Our mission at Heavenly is to provide each and every guest with their “Experience of a Lifetime”.
In the case of Ski & Ride School we do this primarily through the activity of teaching people how to ski or ride. We are in the fortunate position of having more face to face time with our guests than any other department at Heavenly. At the end of the day people are hardwired to remember faces and they will remember you, their coach, long after they have forgotten what the snow was like or what they ate on any given day. You have the power to make their day and provide them with their own “experience of a lifetime”.
We encourage all our staff to “own it, personalize it, and elevate it” when dealing with our guests. You should own the guest experience, put your own personal stamp on it and then make it the best it possibly can be.
Guest Experience
One of our primary measures of guest service success is the net promoter score, commonly called NPS. We’ll be updating the scores throughout the season so you can see how SRS as a whole is doing, as well as each location.
Keep an eye out for updates once the snow starts flying!
Why Guest Service Is So Important
The importance of guest service has become more and more apparent in recent years as can be seen with the popularity of season passes and the massive increase in the number of season passes sold. People are not simply turning up, they want and expect much more, if they do not get it they do not return and they go elsewhere.
Ski and Ride School has to deal with improvements in technology which make our sport easier and easier to learn and practice at a high level. Improvements in snowmaking and grooming mean that our guests almost always have the opportunity to ski or ride on the equivalent of packed powder. Lifts have become faster in the case of detachable chairs and easier to use in the case of magic carpets. And of course equipment is becoming easier to use and more versatile, the latest innovations being early rise and rocker technology. These developments are great for the sport making it more accessible to more people than ever before.
The challenge, given the recent technological advances, is how to engage guests so that they stay with us. All the innovations described above mean that guests can now ski or ride with less than perfect technique. They need no more than one or two lessons to access the vast majority of the mountain. It no longer takes a week to learn a parallel turn, guests can be wedging on a magic carpet and controlling their decent within a half hour of putting equipment on and can be skiing a blue run by the end of their second day with us. If we rely on our old skills of emphasizing progressions and perfect technique we will lose these people very quickly. Guests can have a great time with less than perfect technique.