Episode 19 of Brad and Philip’s Marketing Your Attraction podcast was on how to learn from your customers, and this blog is based on that episode. The focus is on customer surveys, learning from our customers, and figuring out how to have that conversation with our customers that provides guidance for our new website, our new seasonal attraction, or whatever it is we’re working on in our business.
“So, the question is, how do we make sure we’re receiving input from our customers and their voice is being heard, but we’re not responding to every single comment, suggestion, or idea. As we all know, guests always have an opinion, and that opinion is (usually) based on their experience, so there’s no right or wrong. But we can’t take every comment or suggestion and shape or adjust our attraction around that. On the flip side, we can’t ignore that feedback. We need to use our customers as a resource,” said Brad.
You MUST Survey!
Philip mentioned some general notes on surveys. “The first thing is, no matter the scale of your attraction, you have to be surveying in some way. Brad and I will go into the various types of surveying, but, when I say ‘survey in some way,’ this means it can be as easy as being on site at your pop-up attraction or haunt, asking people questions, and manually checking off boxes on a spreadsheet. That works. The important thing is to survey, and there are different avenues for doing it,” he explained.
“There are also passive survey tactics, which involve observing what your audience is doing—where they stop, where they don’t stop, what signs they’re looking at, what signs they’re not looking at, what draws their attention, what doesn’t. I have a friend who specializes in this type of surveying, Dr. Margee Kerr. She does surveys in which she identifies where the weak points are in communication systems or funneling and where people are getting stuck. So, there are surveys where you can ask, there are research surveys, or there are many different ways you can do it—but the bottom line is, just do it!” he emphasized.
Build Your Survey Based on a Context
“The second point is, you need to be able to construct a system with data that you’ll be able to utilize in some way. I see a lot of people doing surveys, and they don’t have a plan for what to do with the survey data. What thing are you trying to learn more about, correct, figure out, or fine tune? What action are you going to take based on the data? You have to ask those questions before you start collecting the data in order to understand the context and apply the data to it,” Philip explained.
“Those are great points,” agreed Brad. “You need to do surveys, and that doesn’t need to be complex. I don’t have a ton of experience working in customer surveying, but a lot of what I do in marketing crosses over into that. I can tell you that with the companies I’ve worked with and worked for, the surveys aren’t that sophisticated. Even at some of the biggest attractions in the world, like Disneyland, they’re asking people questions. Maybe they have a fancy tablet, and maybe they’re doing some incredible data analysis on the back end, but, basically, they’re just asking questions or having a conversation,” he pointed out.
Ask Open-Ended Questions
“Open-ended questions are one of the best ways to encourage feedback. If you only ask questions that are scaled from 1 to 10 and are very specific, Like, ‘How much did you enjoy the Boysenberry Festival?’ or, ‘How much did you enjoy this new ride?’ with a rating of 1 to 10, that will get you some good data, but, in the end, the most valuable question to ask is often, ‘What else would you like to tell us?’ That’s when you find out something you’ve never thought about before,” said Brad.
“So, make sure you’re surveying those specific questions you want to learn more about, but also provide that mechanism for guests to give you whatever feedback they’re thinking about, because you might be missing something. There might a part of an experience that affects their visit, like parking or buying tickets or whatever. Often, attractions focus too much on the actual entertainment value and don’t consider everything surrounding that,” he pointed out.
The Net Promoter Score and How to Use It
“One of the most popular methods for a general survey, which is used by companies all over the world, is called the Net Promoter Score,” said Brad. “This is a very, very straightforward process: On a scale of 0 to 10, you ask your guest or customer, ‘How likely are you to recommend this company’s (or attraction’s) product or service to a friend or colleague?’ Based on that rating, customers are classified into three categories: detractors, passives, and promoters. Detractors are those who give a rating of 6 or less. They’re not particularly thrilled by the product or service, and, in all likelihood, they won’t purchase again from the company and could potentially damage the company’s reputation by negative word of mouth. Passives are those who give a score of 7 or 8. They’re somewhat satisfied but could easily switch to a competitor’s offering if given the opportunity. They probably wouldn’t spread negative word of mouth but aren’t enthusiastic enough about your products or services to promote them. Then there are promoters. Promotors give a rating of 9 or 10. They love your attraction, they’ll be back, they’ll share your attraction on social media, and they’ll give you positive word of mouth.”
Brad continued, “The Net Promoter Score is determined by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage who are promoters. That’s it. What’s generated is a score between -100 and 100, that’s the Net Promoter Score. We use this all the time at Knott’s Berry Farm, and all the companies I’ve ever worked with use it. It’s a great way to measure your audience. It’s just one question, so it couldn’t be simpler,” he said.
