With the countdown ticking towards the opening of the V&A Dundee in 2018, Michael Alexander looks at preparations already being made to ensure visitors receive the warmest of welcomes to the city.
It’s 2017 which means Dundee has just over a year to ensure that it is the most welcoming city in Scotland for the opening of the V&A.
Now a remarkable initiative is underway to train everyone likely to meet a tourist and create an impression.
With up to 500,000 visitors expected that first year and 300,000 thereafter, taxi drivers, road sweepers and parking attendants are amongst those being put through the WorldHost customer service programme to ensure they offer the best possible welcome.
Many private sector businesses are also taking part in the training, which was used for volunteers at the London 2012 Olympics and Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.
Amongst those to have already put her staff through the scheme is Claire Simpson, 41, proprietor of the family-run Tea and Cake shop on Exchange Street.
The Fife-raised mother-of-two, who studied art and design at college, pursued her lifelong love of food at the end of 2015 when she took over the business after being a stay-at-home mum for 16 years.
Claire, who has ambitions to open a hotel, believes customer service should be at the forefront of business anyway.
But with Tea and Cake just a “hop skip and jump” from the V&A – and potentially one of the first businesses that visitors could stumble upon – Claire says she wanted to “do it right and nail it”.
“When we did the training we closed the shop for the day,” explains Claire, who is assisted in the restaurant by her daughters Emma and Katie, and other staff.
“A lady came in. We went through work books, scenarios and wrote down different ways to solve situations. It was things like everyone keeping an eye on the place, making sure the floors are clean.
“If one things needing done and you are busy you get someone else to do it and just making sure that everyone is on the same page and working as a team. “Then we got assessed and got accredited. It was a win win. We were the first restaurant in Dundee to go through it.”
Claire is excited about the V&A and the wider Dundee waterfront redevelopment. However, she says the city authorities need to remember about the “little streets” off the centre.
“I think the V&A will bring a lot of tourism,” she adds.
“We already get a bit of tourist footfall coming through the door with us being near the Apex and the Holiday Inn. Some people just like to come out of the hotel and go somewhere nice. I think with the V&A there’s going to be that little bit more – and with our location it’s great. We’ve got to be ready.”
Louise Murphy, 35, and Stewart Heaton, 37, both from Dundee, gave up their respective full time jobs in HR at Dundee University and customer service with Dundee City Council to develop their Dark Dundee walking tour business.
Since they began in April last year, the pair who have been friends since Craigie High School, have guided over 1800 guests around Dundee’s dark spots – having originally launched as a Dark Dundee website, packed with historic tales.
“WorldHost was recommended to us when we decided to go full time,” explains Louise.
“Although we’d both done customer service before, we hadn’t really done welcoming visitors to the city.
“The WorldHost training was really good – not just in thinking about how we were going to tell stories about wars, battles, mass graves and disasters affecting Dundee, but how we were going to treat our customers – a lot of whom are on their first visit here.
“It really made us re-think how we were presenting ourselves and our stories. “Everything from how we start the tours to how we keep in touch with people at the end.”
Louise says a key realisation was that they were not just welcoming visitors to their tour but also welcoming them to Dundee.
The training also emphasised the importance of a successful online presence. Dark Dundee has 8,500 followers on Facebook and takes most of its bookings from recommendations via social media. Good reviews lead the way to more business.
“I think people are getting better at emphasising the positives of Dundee, ”adds Louise.
“The V&A is going to bring a lot of attention to Dundee and it’s important we are all in the right positive frame of mind when that happens – to be telling people what a great city it is.”
Ahmed Mobin, 38, from India, is one of the 160 Dundee taxi drivers to have been through the course so far. The former call centre worker has been a taxi driver for 11 of the 17 years he has lived in Dundee.
He completed the course at Dundee College in 2015 after Dundee City Council made it a requirement that all city taxi drivers should undergo customer service training as a condition of having their licences renewed. By May, it’s expected 700 taxi drivers will have been trained.
Brimming with enthusiasm and conscious that taxi drivers are often the first and last contact that visitors have with the city, Ahmed says he and his fellow drivers are undoubtedly “ambassadors” for the city who need to create a great impression.
“Nobody likes a grumpy taxi driver!” he laughs.
“If somebody is going to come up to Dundee by plane, train or bus we have to be very nice and welcoming to give a good impression of the city and make visitors feel at home.
“I find when people do come to Dundee they are often here for the first time.
“I have also found there are very few people in the UK who know about Dundee.”
Ahmed says he gets most job satisfaction from interacting with his customers – and visitors are often surprised at what Dundee has to offer.
“When I tell them about the history, when I tell them that the highest number of millionaires per square mile outside of London used to live in Broughty Ferry, they are very surprised,” he explains.
“I tell them about the jute mills, about the Irish settlers, about Sir Winston Churchill being MP for Dundee.”
Ahmed is also “very excited” about the V&A and wider waterfront development and is confident that once complete there will be positive spin-offs for businesses like his own.
“It’s great there are buildings actually rising up now because we have something to help visitors understand what is going on. Before we just had posters to point at,” he says.
The importance of a warm welcome is certainly backed by statistics. A You Gov poll in June showed that 82% of Scottish adults consider a warm, genuine, friendly welcome to be an example of good customer service.
The survey also revealed that 72% of women would tell family, friends and colleagues if they received good customer service, while almost half of all those questioned said that they would post a negative comment on social media or on review website like Trip Adviser if they felt they had experienced poor service.
West Lothian-based David Allen, 41, regional director for Scotland, People 1st, which organises the WorldHost training, says Dundee City Council deserve particular praise for “championing” the programme.
He says customer service standards within the tourism industry in Scotland traditionally tend to be fragmented – and that needed to change.
“The WorldHost initiative isn’t about coming in, wagging a big stick at businesses and saying you are doing a really bad job,” he says.
“It’s not that at all. As in any walk of life, there are businesses that do exceptionally well and businesses that don’t do it as well. Really this initiative is about pulling together all the businesses within that broader definition of tourism and getting them all to come up to a minimum standard where we can then build on a quality offering.
“When you look at what’s sitting in the background in terms of redevelopment of Dundee, I don’t think there’s been anything as transformational, as exciting from a tourism perspective as what’s happening in Dundee at the moment. It was a perfect synergy to get Dundee involved.
“Dundee City Council is leading the charge across all 32 local authorities in Scotland. It shows a lot of commitment on their part. They should be highly commended not just for saying it’s a good initiative but actually going on and doing it.”
