Tracking guest satisfaction — Is your finger on the pulse?

Your attraction's prosperity depends on delivering an exceptional customer experience to guests. It’s the key to creating high satisfaction rates, bringing people back through the gates and generating those glowing reviews that bring in new customers — you know, the ones that can get your attraction to #1 on TripAdvisor.

That said, how happy are your guests? Don’t know?

‍That’s probably because you’re not tracking guest satisfaction. Or you are, but you’re not doing it right. Your finger isn’t on the pulse.

Why is this so important? Attractions including theme parks, zoos and resorts, benefit financially from knowing how satisfied their customers are. 84% of organizations working to improve CX report an increase in revenue. Dissatisfied customers not only take their business elsewhere, but worse, they act as detractors and dissuade others from visiting.

Without tracking, you’ll be blind to the actionable steps that can increase guest satisfaction. If you don’t monitor guest satisfaction, how will you know how to improve it?

Tracking guest satisfaction rates

The good news is, you only need to ask your guests two simple questions to get everything you need:

1. Did you have a good experience?
2. If not, why not?

With answers to those questions, you’ll have everything you need to understand the current situation, know what action to take and monitor the results.

Ditch the big surveys

We hate to break it to you — but your guests aren’t interested in filling out lengthy surveys online or on paper. We’d wager they’d rather drop their ice cream cone in sand and eat it. This is evident in the fact that most surveys resort to a prize draw in order to motivate visitors to complete them.

The point is you’re going to turn guests away from submitting feedback if you use the big survey format. Not only that, you’re going to have to organise the responses and figure out how to act on the results, which becomes more involved with the more questions you ask.

There is absolutely a place for longer surveys, but their poor response rates and lack of clarity means they’re not ideal for getting a constant stream of daily feedback from guests, and that’s what you want to do to keep your finger on the pulse. Keep it simple!

Don’t neglect questions out of your control

This is something so many attractions are guilty of. What are we talking about? We’re talking about leaving things out of surveys that have affected the customer experience but aren’t obviously in your control.

Here are a couple of examples:

• The weather (you can’t control the weather, but you can certainly control the erection of wind and rain barriers. You can also control strategic decisions, such as building more indoor attractions or offering a rainy day guarantee)
• Strewn litter (you can’t stop customers from throwing litter and food onto the floor, but you can certainly provide more bins and employ more litter pickers)

You do have control over the seemingly uncontrollable, so make sure you ask these questions to get a clearer picture as to why your customers are unhappy.

Collecting feedback via a mobile app

Your attraction's mobile app is the perfect medium for collecting a constant stream of visitor feedback.

With the Attractions.io platform you can:

• Automatically alert those who visited each evening, asking them to leave feedback
• Offer a quick and frictionless way of providing feedback using the two key questions
• Direct those who had a good experience to TripAdvisor, building up your positive review stream
• Easily analyse visitor satisfaction over time, understand the top reasons for dissatisfaction and monitor the impact of initiatives to reduce them

Not only that but by understanding who's happy and who's not, you can tailor other app communications accordingly — something we'll cover more in an upcoming article.

The bottom line

The guest experience is paramount in today's competitive landscape, with more things than ever competing for our leisure time. It's essential that you keep your finger on the pulse, tracking guest satisfaction and understanding why guests aren't happy on a daily basis.

With this information at your disposal, you can take the action you need to make improvements, and quickly see the results of your efforts.