Tutorial for Hosts

Our Mission:

As the wine market activity leader in Colorado, we connect wine enthusiasts, guests celebrating any special occasion, and corporate clients with personable wine experts and the best wine experiences in the area. Our friendly, knowledgeable, and professional team aims to create the perfect wine activity experience for wine activity hosts and guests.

Our Objectives:

• Develop long-term relationships with our guests, hosts, and partners.
• Consistently exceed expectations from both guests and hosts helping you as a host to create a first-rate wine activity and service delivery.
• Work with honesty, transparency and integrity at all times.
• Continuously advance our best practices and charitable contribution to maximize environmental, social and economic development.
• Seek excellence in everything we do, and provide.
• Provide our hosts with a creative and rewarding entrepreneurial opportunity that inspires success and empowerment.

Who are we?

Vinera Hub is Colorado’s premier wine activity marketplace. We help guests discover Colorado’s burgeoning wine industry through unique wine tasting adventures.

Share your wine knowledge and give guests an unforgettable palate experience. 

What do we do?

Connecting wine tasting activities and wine experts to guests is not only our core business: it’s also our passion. We go to great lengths to cultivate strong relationships with the best hosts, wineries, hotels, tour guides, and restaurants in Colorado. This allows us to provide guests with a wide variety of the best possible wine tasting activities. 

What is great customer service?

Great customer service means following best practices like valuing guests’ time, communicating promptly and consistently with guests, having a pleasant attitude, and providing fun unique access to wine experience to guests. It also means not just meeting, but exceeding your guests’ expectations.

How can you provide great customer service?

1. Know your product and service
   
   

You need to be an expert in your wine activity to be a great host because let’s be honest, you cannot “sell” something you don’t know. 

Expansive knowledge of your service is an essential customer service skill. Ideally, you should believe and be passionate about your wine activity, be able to infuse your activity with that enthusiasm, and your own “unique sauce”.

Your job is to help guests see that your wine activities are priceless. Make it your goal to constantly improve your wine activities so you can amaze your guests with personal and unexpected touches.    

2. Maintain a positive attitude
   
   

Attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service.

“The right attitude changes negative customer experiences into positive customer experiences,” says Flavio Martins, VP of Operations and Customer Service at DigiCert, Inc. Since most customer interactions are not face-to-face, your attitude should be reflected in your language and tone of voice.

It’s easy to misinterpret the tone of written communication, and email or live chat can come across as cold. The clients will read their email on their tone and emotion so even if you meant no harm, it could easily be interpreted otherwise. 

Don’t be afraid to use emojis to convey warmth and good humor, or pick up the phone if you find an email or chat conversation getting tense. In connecting with guests and providing excellent customer service over-communicating is good. Always keep your clients in the loop even if they don’t ask for it, they will appreciate it.

3. Creatively problem-solve
   
   

Over 80% of customers have churned because they experienced bad customer service. That’s why you must thrive on solving problems for your customers and make it a central part of your support role – and there will always be problems to solve. The best way to do this, again, is to over-communicate. Most problems actually arise from miscommunication or lack of communication between guests and hosts, or hosts and their partners. 

Don’t be afraid to wow your customers as you seek to problem-solve for them. You could just fix the issue and be on your way, but by creatively meeting their needs in ways that go above and beyond, you’ll create customers that are committed to you and your product.

4. Respond quickly
   
   

66% of people believe that valuing their time is the most important thing in any online customer experience. Resolving customer queries as quickly as possible is a cornerstone of good customer service. Speed should be of the essence — especially for smaller issues that don’t take much time to solve.

That being said — great customer service beats speed every time.

Customers understand that more complex queries take time to resolve. There’s a difference between the time it takes you to respond and the speed at which you resolve their problems. Customers don’t want to languish in a ticket queue, but they’ll spend as much time as it takes to resolve their issue. You should, too.

Get back to your customers as quickly as possible, but don’t be in a rush to get them off the phone or close the ticket without resolving the issue completely. A solution to solving more complex issues is to simply respond as quickly as possible letting them know that you are working on the issue or working on coordinating their wine activity etc. As long as you keep them in the loop quickly and consistently they’ll appreciate as opposed to having to reach out for updates.

5. Personalize your service

40% of customers say they want better human service. That means they want to feel like more than just a ticket number. They get angry when they’re not being treated like an individual person, receiving boilerplate responses, or being batted like a tennis ball to different people.

We always ask if they are looking for something different in terms of experience, budget, or times because we know that everyone has different needs and wants. 

6. Follow through, under-promise and over-deliver
   
   

The best recipe for an above 5 star review is to always have a special surprise or “extra” part of your activity that feels personalized. For example, if you see that a couple is celebrating an anniversary you could bring flowers on behalf of the boyfriend or husband, if it’s a birthday event you could provide a complimentary dessert, or for a corporate event you could do a wine bottle give away for the group. Get creative! If you don’t mention this and just surprise them, that will leave a very lasting impression!

Part of providing excellent customer service and improving it over time is to keep getting feedback after your wine activities. An automatic follow-up email will be sent to guests and hosts to hear each other’s feedback. You may also message them to submit a review or gain any additional feedback after the wine activity, thanking them for you to arrange the wine activity for them. 

This is also a great opportunity for you to remedy anything in case something unfortunate occurred. A satisfied customer is more powerful than a paid advertisement. Always remember that positive word of mouth brings in more customers to you through referrals and ranking up with 5-star reviews, after all positive word of mouth is FREE!. 

Types of Groups you may encounter

Private Wine Tours

• Corporate Tours/Events

-A company is arranging a wine tour or event for their team or clients. These are typically big groups but could also be small (even just 2!), depending on their purpose or needs.

More information about our corporate event and experience booklet that Mile High Wine Tours offers, here. 

• Bachelorette Wine Tasting Event

-The last fling before the ring! As the name suggests, this is an event typically attended by women close to the bride-to-be which is a way of celebrating and honoring her life as a single person. They tend to prefer a more casual high-energy yet upscale wine tasting experience. A nice surprise for the bride-to-be is always appreciated and more tasting, less education is generally a good rule of thumb for these groups.

• Birthday Celebrations

-This is one of the most common group types for wine tours and activities.

Group Tours (Non-Private Wine Tours)

-Scheduled tours that can be booked by anyone. Typically these groups are smaller ones that may be wine enthusiasts, a couple celebrating something, travelers or friends just looking for something to do in the city. Typically they appreciate wine information and unique / interactive tours or activities.