Visit Isle of Wight is offering local businesses and their employees the chance to add to their customer service skills in a bid to ensure the Island is the most welcoming visitor destination in the UK.
The bespoke Welcome to Excellence Customer Service training is offering 500 places free of charge, with the aim of providing extra support for Isle of Wight businesses to welcome visitors.
The half-day course will provide delegates the tools to offer the best customer service and help deal with difficult situations as well as local knowledge to pass on to visitors.
Visit Isle of Wight is encouraging tourism and customer facing businesses to sign up to the free training course as part of a drive to help businesses in all aspects of the visitor economy.
This sector is worth approximately half a billion pounds to the Island each year.
The Isle of Wight has a history of providing a warm welcoming as highlighted by the Visit Britain/Mirror top award for UK Tourism Superstar in 2018 and 2020 for Red Funnel’s Jim O’Reilly and Hovertravel’s Lorry Middleton.
Lorry Middleton — Visit Britain winner of UK Tourism Superstar 2020.
The three-and-a-half hour course aims to develop proactive communication skills, recognise different customer expectations and how to meet them.
It will also focus on encouraging confidence in effectively tackling difficult situations and looking at the importance of teamwork in a customer-facing environment.
Jim O'Reilly Visit Britain winner of UK Tourism Superstar 2018 copy
Will Myles, MD at Visit Isle of Wight, explains:
"This course is aimed at businesses which want to give their staff and colleagues an extra boost in a variety of skills which will benefit them – and the Isle of Wight.
"The Island is famous for its warm welcome and this course will back that up, providing team members with the tools to make sure they are more confident in their work.
"In a normal year the Isle of Wight welcomes 2.6 million visitors, they spend upwards of £330 million here, that excludes the ferry part of their travel.
"Visitors are the life-blood of our economy and it is always great to welcome them here."
Attendees will have the option to book on one of 16 half-day courses over 8 dates during February and March in the new Isle of Wight Council facility in Cowes, Building 41
You can secure your place on the course by visiting the Eventbrite page.
The first course dates are on Friday February 10 and they run until Friday March 31, with two half-day courses on each date.
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