_August/motivatingfactors.png "Motivating Factors")
Years ago, cozy familiarity between customers and an outside-services worker may not have flown. But a growing number of golf facility operators are spotlighting and empowering their service staff more prominently, making customer-facing workers of all ranks part of the marketing effort.
Whitetail Golf Resort in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, has adopted it readily. The resort’s director of golf, Rich Hogan, Jr., says it’s “important to get our staff known and very visible.” On property, team members wear badges bearing their names and titles. Hogan also trains the staff to identify each other by name when a customer is going from one department or area to another in need of service or information.
Dave Cousart, golf director at the University of Georgia Golf Course in Athens, considers it vital to put front-line workers in the limelight. Along with generously identifying support workers, the university course empowers them. An entry-level person can refund green fees or provide other solutions to customer displeasure, in the appropriate circumstances.
Managers who favor this strategy suggest the following:
Use On-Property Signage, the course Web site and name badges to identify all service staff members.
Include Background information and a few personal facts or quotes in a Web site page dubbed “Our Staff.”
Identify Staffers with specials skills such as CPR training, fluency in Spanish and the like.
Replace Any Departing Staff member who possesses superb interpersonal skills or style with someone who has those same traits.
Underlying this staff-as-stars approach is your customers’ enduring envy toward someone who gets to work at a golf course. “We’re still viewed as people who have great, fun jobs, and in order to get chosen for them, maybe we’re a little bit special,” Cousart says. “Part of satisfying the customer is just making that assumption come true.”
—David Gould