New operators give service image a facelift

By Lesley Springall

A year after splitting from the Tourism Board, KiwiHost is getting tough on customer service standards in an attempt to return quality to its brand.

"When we took it over, we found there was no control and no auditing of [KiwiHost] businesses and we were receiving some pretty horrific complaints about bad service," says Brian Batie, one of KiwiHost's two new owners. "A lot of businesses who had trained only a couple of their staff back in 92 through the original KiwiHost training programme were still featuring the old logo, so we felt we had no control over the brand we now owned."

New Zealand still has a problem in customer service standards, even though the Tourism Board did a lot to raise awareness to its importance while it ran KiwiHost, Mr Batie says.

"It's not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination, but when you have two businesses that offer the same products, the only real competitive edge people have is how good their staff are."

Since taking over, Mr Batie says the company has invested "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in reinventing itself, based on detailed research to discover what the market wanted.

"Getting the product right was our first priority. Over the years the Tourism Board put through a large number of people, but they virtually only ran one essential service skills training programme."

Mr Batie says companies who had used the programme said training was not customised to their businesses and ignored new developments and innovations. "We've now introduced a whole range of new training programmes that are more orientated to the needs of the market and today's world."

The Tourism Board established KiwiHost in 1991 because of concerns about service standards in the tourism industry. But it was sold last year. "It became increasingly obvious that a large part of the market for service training was not in tourism," says Peter Winder, the board's industry strategy manager.

Previously marketing director of car rental firm Hertz, Mr Batie is responsible for marketing KiwiHost while his partner, John Wren, who owned training company MST, develops the training programmes.

Listing clients such as Middlemore Hospital, NZ Customs at Auckland Airport, Farmers Deka and Ministry of Agriculture Border Control, Mr Batie says only 30 per cent of sales now come from the tourism industry. Since the end of last year, when the new training programmes were introduced, KiwiHost has trained staff from around 70 companies, averaging about 1500 to 2000 people a month and is expecting 17,000 people to be trained by the end of the year.

The new look of the company was finally launched last month. "We're going out there with a different type of logo, called a brand partner logo which has new benefits, but we're going to control it."

As part of its policing policy, users of the new logo will need to have most of their staff trained every two years, undergo annual service quality audits and be subjected to "mystery shopper" checks (something Mr Batie says he used regularly at Hertz) to ensure service levels are maintained.

Previous KiwiHost branded businesses are being asked not to use the old logo, but Mr Batie sees the conversion taking another a year. "We're not going to rush it and throw bricks through windows or anything, it's going to have to be done diplomatically. They will all have the opportunity to become brand businesses, but in the end it's our brand and we have to make sure standards are good."

With the Tourism Board saying any marketing of the brand is now down to the company, Mr Batie plans to invest $250,000 in print advertising this year. "We've poured a lot of money into new programme development and we're starting to put more into marketing. The business really needed that capital injection to change the perception out there that KiwiHost was old-hat."

Lesley O'Hara, marketing manager of Tourism Auckland, says other countries also run "host" programmes, such as Canada and Australia, giving KiwiHost has an advantage in marketing terms. "I think it's something that people understand. A commitment to service and quality is very important."

Mr Batie expects the company will make a profit by the end of this year and hopes to have recouped costs in two to three years. "Like every country even our tourism market will live or fall on good customer service."