Case study - Welcoming locals as well as visitors

Chesterfield Tourist Information Centre

“The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the customer and deserves the best possible service,” says Alyson Barnes, Tourism Services Officer at Chesterfield Borough Council.

And its excellent customer service led to Chesterfield Tourist Information Centre winning the Gold England for Excellence Award in 2009 for the second time.

All eight staff who work in the centre attend as many customer care courses as they can, funded by East Midlands Tourism. “We’re ambassadors for the area,” says Alyson – though 60% of their annual 170,000 visitors are local residents.

Perhaps that’s why they occasionally get queries about what the weather is like in Mexico in July, among the more usual requests for information about bus and coach timetables.

One example of the lengths Alyson and her staff will go to is when a member of the public sent them photos from a film they had found on the street in Oxford and had developed. The snaps included a picture of the Chatsworth Guesthouse, which they thought would be near Chatsworth.  In fact, the guesthouse was on Jersey, but staff still managed to track down the photographer and return their photos!

So what’s the secret to Chesterfield’s excellent customer service? “The challenge is to keep up the standard,” says Alyson. “Every year we write a new improvement plan, based on the feedback from mystery shoppers on where we need to improve. We can’t rest on our laurels – we have to keep striving to improve and meet customers’ expectations.”