EASTERN Cape Tourism and Visit Cradock have been running a series of workshops on tourism and customer service.
The training was originally intended to assist service station petrol attendants as the front-line first contact with visitors to Cradock but it soon became obvious that the training was relevant to anyone who deals with tourists and visitors, and people from various businesses in Cradock whose key focus is customer service, joined in.
The cost of the training was covered by Visit Cradock and facilitated by Carl Hendricks from Sticks & Stones.
The workshops started at 10:00 and ended at 13:30 and included a short tour of all the main tourist attractions in Cradock followed by the actual customer service training held in a number of eatery venues around town.
The second workshop was very special as the attendees were taken on a trip to The Mountain Zebra National Park, as part of SANParks week which offered free entry to all South African parks.
These workshops proved to be extremely successful and a great opportunity to sharpen up on the customer service skills of front line employees while providing them with a truly special Cradock experience.
As a follow up to the success of this workshop series, additional workshops are being developed specifically crafted for small businesses with a special focus on customer service, effective communication and managing conflict in the workplace.
The idea is to keep groups small with no more than six attendees at a time.
The focus is on affordability and time effectiveness as most small businesses cannot afford to have employees away from the workplace for long periods of time.
Workshop sessions always include a mix of attendees from various businesses and an outing to an interesting or important place in and around Cradock.
There was an amazing response to these workshops from attendees and they even got two broadcast slots on Vukani FM, a community radio station.