VUSSC/Content/Tourism/Customer Care/Summary of Unit 2

What do you think of the following quotation from M K Gandhi.

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so”.

Yes, it very relevant to our context.

SUMMARY

We examined the rationales for customer service excellence in tour guiding. We need to continue to improve to delight our customers because this is what they expect. As tour guides our behaviour, attitudes, actions and performance are guided by our code of ethics and also by what we promised to the customers through the customer charters

In addition to these we looked at the rationales from other key perspectives that included

• Marketing perspective;
• Stakeholder perspective;
• Survival perspective;
• Good Governance perspective;
• Legal perspective.

Adopting certain key principles, honouring the statutory requirements, practising good governance go a long way towards building trust and customer service excellence.

We trust that you are convinced that customer service excellence concerns you as a tour guide. You can make the difference! In the next Unit we’ll be looking in some detail the services we provide as a tour guide and how we can provide service excellence.