Visitor Experience no laughing matter

Visitor Experience no laughing matter

ServiceIQ takes a cue from the Basil Fawlty school of customer service with a short film featuring an unsuspecting couple on a cycling adventure in the hands of a scary tour guide.

The cautionary tale is part of ServiceIQ’s new online training course ‘An Introduction to Visitor Experience’, designed to help tourism businesses get staff up to speed quickly in tourism knowledge and excellent customer service skills. The course is at www.serviceiqskillsonline.org.nz

The comprehensive course takes just 1.5 hours to complete online and covers a range of topics including: the different stages of visitor experience, how to deliver on your business promise to visitors, vital communications skills, planning, visitor profiles, and more.

ServiceIQ Chief Executive Dean Minchington says successful tourism businesses and well trained employees are crucial to creating a sustainable industry that is now the country’s top export earner.

“To people all over the world New Zealand is a ‘must-visit destination’. Tourists can travel enormous distances to experience what we have to offer,” says Dean. “For our part, we owe them an outstanding time when they’re here, and show them that it’s more than worth the journey. A great visitor experience translates into great reviews, recommendations and increased business for the region and New Zealand tourism as a whole.”

Or as international hospitality guru Shane Green, who also happens to be a Kiwi, said to a Queenstown audience recently: “If you don’t upskill your staff you put your business at risk. Your brand is your reputation and that is based on the quality of your visitor experience which is driven by the quality of your people.”

The course is also perfect for tourism businesses with seasonal workers and can be used as a refresher for people who have been employed longer term. It’s been designed for staff to up-skill quickly and easily, and be ready to make the right impression with customers in the shortest possible time.

It’s also flexible. Trainees can start and stop and restart online courses at any point and automatically pick up from where they left off. They can also learn on the move because they can work on their tablet or PC, and swap between devices.

An Introduction to Visitor Experience is ServiceIQ’s latest addition to its popular range of quick online courses that are all designed to assist tourism, hospitality and retail businesses.

The courses themselves are suitable for a variety of jobs across the service sectors including guides, customer service and retail and café staff. They cover all the essentials, from visitor experience and customer service, through to legal responsibilities staff need to know.

Over 18,000 service industry employees used ServiceIQ Skills Online in the first year of being launched. www.serviceiqskillsonline.org.nz

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