Five ways to optimise customer service in the leisure industry

While more traditional contact channels such as email and telephone are still used, consumer preferences are shifting, with many switching to more efficient means, such as fast messaging apps, while also expecting businesses to be more accessible than ever.  

Finding it challenging to keep up, many organisations in the leisure industry are keen to invest in a better mobile visitor experience to give customers what they want. Most, however, don't know where to begin.  

Thankfully, there are several ways your business can enhance its level of customer service, whatever the kind of event you are involved in.  

Five tips for customer service in leisure 

Here are five common customer service problems the leisure industry needs to solve and how CM.com’s technology can help organisers do just that. 

1. Efficiently deal with repetitive queries  

Many customer service teams struggle to manage the increasing volume of customer questions or requests they receive daily. Is this you? Don’t worry; you’re not alone.  

The majority of support teams find it difficult to sustain quality service, especially since customer expectations of excellent service are rising. However, it’s exceptionally common that many of these requests involve identical queries that have been dealt with before time and time again. The solution? Faster, more effective service - which will lead to higher sales – with an integrated customer service solution.  

By integrating all customer service activities in one solution, such as CM.com’s Mobile Service Cloud, you can more efficiently manage your customer service tasks and requests. Since everything is overseen in one place, communicating from one inbox, your business can benefit from increased productivity as there’ll be more time available to invest in other operations.  

For example, you can easily tell visitors how to get to a venue or where best to park before heading to an event, offer help finding the toilets during the event and deal with queries post-event, such as requests to help find lost items. You can even send additional content to customers after the event so that they can re-live the experience. This allows visitors to better prepare before their arrival while leaving them feeling like they’ve been looked after from start to finish.

And with the leisure industry being such an enormous space, where customers have endless options when it comes to when, where, and on what they can spend their money, offering the best experience to a customer can be one surefire way to differentiate yourself in a competitive market. 

2. Transform from a cost centre to a profit centre 

Customer service for companies in the leisure industry is usually a department that does not generate revenue. Still, it is important to ensure customers are retained and want to come back for more. However, ensuring this service is top-notch can be a big task to fulfill, requiring a lot of a business’s resources. So why not make customer service into its own profit centre? How? By upselling! 

The tools within Mobile Service Cloud can be used to provide upsell opportunities. For instance, if a visitor to a festival asks a question on the organiser’s WhatsApp channel, such as “where can I park?” an automated chatbot can provide the answer while being intelligent enough to preempt what else they might need during their visit and offer different options to purchase relevant extras.  

Depending on the rules set, the virtual assistant could ask something like: “Do you already have a parking ticket? If not, buy it here!” 

This smart automation works through CM.com’s Conversational AI Cloud solution, which allows you to create an intelligent, personalised conversational bot without a single line of code. You can build it yourself and then implement it on the channel of your choice, be it Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. By designing personalised conversations based on common Q&As and dialogues, you can offer the best experience for your customers.  

3. Break down company siloes  

Did you know that combining departments can generate more opportunities to deal with customer interactions or upsell? Taking a multifaceted approach to customer service so that the different teams within your organisation can work better together, can offer a better experience to customers. 

This is how they can all work together: Integrated with your own customer data platform and thus linked up with all other departments across your business, when a customer asks a question through one of your automated services, a chatbot or live chat representative will know immediately who they are talking to and have all their data displayed in front of them, such as secured subscriptions, annual passes, and previous purchases. This will allow them to respond more easily to the question at hand, ensuring they’re offered a better, more personalised service.  

With marketing and customer service departments working together, it allows you to proactively send emails, messages, and answer any questions effectively as well as predict needs. An especially great tactic in this 24/7 economy, where people have become accustomed to receiving relevant responses almost instantly. 

Want to learn more about how marketing and customer service can work better together? Read our blog about the benefits of an integrated marketing and service solution.  

4. Get to know your customers 

If you’re not entirely sure how to properly target your customers, the key is getting to know who they really are. For example, if you’re a venue sending marketing emails about a pop concert to customers who visited you for a rock concert just last month, it’s going to appear like you don’t know their preferences because you don’t care, or you just want sales. 

By offering a personalised customer experience that shows you know them, they’ll not only see you in a more positive light but will be more inclined to buy the tickets from you if it’s an event that interests them. 

5. Stay in touch for the long run  

Many companies within the leisure industry struggle to retain long-term relationships with their customer base, which can impact sales. It’s no secret that repeat customers are key to business success and growth. For one, staying in business with a customer for a long time is far more profitable than putting in the energy required to attract completely new guests or visitors.  

One way to keep a hold of your customers for the long run is by ensuring all touchpoints are covered. This can be through offering them the ability to ask questions on communication platforms before, during, and after the customer’s visit, not just during the event. On top of this, if they’re not getting the answers they need from the automated service, they can opt to speak to a real-life human, which they will be transferred to automatically. A seamless customer experience all-round. 

How CM.com can help you 

By undertaking the digital transformation Mobile Service Cloud brings, your company can appear available at all times while offering great communication.

By centralising data and linking everything to one system with a clear overview, Mobile Service Cloud can help your customer service teams work more efficiently and become more productive. With one overview, it allows different people from the support department to handle questions faster and easier.

By bringing all your communication together in one place, Mobile Service Cloud allows you to interact with your customers through their preferred channel via one Agent Inbox or automate your conversations with a chatbot. The result? A five-star service.