While your family entertainment center’s business plan should concentrate on amenities, promotions, and facility upkeep, don’t forget your most important marketing tool: Customer service. Here are a few ways you can improve your center’s overall customer experience, and how negative customer service can be a huge detriment to the success of your business.
Make Customer Service a Priority
When you hire a new staff member, customer service training should be a huge priority before they take their position in your family entertainment center. Teach them how to address customers, how to make them feel welcome, and how to deal with complaints. Keep an open door policy for your employees — let them know that they can come to you at anytime for customer assistance.
In addition, make it a point to keep these ideas fresh for your employees. Hold regular staff meetings or place reminders in a staff-only area. Keep in mind that staff members respond better to helpful reminders than they do to outright criticism, so keep the notes positive.
Demonstrate Quality Customer Service Yourself
When you’re interacting with customers, keep your customer-service game on lock the whole time. You will not only keep your customers happy and give them a positive experience that will keep them coming back, but your employees will be able to use your example to fine-tune their own customer interactions.
Keep a Watchful Eye on Your Staff
In addition to regular reminders to your staff on proper customer service standards, keep a close eye on their interactions. When you see great examples of customer service, praise your employee — positive reinforcement is an excellent way to help mold behaviors. If you see areas that need work, gentle reminders that suggest alternatives are the way to go.
Why Customer Service Can Affect Your Brand
A negative customer experience can have repercussions that resonate far beyond that individual customer. If your family entertainment center’s customer service isn’t up to par, that customer can share their experience and feelings to others, which can damage your business.
Consider online reviews. While people do write positive reviews when they’ve had a great experience, it often seems that people will go out of their way to share their experience if it was a negative one. Negative online reviews are the opposite of what you and your business want and can impact your company’s branding.
Also, while word-of-mouth is an excellent marketing tool, it’s definitely not good for business if the “word” is about an awful customer service experience at your facility.
Let Them Leave Happy
Keeping customer service a priority not only benefits your customers, but it can directly impact the health of your family entertainment center. High customer service standards can keep patrons coming back on a regular basis, and can lead to even more business. Poor customer service, on the other hand, can be a detriment and bad for your family entertainment center. Keep these tips in mind to ensure every visitor leaves your fun center happy.
Need more ideas on how to improve your relationship with customers? We can help!