Service quality directly relates to customer satisfaction and loyalty. The better your customers perceive your customer service and overall guest experience, the more likely they are to visit again and recommend your attraction to others.
Measuring your customer’s perceptions of your experience involves requesting and analyzing customer feedback at several points of their journey — from the point they purchase their tickets to the moment they exit your attraction.
With so much customer data available, your attraction may be wondering where to start. In this post, you’ll learn several data-driven approaches to accurately measure service quality and what each metric says about your company.
What is the difference between service quality and customer satisfaction?
6 ways to measure service quality
- 1. SERVQUAL
- 2. Post-visit ratings
- 3. Follow-up surveys
- 4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- 5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- 6. Customer effort score (CES)
What is service quality?
Your service quality is largely based on how your customers feel about their visit to your attraction.
By definition, service quality measures how well a service was delivered compared to customer expectations. In other words, how great was your customer experience in comparison to what your guest was expecting.
Let’s say a guest was expecting your zoo to be easy to navigate. When they arrived at your attraction, they were told they could download an app to access an interactive map of the zoo. They find that this map is easy to use and that the zoo has great signage, too. They find it easy to get around, so your venue is meeting their expectations.
They would likely consider this to be high service quality.
Businesses with high service quality are likely capable of meeting customer demands, which will help them remain financially competitive in their industry.
What is the difference between service quality and customer satisfaction?
The concepts of service quality and customer satisfaction are closely related, but there’s a distinction between them.
Customer satisfaction is how your guest feels about a particular experience relative to their prior expectations. It’s used to measure the degree to which your guests are satisfied with interaction with your business.
If a guest requested a ticket refund, for example, yet your company took months to follow through with it, the guest would likely be unsatisfied with your customer service.
Service quality, on the other hand, refers to guests’ perception of the firm’s overall level of quality. Businesses that continuously meet customer demands are perceived as having a high service quality.
6 ways to measure service quality
Service quality is qualitative, which makes it challenging to measure.
There are, however, several metrics that can help your business better understand whether your services are meeting customer expectations.
Let’s explore a few of them below.
1. SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is a holistic metric based on five core areas of customer service:
- Tangibles: the physical appearance of facilities, staff, and communication materials
- Reliability: your attraction’s ability to provide the experience the customer paid for in an accurate and reliable manner
- Responsiveness: your company’s willingness to help customers and provide timely responses
- Assurance: your team’s ability to reassure customers and convey confidence in every aspect of the guest experience
- Empathy: the caring, personalized attention every customer wishes to receive
The SERVQUAL metric can be especially useful in identifying the gaps in your customer service in comparison to guest expectations.
A service quality questionnaire can be sent to your guests via email. Here are three ways you can use a SERVQUAL survey:
- Measure a guest’s specific customer service experience. At the end of a phone call or in-person experience, send the guest an email survey that asks whether the service representative they spoke with was helpful.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses: Ask guests if anything about their recent visit stood out to them.
- Gauge customer loyalty: Ask guests how likely they are to recommend your attraction? Why or why not?
2. Post-visit ratings
Post-service ratings are useful in getting immediate feedback from guests.
This metric is measured by asking guests to rate their experience immediately after their visit. It’s a great way to get a raw perspective of how guests are feeling post-visit since the memory is fresh in their minds.
How would you present this to your guests? You could install digital kiosks that allow guests to rate their experience from 1 to 5 as they’re exiting your attraction. If you have a customer experience app, you could send guests a push notification with the same question as they’re leaving.
3. Follow-up surveys
Follow-up surveys sent via email are a common method to gain customer feedback.
These surveys typically give your guests more time to reflect on their experience compared to the post-visit ratings above, which are provided immediately after a visit.
The follow-up survey can also be composed of multiple questions, which will result in more detailed responses.
Your business could send a SERVQUAL survey as a follow-up email to your guests, asking them to rate your attraction in several areas of your customer service. These surveys give businesses a more complete picture of how guests feel about the attraction as a whole.
