Maxx Marketing News

Make the Experience Count

Oct 22/05 Doormats. Voicemail messages. Shampoo bottles. You may think these are just mundane objects, but these things can combine to leave an indelible impression on your customers. Visitors’ overall impressions and feelings about your brand are the sum of their experiences with it.

Experiences fall into three categories – sensory, rational and emotional, with Vancouver Island fitting very much into the sensual and emotional elements. Vancouver Island invites travellers to engage their palate with unique foods and fine wines. It offers their eyes a feast of vistas. It offers them the spirituality and uniqueness of “Island” culture both past and present.

So how can you make sure that your tourism operation fits with the Vancouver Island brand?
Maybe you need to do an ‘Experience Audit’.

What is Experienced?

The first step to improving your visitors’ experiences is to ‘map’ each and every contact point they could enjoy or endure with your brand, from the first click onto your website, right through to any follow up. Road signage, staff uniforms, price schedule, telephone ‘hold’ music, quality of the shampoo bottle, speed to download pictures from your website – all of this is relevant.

Look at how your customers are treated. How do you and your staff, intentionally or unintentionally, make them feel?
Now it’s time to find out how your customers feel about what they see, hear, taste, smell and touch at your hotel, on your boat, at your winery or your golf course.
The easiest and most reliable way to get an overall measure of how your customers feel is with straightforward and simple questions:
– How would you describe this resort/store/service etc to other people?
– Would you strongly recommend this resort/store/activity/area etc to a family member or close friend?
– Were you completely happy with the ride/stay/service etc today/this time?
Then you want to dig deeper to find out how they arrived at their overall impression.
– How comfortable were the bus seats?
– Were the rooms big enough?
Self-completion questionnaires are the least intrusive way to gather feedback from your customers, and tend to be the cheapest way to conduct your survey.
Here are some simple guidelines on developing your own customer survey:
• Have a ‘warts and all’ approach – just receiving compliments feels good but may not be helpful, so encourage balanced feedback.
• Take a long term view – one survey is interesting but regular (e.g. 6-monthly) feedback tells you how you are progressing.
• To measure satisfaction you must ask questions about both what people expected and what the experience is like.
• Numbers give you reliability – the more surveys you get back the more representative it should be. Aim for at least 50-100.
• Mix your questions. Fixed response questions with a defined yes/no or rating scale, or satisfaction scale are easy to complete and to quantify the results. Open ended questions that ask why, or how or that ask for the customer’s ideas are good to gain more detail – although they take longer to analyse.
• Be reasonable. If you ask too many, or difficult questions then you might produce dissatisfaction by simply doing the survey!
• Test your questionnaire first on a few people so that it makes sense and allows people to give their honest opinions by asking the right questions.
• Excel spreadsheets are simple and effective to analyse your results with. They allow you to do calculations and make graphs so that your results are easier to read.

Watch for a follow up report titled IMPROVE THE EXPERIENCE coming soon. 

Previous entry: What Chinese Tourists Look For     Next entry: Golf Course Study Part 2 of 3