We reach a milestone for Bournemouth Ambassadors

This month, we passed the thousand milestone for the number of people who have undertaken the NCTA’s Bournemouth Ambassador online training.

That’s over one thousand visitor-facing staff from all kinds of industries, who have voluntarily signed up to provide a warm welcome to visitors to Bournemouth. It’s a goose-bump moment.

www.bournemouthambassasdor.co.uk was created to satisfy the need of Bournemouth businesses to create a standard of product knowledge and customer service across the town. It is the first stage in our ‘blended learning’ offering. It is the introduction to the ‘warm welcome’ we are striving to offer our visitors. It is an accreditation for any CV. And you get a certificate.

"Desi Koleva, a hospitality student at Bournemouth University and conference and events assistant at The Highcliff Marriott Hotel, has become the 1,000th official Bournemouth Ambassador!"

Bournemouth Ambassador takes under an hour to complete. The pilot ran from June until October - when we had approximately 500 users through the scheme. We then asked our Ambassadors what they thought. From the feedback, we are currently redeveloping the system to improve its accessibility and to make it more interactive and therefore enjoyable to complete. The new system in its basic form goes live in April 2014.

The new system is a ‘Learning Management System’. This will give us more insight into course usage, pass rates, profiles etc. The new system will encourage users to share the courses and improve communication between users and those creating the content for the courses.

Bournemouth Ambassador is modular, meaning that we can add in more ‘product knowledge’ topics and courses, plus include any industry toolkits and helpsheets as and when required. Users will be contacted each time there is a new section uploaded. The opportunities for courses, lessons and topics are endless.

It’s exciting stuff, and I’m looking forward to our launch in April.

By Natalie Tye