Club wins Customer Service Excellence Award for fourth year in a row

22 January 2010

For the fourth consecutive year, The Hong Kong Jockey Club has been honoured in the Customer Service Excellence Award 2009 organised by the Hong Kong Association for Customer Service Excellence (HKACE).  This year the Club gained a bronze individual award in the internal support service category and its first gold team award in the counter service category.

The Club's Head of Betting Services (Cashbet), Peter Tsang said he was delighted to win the Association's accolades again this year as they recognised the quality customer service that the Club had achieved.  But he emphasised the purpose of entry was not for the awards.  "We want to take this opportunity to learn best practice from service partners so as to help us attain new heights of excellence," Tsang said.

The gold team award for counter service went to Champion Circle, a popular raceday venue at Sha Tin Racecourse.  This public race-viewing lounge offers sweeping views across the track, a spacious and stylish environment, advanced facilities and convenient services, ensuring its patrons a top-class raceday experience.  Since its opening in 2006, Champion Circle has received overwhelming customer response.

As well as investing in major upgrades of its racecourse facilities in recent years, the Club makes continuous efforts to provide its customers with more convenient and efficient betting services.  It has recently completed an upgrade of the betting terminals at all its Off-Course Betting Branches (OCBBs), replacing them with the advanced Next Generation Betting Terminals (NGBTs).

The NGBT implementation project affected customers of the OCBBs as well as some 4,000 Club operating staff, all of whose concerns and responses needed to be fully addressed.  Its successful roll-out earned Ivan Lee Man-wai, a core project team member, the HKACE bronze individual award for internal support.

The Club believes excellent customer service should be driven and delivered proactively by employees while management sets the direction of the business, provides necessary resources and advocates proper values, as well as offering tailor-made staff training programmes.

The Club's upgrading of its facilities at racecourses and OCBBs is aimed at taking customers' experience to a new level.  "We hope our customers will not just look on racecourses and other outlets as betting venues, but as places for leisure and social gathering," Tsang explained.  "We believe our efforts are paying off, as surveys indicate the satisfaction level of our customers is steadily growing, and awards such as these endorse that."

The Customer Service Excellence Award is organised by the Hong Kong Association for Customer Service Excellence (HKACE), which is this year celebrating its 10th anniversary.  The awards aim to recognise outstanding customer service provided by companies and service staff, in order to further foster an excellent customer service culture in Hong Kong.