4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is one of the most straightforward ways to measure guest satisfaction.
That’s because it can be measured by asking a single question: How satisfied wot you with your visit?
The guest would be prompted to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5, for example.
A business can find its overall CSAT score by counting the number of positive responses they get and dividing it by the number of total responses collected. Then, multiply by 100. The outcome is the percentage of satisfied guests that visit your attraction.
Since a CSAT survey is quick and painless, you can administer it across multiple touchpoints in your guest journey, such as when guests are checking out on your website — “How would you rate your check-out experience?”
This will give you a more detailed picture of how your guests feel at different points of their customer journey and allows your company to identify specific bottlenecks and crucial areas of improvement.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty.
It’s typically measured through a single-question survey, such as “How likely is it that you would recommend this attraction to a friend or colleague?”
Your guests will give a rating from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).
Guests who responded with a score of 9 or 10 are considered your “promoters.” They’re loyal and happy customers that will promote your brand to others.
Those who respond with a 7 or 8 are considered satisfied customers, but unlikely to act as brand promoters. Anyone who responds lower than a 7 is considered a “detractor.” Detractors are unhappy customers who are unlikely to visit your attraction again and might even discourage others from visiting.
To calculate your final NPS, you should subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Tip: Want to find out how your NPS score measures up to your competitors? Find out what’s a good NPS score.
6. Customer effort score (CES)
Your customer effort score (CES) is a measure of how much effort your guests have to put in to interact with your company.
If a guest calls your team to change their reservation, your CES would measure the difficulty the guest had in resolving the issue.
Instead of asking how satisfied your guests are, then, you’d ask them to measure the ease of their experience.
You could measure this by prompting your guest with a simple CES survey that asks them to rate a specific customer service experience. For instance, if you run a theme park and your guest called your customer service center to change their ticket reservation, you could ask them to what extent they strongly agree or disagree with a phrase like, “It was easy to solve my issue with [Company Name].”
A CES survey can be useful immediately after an interaction that led to a purchase or immediately after a customer service experience.
***
There are many metrics and approaches to measuring service quality at your attraction.
The takeaway here is that you begin using these data-driven approaches to collect and analyze important customer feedback.
What is service quality?
Your service quality is largely based on how your customers feel about their visit to your attraction.
By definition, service quality measures how well a service was delivered compared to customer expectations. In other words, how great was your customer experience in comparison to what your guest was expecting.
Let’s say a guest was expecting your zoo to be easy to navigate. When they arrived at your attraction, they were told they could download an app to access an interactive map of the zoo. They find that this map is easy to use and that the zoo has great signage, too. They find it easy to get around, so your venue is meeting their expectations.
They would likely consider this to be high service quality.
Businesses with high service quality are likely capable of meeting customer demands, which will help them remain financially competitive in their industry.
What is the difference between service quality and customer satisfaction?
The concepts of service quality and customer satisfaction are closely related, but there’s a distinction between them.
Customer satisfaction is how your guest feels about a particular experience relative to their prior expectations. It’s used to measure the degree to which your guests are satisfied with interaction with your business.
If a guest requested a ticket refund, for example, yet your company took months to follow through with it, the guest would likely be unsatisfied with your customer service.
Service quality, on the other hand, refers to guests’ perception of the firm’s overall level of quality. Businesses that continuously meet customer demands are perceived as having a high service quality.
6 ways to measure service quality
Service quality is qualitative, which makes it challenging to measure.
There are, however, several metrics that can help your business better understand whether your services are meeting customer expectations.
Let’s explore a few of them below.
1. SERVQUAL
SERVQUAL is a holistic metric based on five core areas of customer service:
- Tangibles: the physical appearance of facilities, staff, and communication materials
- Reliability: your attraction’s ability to provide the experience the customer paid for in an accurate and reliable manner
- Responsiveness: your company’s willingness to help customers and provide timely responses
- Assurance: your team’s ability to reassure customers and convey confidence in every aspect of the guest experience
- Empathy: the caring, personalized attention every customer wishes to receive
The SERVQUAL metric can be especially useful in identifying the gaps in your customer service in comparison to guest expectations.
