By L.K. Hewlett
St. Kitts Reporter
The Freemangroup, a company that conducted a Tourism Awareness Programme which assessed the standard of service in some of the island’s service oriented businesses and organisations, report that St. Kitts has scored high in that area.
The group set up ‘mystery shoppers’ to go to places that would see their employees interacting with visitors in some way.
The police, immigration, airline agencies, port authority sports, restaurants, stores, post office, car rental agencies, Tourism Authority were among the organisations visited by the mystery shoppers. They even interacted with the general public and police officers.
Evaluations were carried out to assess the visitor’s experience from arrival until departure, and also to implement a comprehensive and flexible measurement service standard system.
Kedric Malone of the Fremangroup explained the purpose of the mystery shoppers and how they conducted their evaluation.
“There were three American couples who acted like husband and wife who spent four days in St. Kitts. They pretended to be a couple that had come to the island on vacation. They visited about twenty different areas from immigration when they came in to taxis, airline agencies, ferry services activities providers etcetera.
The interacted with persons, they bought items and such. These persons are trained and certified so they know how to get the data without people catching on to what they were doing. None of the people visited knew who they were or what they were actually doing so we got a good idea as to what kind of service was being offered on island,” Malone said.
Damon Smith, Freemangroup’s Executive Director of Caribbean Operations told The Observer that the data collected from the mystery shoppers would be incorporated into an upcoming workshop.
“The workshop will be launched here in June or July, after it has been customised. The reason it takes some time between collecting the data and conducting the workshop is that the programme is customised to individual countries. This allows the participants to receive training in the areas that the country scored lowest on in the evaluation. We take a lot of time to make sure that culture and history are put into the module that will allow someone who works in the service industry to deliver a higher level of service to visitors,’ he said.
Malone said that as St. Kitts made the transition into the service-based industry, the people had to ensure that the highest quality of service was given since visitors was used to getting it in other destinations. He noted that with so many countries offering very similar tourism products, St. Kitts had to set itself apart by offering top-notch service and hospitality.
Malone was pleased to say that Kittitians had the natural charm and friendliness necessary for the tourism industry, however there were some areas that needed ‘fine tuning’.
