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1. Answer Questions in Real-Time
If your customers have questions before or after they’ve attended your venue, responding to them in real-time is crucial. Younger people are significantly less patient and expect instant replies to their questions when they go somewhere. Calling is not an option for these mobile-first visitors, either – their preference is to contact customer service via their favorite mobile channel.
Creating a WhatsApp chatbot is, therefore, the answer. This method allows them to quickly and effectively get the information they need without seeking a customer service representative. That saves your team time and lets your customers enjoy their day. Configure chatbots to automatically escalate queries to a human representative when they pass a certain level of complexity or are specific.
2. Offer a Personalized Experience
Make your visitors feel like they’re getting a much more personalized experience. Send them relevant information and offers, such as discounts on preferred drinks, food, or tickets on days they’re likely to attend.
Sounds complicated? It isn’t.
Collect data from your mobile app, ticketing platform, or other sources that show their behavior and ask them about their demographics and preferences. For example, the past purchases they have made, how often they visit your park, and their interaction with your brand online. These insights will also help drive your revenue simultaneously due to the potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
3. Reward Loyal Visitors
The data you collect will allow you to uncover who your loyal visitors are, especially ticketing data. Use profile scores, for example, based on your visitor’s subscription status, the number of times they have visited your park, the amount of money they’ve spent, or the number of interactions they’ve started. These scores will allow you to reward their loyalty with discounts at the food and beverage outlets on-site or by giving them exclusive access to new and future exhibitions. In turn, these loyal visitors will provide you with a steady revenue stream, but preferably they will become ambassadors of your brand and bring in new visitors.
4. Provide a Relaxed Ticket Purchase
Visitors using online ticketing are likely to feel less stressed, knowing they have a ticket and don’t have to wait in line worrying they’ll sell out. They can buy their tickets when they want and don’t need to wait for opening hours, which – in turn – helps to improve that all-important visitor experience.
On top of this, you can also let your customers take advantage of dynamic pricing and buy cheaper tickets at less crowded times, which is especially interesting for students and retirees. At the same time, it increases your sales and provides more insight into customer behavior.
5. Regulate Visitor Flow
Crowd management concerns most venue operators as they strive to deliver an enjoyable experience for their customers. A recent Oracle study found that 67% of them would still like social distancing measures at venues, despite the relatively low risk of covid.
Regulating visitor flow can help here. By using ticketing timeslots, customers can choose a specific date and duration of time from those available in a calendar menu when booking tickets for an event. The benefit? It gives you more control over visit numbers and thus more efficiently regulates visitor flow.
6. Increase the Findability of Your Venue
There is no need to spend vast amounts of money promoting your ticket sales. If you partner with local and international resellers, such as hotel chains, OTAs, or tour operators, you can benefit from their reach, which will help visitors find your site. However, managing multiple resellers can be very labor-intensive. When you use a Channel Manager, you can manage all your resellers from one dashboard and only have to upload your data once. Moreover, they can automatically upload your availability if you have the same partner for your ticket sales. This way, your sales boost, and you can focus on what you do best: the live experience.
7. Allow Visitors to Better Plan Ahead
A recent study by Oracle says 55% of parents with children under 12 prefer to be able to schedule food or drinks before they arrive, as it allows them to purchase foods and beverages in advance or skip queues. This often results in a less stressful experience for adults, children, and other visitors.
You can quickly solve this by allowing your consumers to purchase extras upfront with mobile order technology. This can be linked via SMS or mail and offers your visitors an opportunity to choose where and when to pick up their purchase to ensure a top-notch visitor experience.
Ticket sales represent the apparent revenue stream for attractions, but you shouldn’t forget additional revenue streams such as food and beverage and VIP experiences. Locking those revenues at the ticket purchase stage is a much easier way to do this than trying to convert customers on-site.
8. Enhance the Live Experience
By using technology, you can make your visitor’s experience more interactive than ever before, which will only enrich their level of enjoyment. Take, for example, the use of QR-code technology, which will allow you to provide Pages with more background on specific points of interest, such as art pieces in museums or animals in zoos.
Using a mobile app to provide this experience, your visitors can access everything in one place; their tickets, site map, newsfeed, and more. In addition, you can use push notifications to surprise your visitors with discounts on snacks and souvenirs when they walk past these outlets.
9. Improve Future Visits
By taking advantage of technology, you’ll have a plethora of data and analytics available to you that you didn’t have before, including when people book their visit, via which platform, where they get stuck in the ticket process, and how many tickets people book and more. This will provide invaluable insights for your business and improve how you deliver your services in the future.
Additionally, you’ll want to allow your visitors to tell you how well you’ve done. Allowing them to quickly fill in a customer survey via easy-to-use forms, such as directly after their visit with an SMS, enables them to react to their experience while it’s fresh in their mind. It allows you to maximize data gathering and determine how to improve your customers’ experience even further.
10. Donate Easily
Many venues rely in part on donations from their visitors. Often there is a box at the entrance where you can put money. Nowadays, however, most people do not carry cash. Technology can also make it easy for this group to donate via a QR code on which they can indicate how much they want to donate or even if they want to become ambassadors with monthly contributions.
