Press Releases

FESTIVAL-GOERS NOT SO HAPPY WITH ISLES CUSTOMER SERVICE

Jul 27, 2007

Visitors to the Hebridean Celtic Festival were not so satisfied this year with the service they got in island shops and restaurants.

Feedback cards returned to the Who Cares Wins customer care project show a marked increase in festival-goers who thought they did not get such a friendly welcome and were not spoken to much by those who served them.

Although the disappointing feedback is thought to be the result of sheer numbers, it has prompted the project to consider recruiting and training a bank of staff to help out businesses at their busiest times in the summer.

Who Cares Wins is a business support programme funded by HIE Innse Gall and supported by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar with a view to encouraging business excellence in customer service. The project also aims to demonstrate to island businesses the financial benefits of providing consistently high quality service.

It has emerged that up to 200 of the people who came to the festival took the chance to use the customer feedback cards and let the project know what they thought of the island welcome and standard of customer service.

More than usual decided to express their disappointment and suggest that some of those who served them could have done a bit better.

Lisa Maclean, the Who Cares Wins project co-ordinator, said that the latest feedback from the cards which are available for customers to fill in in many shops and businesses up and down the islands, was slightly surprising for a famously-hospitable area like the Western Isles.

She said: “From the cards already coming in, it appears that, while the festival was on, many places that were previously regularly getting good feedback had struggled this time.
“The main grumble was from customers having to wait so long to be served and staff not being as attentive as normal. You have to remember that this was festival week which is when they are busiest and when staff were under the most pressure.”

Lisa said that it could be a case of staff not being trained well enough or just not enough planning going into what was required for the big festival rush.

She said that the Who Cares Wins project was not ignoring the feedback but was now looking to help businesses cope by advertising next Easter for a bank of staff that would be trained up to have the basic customer service skills they could use in the peak summer months.

“If the businesses need more staff last minute, we would like to have a bank of staff available who can work that week at short notice and who are already trained with the basic skills such as waiting on tables,” said Lisa.
“If the businesses think it is a good idea, we will help them achieve it.”

The feedback cards are seen as playing a crucial part in gauging whether businesses, large and small, in the islands are providing what their customers expect.

Lisa MacLean says that feedback like that was also vital to highlight areas on which they should work so that businesses could be ready to cope with the busiest times as professionally as possible.

“It is not a case that we will nothing do about the feedback - even the criticism. It will be dealt with constructively. Businesses themselves will show us whether they think the staff bank idea that we are now considering would work for them and how it would work in practice.”