary questionnaires, survey over social network or to look for active users on response websites.
E.g.: There are always questionnaires at the reception, which Guests can always fill in, if they want to. Every person, who took part in the poll, made constructive suggestion and passed his contacts, is considered to be a loyal one. Quality Manager contacts such people and offers them to visit leisure centre as Mystery Shoppers. Thus, we get to know the real state of affairs on the front line. And, as far as Mystery Shopper is concerned, he is presented free entrance to our centre and an opportunity to spend 1500 rubles on food and drinks.
Step 5. Promote a corporate culture.
Sincere service — means assistants, who love people and «serve» Guests. It’s impossible to achieve such effect by training service standards, only. It is necessary; the staff loves its job and empathizes with a company. This is achieved by corporate culture promotion.
E.g.: We arrange self-government days, when the General Manager of the leisure centre serves Guests in the wardrobe on an equal basis with line managers. That’s the way we cheer our colleagues up and show them — any job is disgraceful. We always tell: «Treat your colleagues, as you want them to treat your Guests».
But for all that, it’s necessary to understand, that any service, corporate culture, sincerity and qualified staff will never save the situation, if you provide poor-quality products and sell bad goods. Service model — is just a part of the whole system, aimed at setting long-term relations with Guests.
To raise the feeling of sincerity in stuff managers, it’s important to employ people, sharing company’s values and carrying for a Guest, initially. Why do we appreciate sincerity? Because, the sincerity is the thing, impossible to imitate.
Pavel Timets, the CEO of «Indoor amusement parks» LTD
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