What do your customers want from you?
I imagine the first thing that many winery people say is “Good wine” and they would be right. However good wine is not the same for all people and (amazingly enough some of your guests may think that your wine is not to their taste. It happens occasionally, though hopefully not often.
This is why, if you can’t wow them with the wine, you should be able to wow them with your Winery (look and feel) and with interaction with the tasting room people. Even if the wine is, perhaps not to your guests’ taste, they will still have good things to say about your winery and will recommend others to visit.
Greet every customer as soon as you can. If you have a tasting room full of people, make the effort to smile at new customers as they walk in. They can see that you are busy but will appreciate the gesture that shows them that they have been seen.
If it is exceptionally busy, with people coming through the door one after another, organize them into groups and offer a tasting to two or three couples at the same time. Having more than six people to serve can make it more difficult to answer all the questions and to interact personally with each guest.
Introduce yourself and ask your customers to introduce themselves to each other and to you.
Then ask a couple of questions to be answered by all such as:
- Is this your first visit to our winery?
- Have you tasted our wines before?
If your guests are familiar with your wines, ask them which of your wines are their favorite.
You might want to ask regular customers in the group, what brings them back.
Make creating a plan part of your next TR staff meeting and in later meetings ask what is working and what is not.
A tip of the glass from me to you!