With the designation of the new national park WV Hive wants to make sure that businesses elevate their staff to the best delivery of customer service.
So people from all over southern West Virginia are learning about customer service during the two-day workshop. Attendees include restaurants, lodging facilities and groups across the 13 counties WV Hive serves.
“We want to be known as the best in the area so people will keep coming back,” said Deputy Director Judy Moore, of New River Gorge Regional Development Authority/and WV Hive executive director. “We have a lot of opportunity now with the National Park and everyone interested in coming to see what West Virginia’s all about or what the New River Gorge National Park is all about. And we want to make sure that our customer service is in line with the beauty that they’re going to see.”
When they think about service and training and making it stick one of their tools is role play…
“Being able to do role play and examples of how we’re giving great service or how to handle complaints is a really easy-to-implement tool that allows practice on a regular basis,” said Zing Train trainer Timo Anderson. “And the role plays, if they’re with each other don’t cost the business anything, whereas making mistakes with real customers can be very expensive.”
WV Hive provides resources to make businesses better, more successful, and affect their bottom line. There were three different components to the workshop…
“They’re learning about service, they’ll learn about leadership, servitude and then tomorrow they’re gonna learn about how to take that training back to their staff,” Moore said. “It’s a ‘train the trainer’ model — meaning that they didn’t have to pull everyone out of their business to attend the training themselves but they can deliver it fully across their business.”
Anderson says when it comes to the workshop — what you take out of it is what you put back in. People all over the country use this and see dollar impact.
“Changes in their sales, changes in what they’re doing and thinking about ‘how do we make service an intentional, careful thing that we’re teaching,'” the trainer said. “As opposed to something we hope that we get someone who’s good at service on.”
According to Anderson, he loves that each person can engage the service recipe.
“Figuring out what the customer wants, getting it for them, doing something extra, as well as handling complaints,” he said. “And if they don’t have the answers we always say they can ask for help. So giving people that tool and that framework allows them to be really successful staff.”
