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Hospitality industry tasked to place premium on customer care

Operators in the hospitality industry have been urged to place premium on customer care to enhance the tourism sector.

According to the Technical Advisor at Ghana Tourism Development Company (GTDC), Professor Gabriel Eshun, quality customer care service would help improve the tourism industry and make it the number one contributor to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Prof. Eshun was speaking at a customer service training workshop organised by GTDC under the auspices of Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture for stakeholders in the tourism value chain in Accra yesterday.

The training aimed to build the capacity of operators in the tourism value chain to improve on service delivery.

Prof. Eshun said it was imperative for businesses, especially those in the tourism industry to invest in customer service to ensure customer satisfaction.

He emphasised the need for a change in attitude as far as customer service was concerned, in order to improve Ghana’s corporate image of wooing more tourists.

“In as much as we are looking at globalisation and international best practices, we should also look at the issue of localisation. Having that local content in the tourism service. Ghanaians have that Akwaaba spirit and our sense of hospitality must be repackaged to give us that unique standing even in the international standard,” he added.

The Chief Executive Officer of the GTDC, Mr Kwadwo Antwi, said inspectors ought to be equipped enough to ensure that tourism establishments and facilities lived up to standards.

He expressed optimism that operators would tap the potential of the tourism industry to improve their businesses to meet the changing business trends in the sector.

A consultant and a member of United Kingdom Advisory Board, Ms Linda Wayoe, said customer care service were often times underestimated by many which could go a long way to impact many businesses either positively or negatively.

“When someone has a good experience of a service from your business, they may or may not talk about it but  when someone experiences a bad service, he/she will make sure a lot of people get to know about it. Word of mouth should therefore not be underestimated in any business now that there is a more powerful tool out there which is the social media that can reach over one million people within a click,” she added.

She, therefore, urged that customer service must be paramount for business owners in the tourism industry to ensure quality service beyond the face-to- face customer care since the country was working to achieve one million tourists every year.

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