“However, you can get more complex with it. Knotts and those other companies have Net Promoter Scores for people who’ve visited or interacted with their product recently as well as scores for people who’ve never interacted with their brand or product or haven’t done so for a while, and they see how those scores compare. If your attraction has undergone a rebranding or an expansion or something—maybe you were one thing a few years ago and now you’re something else—it’s interesting to compare and contrast those scores,” observed Brad.
“I can’t get into too many of the specifics of what we do at Knotts, but I’ll just say that seeing the scores of people who haven’t visited compared to people who just recently visited can really help your marketing plan. For example, if the people who recently visited have a much higher Net Promoter Score than people who haven’t visited in five or so years, maybe you need to think about how to get more people through the door. Obviously, the product has improved, but some people have a negative perception of what the park or the attraction looked like a few years before and now that’s changed. The Net Promoter Score is the easiest way to survey what people think about your attraction, whereas it can get really complicated with surveys,” he said.
“At Knotts, we primarily do email surveys; there aren’t a lot of in-person surveys. With bigger campaigns, we bring in focus groups—which, if you have the time, can be hugely helpful. Bigger parks like Disney do focus groups all the time. They focus-test everything from new food items to new attraction ideas. They do that both in person at the park and online,” stated Brad.
“The sooner someone takes a survey after they’ve experienced your attraction, the better, because they’re going to be very fresh with their opinions, and they’re also more likely to share them. If you’re only doing email surveys, that’s okay. They’re better than nothing, just as Philip mentioned. But try to get to where you’re talking to your guests on a regular basis—whether you’re using a specific survey or just asking them, ‘Hey, what did you think? Would you recommend this to a friend?’ If you’re doing this in person, that’s a great way to take your surveying to the next level.”
Survey Tools and Resources
Brad then asked Philip his thoughts on tools like Survey Monkey.
“Way back in the day when I was doing a haunt out of my house, I did basic demographics and had simple, ‘What did you like and what didn’t you like?’ surveys. I printed out Excel sheets with little checkmark boxes on them. I put people at the front and back of the house and had them check boxes on that Excel sheet as people were entering and exiting. I did it manually, and then we had someone tabulate them. Even back then I was outsourcing!” he joked.
“I’ve done the Survey Monkey dance. My favorite method now is called TypeForm.com. It’s kind of like a subscription survey service where you pay $25 a month, and you get access to be able to do a certain number of surveys. It’s a little pricey, because Google Sheets can function the same way, depending. What I like about TypeForm is it’s responsive across all devices, and it proceeds question by question, so it narrows the focus. I really like those two things about it,” said Philip.
“I want to cover a few more basics about surveys,” he said. “I’m going to mention again that no matter the size or level of your attraction, you gotta do surveys. I want to go over a few guidelines to help shape the types of questions you ask. Some of these ideas are borrowed from Ask by Ryan Levesque, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath, and The Art of Persuasion: Winning without Intimidation by Bob Burg.”
Philip continued, “First of all, people are terrible at making predictions—even experts. Experts are slightly better than regular people, but even the $10,000-an-hour expert isn’t much better than regular people at making predictions. So, in general, stay away from any sort of predictive questions in your surveys. For example, a question like, ‘Do you think you’ll visit this attraction again?’ is useless,” he stated.
“Also, for the most part, people are bad at giving examples unless you provide a framework and guidance. Instead of asking a generic question about how much they enjoyed your attraction, ask, ‘How would you rate this attraction on a scale of 1 to 10?’ Instead of asking, ‘What did you like about it?’ ask them why they rated it a 7 and not a 5 or a 9. This is the best way to get useful, specific information,” stated Philip.
“Often, people can only tell you what they didn’t like and what they’ve done in the past. So, when you’re surveying, keep that in mind and frame your questions accordingly. You can ask questions like, ‘Why did you choose to go on this ride instead of that ride?’ or ‘Why did go through the attraction in this order?’ or ‘Why did you bring your family with you?’ or ‘Why didn’t you bring your family?’ or ‘Why did you choose to do the parts of that you did’ or ‘Where did you come here from?’ Those are good questions, and also, of course, ‘What didn’t you like?’” he said.
