Hotel room sales increase by 11%

A leading Northern Ireland marketer has advised the hospitality sector to improve their customer service for the increasing numbers of tourists coming to the province.

There were 178,000 rooms sold in hotels in June 2012, an annual increase of 11%. While businesses in Belfast enjoyed the biggest boost, other parts of Northern Ireland are seeing the benefits.

Customer Sense’s Lynda Willis believes that tourism in Northern Ireland is taking off and that the hospitality sector needs to wake up and provide worldclass customer service. 

"It is great news to see more visitors enjoying Northern Ireland," she said. "We want these visitors to enjoy their time here and stay here longer.  We are naturally friendly people but we need to focus more on providing a warm welcome to our visitors.”

Lynda works with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board in delivering the internationally acclaimed WorldHost Programme to the hospitality sector here. 

“After people have visited our topclass visitor attractions such as Titanic Belfast and the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre, we want them to have topclass customer service in our hotels, restaurants and bars.  With this increase in visitor numbers, Northern Ireland is now very clearly on the world tourism map so we need to ready to meet and greet them.  Programmes like WorldHost can really help with this.”

The WorldHost Programme is a two day course focusing on the principles of customer service and increasing delegates knowledge of their local area.  For private businesses in the hospitality, tourism and passenger transport sectors, the course only costs £20 per delegate with the Department of Employment and Learning kindly funding the rest.

To find out more, please email lynda@customersensetraining.co.uk.

What is WorldHost?

If you're thinking of coming along on a WorldHost training course, it would be good idea to know a little about it.  So here's a summary for you.

To start off, here are a few things that WorldHost is not.

1. It's not a new religion.
2. It's not about making cups of tea around the world.

WorldHost is in fact an international customer service training programme.  It was devised by the Canadians - and by the way, Canada is the best country for customer service according to a recent international survey.  Since 1985, over one million people have been trained on the programme in 17 countries around the world.  In other words, this is a tried and tested programme.

There are two programmes currently being rolled out in Northern Ireland - the Principles of Customer Service and the Ambassador Programme.  (We'll blog about the Ambassador Programme next week.)

The Principles of Customer Service covers:

• Why businesses need customers
• How to welcome customers and then how to remember their names
• Making conversation ie not talking about the weather all the time.
• Communication skills - verbal, vocal and non-verbal
• Telephone answering skills
• Listening skills
• Handling complaints
• Going the extra mile

This is not a day of "death by powerpoint".  Yes, there are slides but there are video clips, group activities and role plays.  And participants have a lovely workbook which guides them through the day, not forgetting the excellent facilitator!

Don't just take my word for this, here is what one of my course participants had to say about the day.  (And I didn't pay her to say this!)

“We had a great time on the course and definitely were inspired to provide a better service to one and all. Good luck with your future courses. The people who attend are lucky to have such a charming, professional tutor.”  Christine Kane, Manager, Muriels Cafe Bar, Belfast
(The photo which includes Christine was taken at Titanic Belfast as part of the Ambassador Programme.)

If you would like to come along on a WorldHost course, please email lynda@customersensetraining.co.uk.