About Gold Star Consulting
To help businesses grow through service. It doesn’t matter your industry, if you have a guest, a customer or a client. Service is an integral part to a business, but often time is forgotten. You work hard to get customers, but then what? How are your customers treated once you sell them on your product or service? Companies and business owners rely on their employees to provide high level customer service, but are they?
For many businesses, they can’t afford an employee to handle customer service. It’s not always a full time job. For other businesses they have full customer service department, but don’t always keep employees up to date in training. Many times, there is just no training, beyond how to do the job at hand.
Gold Star Consulting is here to help companies create a customer service philosophy, develop a training program, revitalize the program that’s already have in place and keep the momentum going, even monitoring social media.
Where do we start? We start at the top and we start at the beginning with self evaluation. To have a solid customer service foundation, the owner(s) and executives need to invest in the program. They need to invest their time in the program. As leadership, you can’t expect your front line to provide high-level service, if the top of the company isn’t following through and holding themselves accountable for good service. Employees mimic the actions of their leaders. If the people above them don’t care, then why should they?
Gold Star Consulting will review how you do things from the interview process through the training process. Then take a look at your social media reviews to see how the community perceives you. From there we will work with you to develop your philosophy and a training program. As needed we will do maintenance to ensure the momentum continues and your business continues to grow.
Our Mission
Gold Star Consulting’s owner, Jill Baran, has over 20 years of experience in customer service. Unknowingly, her guest service career started right out of high school at The Gap, where you found the original greeter. While pursuing her degree at Oakland University in Journalism and public relations, she worked the front line at Joe Louis Arena on the guest service team, eventually working her way up the Ilitch company ladder to Manager of Events and Guest Service with the Detroit Tigers.
During her time with the Tigers, she was challenged with creating an event staff training program that placed the most emphasis on guest service. After scouring every Disney service book and researching Ritz Carlton service standards, she developed a training and service philosophy for the seasonal event staff which was used and updated for years to come. Jill handled everything from hiring and training, to managing the guest service staff and working with guests to solve any issues they may have during their time at Comerica Park for Detroit Tigers baseball, private events and large scale concerts from Eminem to Paul McCartney, even a few weeks of outdoor hockey and the Detroit Red Wings alumni game vs the Toronto Maples Leafs.
Jill left the Tigers, and accepted the role of Director of Guest Experience for Emagine Entertainment, a theater chain with locations in Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin. During her time with Emagine, she developed and executed a full training program for all colleagues, as well as handled incoming guest comments and concerns for all locations. After taking a break from Guest Service, she worked briefly in Client Services, but missed the guest interactions.
Jill has a passion for good service. As a travel lover, taking time to be a tourist in her hometown, and her support of small businesses, she has seen the good, the bad and ugly of service. From boutique stores and fine dining restaurants to behind the scenes tours and concerts and everything in between, while there is a huge push for good service, a lot of places are just not there. Seeing a need for good service and realizing that not every business has the bandwith for a full time customer service person, Gold Star Consulting was born.
A boutique consulting company here to help small and large businesses alike grow their business through service.