7 benefits to surveying guests regularly (and why it is important)

Carla Vianna
Carla Vianna
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7 benefits to surveying guests regularly (and why it is important)

When guests purchase a ticket to your attraction, they’re expecting you to provide them with the experience and service they signed up for — meaning you need to fully understand their expectations.

Enter customer satisfaction surveys.

These surveys can be leveraged to understand how well your attraction is meeting your guests’ expectations. The insight guests provide in a customer feedback survey helps attractions better understand what guests are looking for at different points of their customer journey. Armed with this valuable feedback, your attraction can then brainstorm ways to better meet guest expectations.

This is why a customer satisfaction survey is important. It allows you to optimize your guest experience based on what matters most to your guests. 

Here are seven reasons why every attraction should be checking in with guests on a regular basis.

1. Provide a direct, open feedback channel for guests

2. Keep track of customer satisfaction in real-time and discover problems early on

3. Determine your attraction’s priorities

4. Retain customers

5. Boost customer loyalty

6. Maintain a positive brand reputation

7. Gain an advantage over your competitors

1. Provide a direct, open feedback channel for guests

Customer satisfaction surveys give guests a platform to share their honest opinions about your brand. When they respond, you’re rewarded with tangible feedback about your guest experience.

Attractions can leverage customer satisfaction surveys to gain feedback at several different moments of the customer journey. For example, a theme park might survey its guests to find out how they’re feeling about a new ride. If the feedback is negative, then the attraction can investigate why guests are dissatisfied with the ride. But if the response is positive, then the attraction knows it can continue marketing the ride to bring in similar guests.

Your business can use surveys to gain guest feedback about your customer service, your website, on-site experience, and more. Your guests are actively interacting with your company in different ways. Being able to survey them at different touchpoints of their customer journey will show you what aspects of your business need to be improved.

2. Keep track of customer satisfaction in real-time and discover problems early on

Let’s say you run a museum. At first, your guests are ecstatic about a new exhibit, and your visitor numbers are booming. A few months later, guests start to get bored. If you surveyed them when the exhibit first launched, their satisfaction levels would be very high. Later on, though, you’d see that they’re not leaving your museum as happy as they once did. Now it’s your job to figure out why that is.

Regularly surveying your customers allows you to notice these changes in real-time. Many businesses send out quarterly NPS surveys for this very reason. This way, they’re able to quickly spot a dip in customer satisfaction and further investigate the cause.

As soon as negative feedback comes in, you can jump on the issue. This gives you enough leeway to investigate the problem and brainstorm ways to improve it before too many customers are affected.

Plus, if you act quickly enough, you can prevent unhappy customers from talking badly about your attraction to others.

Without asking for feedback, it would be virtually impossible for your company to know why guests aren’t coming back to your venue or why your ticket sales are decreasing.

3. Determine your attraction’s priorities

Customer feedback can help your team determine what to focus on next. You can ask survey guests about several aspects of your business, including customer service, ticket processing, your website, on-site experience, and more.

Negative feedback specifically can help you identify exactly what aspects of your business need the most attention. If you receive a poor review about your customer service, for instance, you can follow up with the guest for more information. Ask them why they’re unhappy with the experience and learn more about what went wrong.

The more you follow up with guests, the better you’ll understand what’s driving their dissatisfaction.

4. Retain customers

Acquiring a new customer can be five times as expensive as retaining an existing customer — which means it’s in your financial interest to make your guests as happy as possible. Feedback surveys help you identify where you’re failing to meet guests’ expectations, allowing you to take action quickly. As you improve in the areas that matter most to your guests, their satisfaction increases.

Satisfied guests will, hopefully, continue to come back to your attraction. In other words, surveys can help you retain more customers. Happy guests will not only return to your attraction but also recommend it to their friends and family. It’s a win-win for your situation. Retaining customers also leads to guest loyalty, which we’ll discuss in the next tip.

5. Boost customer loyalty

You can use customer satisfaction surveys to find the key drivers of guest satisfaction at your attraction. Then, you can continuously improve in these areas to provide them with a positive experience. When your customers are happy with your service, they’re likely to become loyal to your brand and recommend your attraction to their friends and family, as well as post about it on social media. This can generate even more buzz around your brand and result in future ticket sales, all thanks to one loyal customer.

6. Maintain a positive brand reputation

When you’re constantly talking to your customers, you’ll have a good idea of what they’re thinking — and saying — about your brand once they exit your venue. If you’re mostly receiving positive feedback, then you know your guests don’t have much to complain about.

Yet if your guests are speaking negatively about your attraction, you need to know about it. Customer satisfaction surveys help you keep tabs on guest sentiment so that if it turns negative, you can quickly take action before it impacts your reputation.

7. Gain an advantage over your competitors

Finally, customer satisfaction surveys can shed light on how you compare to competitors. Your guests will tell you where you excel and where you fall short of their expectations, which they’ve built based on visits to similar attractions. For example, if guests are unhappy with the quality of food served at your venue, you can use this feedback to reexamine your dining options.

***

When your attraction is in tune with guest needs, your guest feedback and business outlook will be increasingly positive. 

Ready to optimize your guest experience?

Start checking in with your guests regularly to better understand their expectations.

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Writer Carla Vianna

Carla Vianna

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