There are lots of little tactics that I’ve collected over the past year that I thought were great ways to provide a remarkable experience to guests at our future tasting room. Hospitality is king in the wine industry and any way to make a guest remember their visit to your winery in a positive way will help you develop loyalty and increase sales.
A couple of the best tips I’ve collected are simple ones: walk the guest out to their car and carry their wine for them; call and make reservations for them if they take you up on a recommendation (added benefit: you get to let the restaurant/tasting room/B&B know that your winery did the recommending). The theme is one of personalized service, of making the folks that stop by to taste and buy your wine feel special.
I’ve been looking for a way to easily apply that principal to phone communications with customers as well. A couple weeks back I ran across a new online phone service called GrandCentral. What GrandCentral does (among many other things) is allow you to customize the answering messages each incoming caller hears based on their phone number. My thought is to use this feature to record a personal message using each of our customer’s names when they call and we’re unable to answer.
For instance, if I were to call I’d hear “Hi Josh. Thanks for calling Capozzi Winery. I’m really sorry we weren’t able to get to the phone to take your call, but please leave a message and Candace or I will get right back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for calling, Josh!.”
Sure it will be a lot of work, but we have the enormous advantage of being small, and I intend to leverage that advantage every chance I get.
Its great to get personalized service in every aspect of life. Look at Nordstorm vs. Macys, Apple vs. Dell, Virgin vs. United. At GrandCentral we throught it was insane that every person who calls me gets treated the same way. The same phones ring, they hear the same ringing sound, they hear the same voicemail greeting, etc. We felt that users would want their important callers to feel important and wanted to give the users the tools to treat different callers differently. Great application of the service and good luck!
Best, Craig Walker (GrandCentral)
Craig,
Thanks for a great product and for dropping by and wishing us well. Care to share your pricing structure once GrandCentral comes out of beta?
Just found your site.
Sounds like a really great idea. I love personal touches AND great customer service.
We were just in the Russian River for our honeymoon and much enjoyed the experience….200 bottles of wine and 12 clubs later we are home.
Just a word on customer service that we noticed at a small number of the 26 vineyards we visited…don’t ignore your customer just because they appear young! We were serious about discovering new wines and had been planning our trip for ages….yet at a small number of vineyards we felt ignored and unattended to, despite being the only ones in the tasting room…I can only attribute this to the fact that we looked young, because as groups that came in after us arrived, with a slightly older appearing crowd, they were attended to immediately.
Megan,
You make a powerful point and I think everyone in the industry would do well to listen to what you have to say. I hope you don’t mind but I’m going to turn your comment into a post topic in the very near future.
My take, as a young-looking 29 year old, is that you are exactly right. I’ve been treated like a profit-sucking, free-taste-seeking barnacle more time than I care to remember. However I’ve always taken it as a challenge to force the tasting room staff to provide me with good service and earn their respect. The truth is though that most people don’t want to - nor should they have to - go through that trouble. Millennials (22-30 yr olds) are a HUGE market for wineries and to treat them like second class citizens simply because of their age is, well, it’s beyond stupid. It’s downright dangerous for your business.
You can be assured that at Capozzi, at least, we will treat everyone the same: like the honored guests that they are.
Thanks for the comment!
Josh,
I’d love to see that column! I look forward to reading it.
I agree, the age group should not be ignored. Cultivating loyalty in that market seems like a wise way to ensure that you have customers in the future, when the age group really has the capital to become serious wine purchasers. We found several wineries that we will always return to, not only because we really enjoyed the wine, but because of the people. On the other hand, despite the quality of the wine at other places, I’m not interested in spending money on their products, simply because I felt like we were not even a blip on their radar.
Hopefully your operation will be up and running by our next trip out West and we can experience it for ourselves!
Bush and the Republicans were not protecting us on 9-11, and we aren’t a lot safer now. We may be more afraid due to george bush, but are we safer? Being fearful does not necessarily make one safer. Fear can cause people to hide and cower. What do you think? Is killing thousands of innocent civilians okay when you are doing a little government makeover?
Our country is in debt until forever, we don’t have jobs, and we live in fear. We have invaded a country and been responsible for thousands of deaths.
We have lost friends and influenced no one. No wonder most of the world thinks we suck. Thanks to what george bush has done to our country during the past three years, we do!
Hello,
I am trying to reach Craig Walker. A friend of mine, Bruce Dunker gave me his name. Could you put me in touch with him?
Thank you,