A service quality questionnaire can be sent to your guests via email. Here are three ways you can use a SERVQUAL survey:
- Measure a guest’s specific customer service experience. At the end of a phone call or in-person experience, send the guest an email survey that asks whether the service representative they spoke with was helpful.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses: Ask guests if anything about their recent visit stood out to them.
- Gauge customer loyalty: Ask guests how likely they are to recommend your attraction? Why or why not?
2. Post-visit ratings
Post-service ratings are useful in getting immediate feedback from guests.
This metric is measured by asking guests to rate their experience immediately after their visit. It’s a great way to get a raw perspective of how guests are feeling post-visit since the memory is fresh in their minds.
How would you present this to your guests? You could install digital kiosks that allow guests to rate their experience from 1 to 5 as they’re exiting your attraction. If you have a customer experience app, you could send guests a push notification with the same question as they’re leaving.
3. Follow-up surveys
Follow-up surveys sent via email are a common method to gain customer feedback.
These surveys typically give your guests more time to reflect on their experience compared to the post-visit ratings above, which are provided immediately after a visit.
The follow-up survey can also be composed of multiple questions, which will result in more detailed responses.
Your business could send a SERVQUAL survey as a follow-up email to your guests, asking them to rate your attraction in several areas of your customer service. These surveys give businesses a more complete picture of how guests feel about the attraction as a whole.
4. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is one of the most straightforward ways to measure guest satisfaction.
That’s because it can be measured by asking a single question: How satisfied wot you with your visit?
The guest would be prompted to rate their experience on a scale of 1 to 5, for example.
A business can find its overall CSAT score by counting the number of positive responses they get and dividing it by the number of total responses collected. Then, multiply by 100. The outcome is the percentage of satisfied guests that visit your attraction.
Since a CSAT survey is quick and painless, you can administer it across multiple touchpoints in your guest journey, such as when guests are checking out on your website — “How would you rate your check-out experience?”
This will give you a more detailed picture of how your guests feel at different points of their customer journey and allows your company to identify specific bottlenecks and crucial areas of improvement.
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric used to gauge customer loyalty.
It’s typically measured through a single-question survey, such as “How likely is it that you would recommend this attraction to a friend or colleague?”
Your guests will give a rating from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).
Guests who responded with a score of 9 or 10 are considered your “promoters.” They’re loyal and happy customers that will promote your brand to others.
Those who respond with a 7 or 8 are considered satisfied customers, but unlikely to act as brand promoters. Anyone who responds lower than a 7 is considered a “detractor.” Detractors are unhappy customers who are unlikely to visit your attraction again and might even discourage others from visiting.
To calculate your final NPS, you should subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Tip: Want to find out how your NPS score measures up to your competitors? Find out what’s a good NPS score.
6. Customer effort score (CES)
Your customer effort score (CES) is a measure of how much effort your guests have to put in to interact with your company.
If a guest calls your team to change their reservation, your CES would measure the difficulty the guest had in resolving the issue.
Instead of asking how satisfied your guests are, then, you’d ask them to measure the ease of their experience.
You could measure this by prompting your guest with a simple CES survey that asks them to rate a specific customer service experience. For instance, if you run a theme park and your guest called your customer service center to change their ticket reservation, you could ask them to what extent they strongly agree or disagree with a phrase like, “It was easy to solve my issue with [Company Name].”
A CES survey can be useful immediately after an interaction that led to a purchase or immediately after a customer service experience.
***
There are many metrics and approaches to measuring service quality at your attraction.
The takeaway here is that you begin using these data-driven approaches to collect and analyze important customer feedback.
This feedback can be hugely valuable in better understanding your guest expectations — and coming up with strategies to meet them.
