For our summer installment of Resort Perspective we caught up with Kyle Griffin, Safety Services Manager at Gunstock Mountain, in Gilford, New Hampshire. With 12 full-time and 60 part-time patrollers, Gunstock was one of our first resorts to implement the Dispatch App this past season. At the time, the resort was looking for a quick way to document all the tasks that happen on a daily basis: who was working, responses to injuries, courtesy rides, and other daily work activity completed by patrol. The resort was underway with Incident Reporting so integrating with Dispatch provided a huge benefit.
For Gunstock, what has been the best part moving to Dispatch, and how has the program helped streamline some of your systems? The best part has been the real-time data, and the integration with the Incident Reporting.
What were some of the challenges you faced when you first began the implementation? For Gunstock, the biggest challenge was training my staff. My original goal was to hold training session, and provide practice to groups of 6-8 people at a time. With a slow start to the season (snow-wise) we were forced to do a lot more “on the job” training. This made things a little more complicated.
The other challenge for Gunstock was getting WiFi to the summit of the mountain, and our patrol mid-station, from where our dispatchers operate. We eventually did get WiFi to our on-mountain location.
Looking forward to the 16-17 season, are you making any changes based on what you learned this past year? We will incorporate training for both the Dispatch and the Incident Reporting into our annual staff refresher weekend, in the beginning of November. Then I am hopeful that a few key team members will help get the rest of our staff back up to speed during the month of December.
For resorts who are moving to Dispatch for the upcoming season, what advice do you have? Provide as much training as possible before the start of the season. We made laminated printouts to follow step by step for lift opening/closing, trail opening/closing, and how to work through a dispatch. We also created a fake user… her name was Sally Training-Scenario and let people play around with the app. That made it easier to archive the records for training purposes.
For resorts who are thinking about Dispatch, what would you say to them? I would urge resorts who are thinking about using Dispatch to reach out to a resort who already are using it, and visit the resort to get a first-hand look at how it works. But mostly… Dispatch was a great investment and we are really LOVING IT here at Gunstock!