Guest feedback is essential to maintaining the appeal of your events. It can help you enhance the overall experience, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure your business’ longevity. In this blog, we'll go over the importance of guest feedback and explore different strategies for using it to improve your events.
Why Guest Feedback Matters
Guest feedback can guide future decisions about your events. Are guests happy with the price they're paying and the quality of entertainment they're getting? Do your wait times meet expectations? What are your other strengths and weaknesses? By listening to what your customers have to say, you can make your events more engaging for every guest walking through the doors.
1. Define Why You’re Collecting Feedback
The type of feedback you collect and the specific questions you ask will vary widely depending on your goals. For example, you may want to:
- Identify areas where staff may need additional training
- Identify areas of your event that could be made more accessible to guests with disabilities
- Gauge demand for possible expansions, such as a new concessions are or an escape room add-on
- Improve your reputation through online reviews
- Show your impact on the local community (to help pitch sponsors, local zoning board, investors, or other stakeholders)
- Understand how guests heard about the event to determine which marketing efforts are the most effective
2. Methods for Collecting Feedback
- Use on-site feedback stations: Set up on-site stations where members of your team can speak with customers after they exit your event. This real-time feedback can be particularly insightful as it captures immediate impressions.
- Send out customer satisfaction surveys: Surveys can be sent before, during, and after your guests visit. These can be sent out online via email or through your website. Make sure to keep it concise and engaging to prevent people from clicking out prematurely. Tip: incentivize guests to participate by offering them a reward, such as a promo code that gives them a discount on their next admission. Passage can help you set up promo codes easily, just schedule a call with our team to learn more.
- Monitor reviews on social media: Don't forget that you can use social media platforms to find additional feedback about your events. Monitor comments and direct messages for insights as to what people are saying about your events. You can also encourage guests to share their experiences and suggestions online.
- Scan for online reviews: If you haven’t done so already, get your event registered on platforms like Yelp and Google Reviews where customers can submit their own reviews of your event. Here you can find very direct feedback on your event that’s all stored in one place.
3. Analyze the Data for Patterns
Once you’ve collected your data, now it’s time to analyze it for patterns. Start off by categorizing feedback into positive and negative, then work through key takeaways from each. To further interpret data, it can be helpful to organize data into visuals like graphs, charts, tables, or dashboards to clearly identify patterns, trends, and outliers.
Try categorizing your feedback into two buckets: (1) things that are mentioned the most, and (2) things that are easiest to change. Any items that fall into both buckets should be your first priority. For example, if guests frequently mention long wait times in a negative review, switching to timed tickets or adding a virtual queue would be a free and simple change with a big impact.
4. Create a Strategy for Improvement
This is where you can decide which changes are possible. You don’t have to take every single guest suggestion, but failing to incorporate customer feedback after its been collected can make attendees feel frustrated. It’s a waste of time and energy, on behalf of both you and your guests, if you don’t put that feedback to good use. Therefore, share your findings with the rest of your team and get started on crafting a strategy of what is achievable. Along with this, create a realistic timeline to implement these changes.
5. Test and Repeat!
Remember that not everything will be perfect the very first time. It’s important to continually test new ideas and innovations for their effectiveness on your goals, then keep iterating until you reach your desired outcomes.
Final Thoughts
In the ever-evolving world of entertainment, keeping your events feeling fresh requires dedication to careful strategy. Using guest feedback allows you to get inside of the minds of your customers to provide them with an experience that exceeds their expectations.
