Data suggest that personal interactions between staff and visitors significantly increase overall satisfaction, improve value perceptions, and contribute to a more meaningful overall experience. Here’s how.
As many of my regular readers already know, I’m captivated by the relationship between “physical touch” (old fashion, face-to-face communication) and “digital touch” (digital communication) in visitor-serving organizations – and how these forces work together to make these organizations more relevant and financially stable. The data regarding how these forces work together is rather compelling…and I’ve even spoken about it before. Digital touch increases reputation and aids in driving attendance – but physical touch provides the “there-there” in a way that technology has yet to supplant. We monitor both reputation and visitor satisfaction for numerous visitor-serving enterprise at IMPACTS, and we’ve found one type of “physical touch” to be extremely potent in increasing visitor satisfaction: When attendees have a personal facilitated experience (or, as we affectionately call them, a PFE) remarkable things reliably occur.
What is a personal facilitated experience?
A PFE is a one-to-one or one-to few interaction that occurs between an onsite representative of the organization and a visitor. This representative could be a docent, volunteer, or any other organization-associated individual who has a direct interaction with an individual visitor, family or couple. A traditional museum cart experience provides a PFE. A volunteer showing you your seat at the theater provides a PFE. An entryway greeter provides a PFE. So does a stationed volunteer, a wayfinder, or even a particularly attentive clerk at a museum store. Shows, talks, or tours – while certainly providing value to one’s overall experience – do not constitute a PFE, as the market considers PFEs powerful due to the personalized attention and one-on-one nature of the interaction. While we’ve found that these other types of encounters provide an efficient density of interaction, they do not always provide the kind of personalized experience often prerequisite for a steep increase in overall satisfaction.
PFEs increase metrics that are critical to overall experience
Take a look at the data below from a representative organization with which we partner at IMPACTS. The column on the left quantifies visitor perceptions of an organization based on specific evaluation metrics (e.g. admission value, education experience, entertainment experience, and employee courtesy), while the right side indicates the same values for visitors reporting at least one personal touch-point. Visitors who had similar experiences onsite – with the exception of a PFE – report very different perceptual outcomes.
PFEs generally increase the perceived value of admission.
In other words, those who have a PFE believe that they got a better bang for their buck after paying admission to visit an organization.
PFEs also increase perceptions of entertainment experience, educational experience, and employee courtesy.
However, these metrics don’t all contribute to overall satisfaction equally. Here’s the data on the breakdown.
PFEs can be utilized to increase visitor satisfaction by daypart
If your organization is in the midst of a construction project or simply gets crowded during certain peak times of day, an organization may deploy PFEs as a mitigation strategy to minimize the impact of crowding perceptions on overall satisfaction.
Digital and “physical” touch work together to secure the financial futures of visitor serving organizations and keep folks coming in the door so that organizations may march steadily toward accomplishing their missions. I write about the increasingly critical importance of personalization on digital media for visitor-serving organizations, but we must remember that people online and people offline are still people – in fact, we want them to be the same person! Personalization – a trend that is getting a lot of buzz in the online space – is just as important onsite. Facebook and other social media sites are getting smarter about personalization – ads are more intelligent, and millennials expect personalized experiences. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all communications and “touch” points… online and offline.
