As first published in Park Life – sharing park success.
Jonathan Winchester is the Chief Executive of Shopper Anonymous who with their network of UK Regional Directors works with 951 UK independent businesses to help improve their customer service through mystery shopping. Here he explains why feedback programmes are so important…
A customer’s holiday experience is emotional and long. From the booking experience to the return home, parks need to be constantly on their game to ensure customers hail praise for life. Having offered feedback to parks for years here are our top three tips to ensure your business delivers a memorable experience…
1. Identify where the first impression is made
The first few seconds of any experience has the most influence on how a customer feels about your park. There are numerous first impressions in your customers’ journey and working up a strategy that makes each one memorable is a very good place to start. For example, what happens when a customer calls your park at 9pm to book a holiday? Is the quality of the call as good as it would be at 10am on Monday morning? Does the language used by the team member ‘paint a picture’ for the customer that makes them rush to book? When emails are sent into the park, what is the quality of the response in both timing, grammar and follow up? Indeed, do you have a follow up strategy? From the booking, to the arrival at the park and at each service point on site, each and every first experience needs the same attention.
2. Please Make Me Feel Special (PMMFS)
Perhaps the single most important activity we conduct in our team training sessions is to help the team appreciate how they can make every customer feel special. The team need to appreciate that every time they come within 20 yards of a customer they need to visualise that the customer has written on their head PMMFS. It stands for Please Make Me Feel Special. What are they going to do to meet this requirement? I can’t explain a three hour team training course within this article but it starts with appreciating body language!
3. Measuring – identifying issues now
Many parks measure the customer experience, once it is all too late – when the customer is back at home. This makes it hard for you to rescue the situation and prevent poor feedback hitting TripAdvisor.
We recognised that there needed to be a method by which clients who have a longer customer interaction can identify any issues within the experience. So we developed FeedbackDirect where, during the experience, the customer can tell you how they are feeling about your business through a text response. We identify at which point in the customer journey we need to ask how the customer feels. They receive a text during their experience with a link to a happy, normal and sad face screen. The customer responds and all the results appear on a dashboard for the team to respond. It is a fabulous way of measuring and then reacting to issues on the park and delighting the customer prior to them getting home and hitting the TripAdvisor button. What is more, it Makes Them Feel Special!
Over a seven-year period, Jonathan Winchester built one of the largest customer service feedback companies within Australia and New Zealand. The business offered more than 1,000 businesses customer service feedback on a regular basis. In 2006, having moved back to the UK, Jonathan established Shopper Anonymous UK. Born in East Sussex Jonathan started his career at Harrods in London on the management training program. His experience within retail, especially through service and quality improvement programs with other employers, enabled Jonathan to establish Shopper Anonymous, when he moved to Australia in 1994. As well as running Shopper Anonymous, Jonathan is well known for his sound business advice and training seminars. More than 2,000 staff have gained vital skills and experience through Jonathan’s training seminars and more than 10,000 have heard him speak at conferences.
Jonathan Winchester, Shopper Anonymous
Tel: 0844 943 2992 Email: info@shopperanonymous.co.uk
www.shopperanonymous.co.uk
Read more advice and download our guide to being a successful holiday park