Focus on Open-Ended Responses
“In general, the longer the response, the closer you’ll get to a pain or peak point,” said Philip. “This is something that Ryan Levesque spends a lot of time on in his book, and that section is pretty brilliant. Even if you’re doing an online survey, if it has open-ended response fields, pay extra attention to the response fields that have the most characters in them. One technique for doing this is to take all your survey responses, look for the open-ended questions, sort them by the number of characters in the response fields, and only look at those responses, because those are the most important. The more people want to talk about something, the more emotional they are about it, which means it’s closer to a pain point or a peak point. You want to pay special attention to those big pain points, because that’s when you get to decide if this is a pit that needs to be filled or just a one-time issue with that particular respondent. On the opposite end, if the response is really positive, you can ask yourself if there’s something you want to do to enhance that to make it even better.”
Focusing on Pain Points
“I just want to chime in here about the pain points,” said Brad, “because that’s a huge, huge area you need to think about. For the attractions industry, of course, pain points could be everything from pricing structure to parking. There are so many different pain points. One example is from Amazon. There’s a great article that Eugene Wei published a couple of weeks ago. He was one of the first 200 employees hired by Amazon. In the early days of Amazon, he was responsible for thinking about long-term strategy and doing customer surveys. He wrote this in-depth article about his time there and what Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had him focus on, which were the pain points. The two pain points for customers early on were paying for shipping and the speed of shipping. Amazon was growing like crazy before this. The problem wasn’t that the company wasn’t growing. The problem was, five years from now, or they get enough people who don’t have that as a pain point, they’re eventually going to run into a ceiling. Eugene calls this the Invisible Asymptote, which is a mathematical term. They focused much of their energy on figuring out how to provide free and faster shipping. I mention the article for anyone interested in how Amazon tackled this problem. Eugene gives a few more technology examples as well. It really got me thinking about how this can be applied to the attractions industry and industries in general,” said Brad.
“One of Bei’s best points was, ‘I see many companies spending time analyzing funnels and seeing who emerges out the bottom. From the start, and as the company grows, it’s just as important to look at those who never make it through the funnel.’ These are people who maybe never come to your attraction, who maybe come to your website but don’t buy, who are jumping out at the top. You want to survey people who aren’t your guests and try to figure out why they aren’t buying. Why did they leave the website? It’s more complicated to do surveys of people who aren’t customers, but there are ways,” he noted.
Pay Attention to Negative Feedback—It’s Painful but Valuable
“Bei’s biggest point was, ‘When companies run focus groups on products [or, in our case, attractions], they usually show me the positive feedback. I’m almost always more interested in the folks who have registered negative feedback, though.’ He goes on to talk about how painful it is to get that negative feedback, but it’s always eye-opening to me when we ask our guests on surveys, ‘What didn’t you like about the experience?’ That’s when you get your most interesting feedback and answers. I don’t think anyone wants to read negative feedback, and it can be especially painful for smaller attractions, because you’re even more connected to the product that someone who works for a larger organization like I do. But always try to keep in mind that you’re learning from that negative feedback, and it’s important to get to it. Otherwise, you can just be looking for the answers you like. That’s the good and bad thing about data, right? You can always manipulate the questions and how you read the answers to get whatever answer you want. So, push yourself to encourage that negative feedback from your guests and from your employees, too, because that can be a great resource as well,” said Brad.
Surveys Can Uncover Your Biases
“The last thing I want to bring up has to do with biases,” said Philip. “Surveys can be helpful to uncover biases, and there are four main biases. You can use surveys as a way to spot check yourself to see if you’re violating any of these. The first is narrow framing. We often frame surveys from our own narrow perspectives about what we think is going well, what we think guests like, or what we think is going wrong. Surveying helps us break out of that frame. The last three biases have to do with confirmation of a viewpoint, short-term emotion, and overconfidence. Surveying helps in all these fronts. It helps in confirmation bias because it gets you out of group-think. If everyone at your attraction agrees with everyone else, this helps you get outside those opinions. Surveys can overcome short-term emotion if there’s a delay in the survey response, and it can go both ways. It shows you what the short-term emotion is when someone is visiting your attraction, as Brad mentioned, and it shows you how quickly that can change or fade. And surveys help with overconfidence by providing real-world feedback,” he said.
“Of course, there are all the general marketing reasons to do surveys such as demographics, understanding more about your customer, pain points, peak points, and whatnot,” said Philip.
So, that’s our introduction to the topic of surveys. If you want to dive a little bit deeper, or a lot deeper into it, click on the links in this article. If you have ideas for topics you’d like us to discuss, visit MarketingYourAttraction.com, sign up to be on our email list, get our contact information, and let us know what you’d like us to cover in future episodes.
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