In what is be­ing hailed as one of the most sig­nif­i­cant and far-reach­ing de­vel­op­ments for To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor in years, hun­dreds of in­dus­try stake­hold­ers com­plet­ed an in­ten­sive cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing pro­gramme.

The Tourism In­dus­try Cus­tomer Train­ing Pro­gramme was or­ga­nized and fund­ed by the To­ba­go Tourism Agency Lim­it­ed (TTAL). The train­ing was con­duct­ed by in­ter­na­tion­al­ly renowned cus­tomer ser­vice ex­perts, Up­lift­ing Ser­vice.

It was the first time this type of in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­claimed cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing was of­fered, free of charge to any­one work­ing in the is­land’s tourism sec­tor. The TTAL be­lieves the ben­e­fits of the train­ing will have a rip­ple ef­fect in the sec­tor giv­en the en­thu­si­as­tic re­sponse by par­tic­i­pants. Al­most thir­ty-six hun­dred train­ing ses­sions were held, and as of Sep­tem­ber 30th, 1,598 par­tic­i­pants were trained.

There are five mod­ules in the course - Six Lev­els of Ser­vice, Four Cat­e­gories of Val­ue, Bounce with Ser­vice Re­cov­ery, Your Per­cep­tions Points and Take Per­son­al Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. Thus far, a to­tal of 3,636 cer­tifi­cates have been is­sued per in­di­vid­ual per mod­ule.

Cus­tomer ser­vice has been tar­get­ed as the cor­ner­stone for over­haul­ing To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor, which has faced ma­jor set­backs due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and con­tin­ued fierce com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er well-es­tab­lished Caribbean des­ti­na­tions. Through its re­search the TTAL found cus­tomer ser­vice was high­light­ed for im­prove­ment by vis­i­tors. The Agency is us­ing this in­for­ma­tion to push new stan­dards for cus­tomer ser­vice in tourism in To­ba­go and bring the sec­tor on par with its re­gion­al ri­vals. The TTAL adopt­ed “To­ba­go, Above and Be­yond” as its mot­to and guid­ing prin­ci­ple for the re­ju­ve­na­tion of tourism.

The TTAL set about to show tourism work­ers not just how they can per­son­al­ly ben­e­fit from adopt­ing in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tices in tourism cus­tomer ser­vice, but how every one of their in­ter­ac­tions with tourists can shape the fu­ture of the is­land, giv­en that To­ba­go’s eco­nom­ic growth and the is­land’s de­vel­op­ment are bound to the rev­enue tourism gen­er­ates. To help To­ba­go achieve this and the pres­ti­gious sta­tus en­joyed by oth­er tourism-dri­ven economies, the TTAL is dri­ving the es­tab­lish­ment of over­all tourism in­dus­try stan­dards. This ini­tia­tive aims to​ cre­ate com­mu­ni­ties and net­works which are fo­cused on soft skills and val­ue gen­er­a­tion and al­so de­vel­op a com­mon ser­vice lan­guage, shared prac­tices and aligned sup­port­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to make a ser­vice cul­ture more at­trac­tive, ef­fec­tive and up­lift­ing​.

TTAL’s Ex­ec­u­tive Chair­man, Ali­cia Ed­wards, says the Agency was en­cour­aged by the re­sponse to the train­ing which ex­posed To­bag­o­ni­ans, through Up­lift­ing Ser­vice’s teach­ings, to in­dus­try re­sources re­served for the biggest com­pa­nies in the world such as Mi­crosoft and John­son and John­son. Ms. Ed­wards said, “I am tru­ly proud of the com­mit­ment of our par­tic­i­pants. They are go­ing back to their jobs em­pow­ered with knowl­edge on how to iden­ti­fy key cat­e­gories where they can in­crease their ser­vice val­ue through the prod­uct and ser­vices they of­fer, de­liv­ery sys­tems, ser­vice mind­set and on­go­ing re­la­tion­ships.”