Don’t Let Perceived Unwelcome Advances Hurt Your Business’ Reputation by Al Hornsby

Employee Interactions With Customers Can Lead to Liability

by Al Hornsby, owner, Al Hornsby Productions, Singapore

Al is regarded as one of the industry’s most experienced risk management litigation executives.

IN DIVING’S QUALITY MANAGEMENT PROCESS, most of the dive organizations have some mechanism through which students and customers can file complaints against stores, individual dive instructors, and other dive staff (including store owners themselves). Fortunately, as consumer-facing industries and organized activities go, diving has placed significant importance on the comfort and confidence of its customer base, and considering the high degree of trust non-divers and divers must have in the people taking them into the water, this shouldn’t be surprising.

However, when that trust is or appears to be broken, it can easily cause a great deal of concern and discomfort among the customers affected. Especially in tropical, warm-water, destination areas where full wetsuits aren’t typically worn (or even shorties in many situations), particularly during introductory scuba programs, it is unfortunately not rare that complaints are received by the dive organizations that, during confined water training or open water dives, an instructor’s ‘hands-on, helpfulness’ was deemed to have gone too far, reaching the point of feared (or actual) inappropriate physical contact. Even a modest – and unintentionally improper – amount of touching during such beginner training and water-skill practice can be misperceived by customers, especially when clad only in bathing suits. And, in holiday-resort situations where potential after-hours contact or follow-up may also not be infrequent, the lines between proper in-water helpfulness and unwelcome touching may become even further blurred.

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For store owners and managers in such situations, you should be aware that related complaints coming to dive organizations from these sorts of incidents are not uncommon, and that many more such situations go unreported, due to the natural embarrassment and discomfort that stepping forward could likely cause the customer. So, even if it is not brought to a dive organization’s or store management’s attention, the (likely) loss of such a customer’s trust and potential future business is real; and, in today’s social-media world, you may also expect that people – both male and female – feeling that such breaches occurred will likely not be silent about it, such as may have been more the case in decades past.

So, what does store/resort management do? The first, and easiest, decision to be made is to include attention to this particular issue in your staff training. It’s a fairly simple point to make – that the customers coming in are the store’s customers, who will drive the store’s ongoing reputation, and that their ongoing safety and goodwill are the store’s most important assets. Any perception that inappropriate touching occurs during your dive training and activities could be devastating to your business’s reputation, especially if families with teenage children are an important client group. You may also feel that your operation needs a clear, ‘no outside contact with customers’ policy, but that’s your call. While this is not typically the most common policy (especially in resort areas), it is used by many dive operations and is a simple, crystal-clear position.

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