Now that February is behind us the British public can dare to dream of the upcoming summer and if last year was anything to go by, UK holiday parks might find themselves quickly booked out.
Dating back to 1936, with the opening of the first Butlin’s in Skegness, the UK holiday park is designed to cater for the ordinary British family. The experience presents a whole host of features, whether that’s hiking nature trails through the countryside, harnessing your inner Robin Hood and trying your hand at archery or for those more inclined to rest, hot tubs to relax. Families seeking such adventures have a whole host of wonderful options across the nation to consider and an excellent customer experience can leave a lasting memory.
So how can improvements to customer service make a visitor’s holiday experience extra special? It all boils down to responsiveness and waiting time. Every visitor wants a quick response to their question or query, allowing them to get back to their well deserved time off. Without a fast and responsive system in place customers can quickly feel dejected, unappreciated and let down. How can holiday park operators practically implement such a system that is prompt and responsive to put customers worries at ease? We’ve compiled a few good habits and operations processes that UK holiday parks can implement to make the United Kingdom one of the best holiday destinations in 2019.
Look at your processes and identify the most time-consuming ones, from a customer’s perspective.
Start by doing a ‘day-in-the-life-of’ exercise from the perspective of a new customer. Look through their eyes at all the process steps and think about how long each part takes. A quick checklist would be:
- Online search and information
- Make a booking
- Check-in
- Contact customer services with a query
- Check-out
Another approach is to look at every type of customer service query, and see which ones are easy to respond to, and which ones take a disproportionate time. Holiday parks offer a tried and tested experience to visitors, but that doesn’t mean that the parks themselves can’t be agile and forward thinking in their operations.
Select systems that are fit for purpose and specific
Start-ups and mature companies across the globe are finding novel ways to utilise technology to crack previously unsolvable problems. Whether it is an online booking website that shows the level of occupancy across holiday park or a digital lost property platform, there are lots of systems that can be implemented to save staff and customers time and money. A key consideration is always going to be cost with a lot of new emerging technologies being surprisingly cheap and easy to implement. This can vastly improve customer satisfaction and ensure their holiday park experience runs as smooth as possible.
Move away from paper based systems
Making a decision to move away from any paper-based systems is the first step towards modernising and improving processes. Not only is it the environmentally responsible thing to do, paper based systems are also notoriously difficult to track and inherently time consuming. By digitising processes, overall transparency can be enhanced as well as enabling real time updates and searches so that an enquiry can be dealt with any where in the park. Make the change to move away from the paper systems and don’t look back!
Implement and save operational time and cost, whilst improving customer experience.
Understandably operators are often resistant to change, preferring to remain with the what is tried and tested. However the ability for modern software to export data means the integrity of the previous system can be maintained. As with any new procurement effective research and planning will ensure a smooth transition. The time saving and customer service improvements will be realised almost immediately.
We hope you found this short article useful. At NotLost, we are passionate about improving the way organisations handle lost property, so if you are interested in finding out more, stayed tuned for when we launch our Holiday Parks page.