A recent posting on the Visitor Attractions discussion group on Linked In made me look twice: “Delivering minimum expected customer service rather than trying to deliver remarkable customer service is a better strategy. . .”
The title concerned me: I thought it was going to be an argument for cutting corners and maximising throughput; the ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’ philosophy. Who cares about quality when you get what you pay for . . . (In other words, the business model pursued par excellence by the budget airlines).
The provocative title worked because I clicked through and read the whole blog post (ready to violently disagree). And it turns out that the message was far more subtle: namely that it’s better to be acceptable 100% of the time than excellent 10% of the time and substandard the rest of the time.
No one is perfect, and sometimes in the pursuit of perfection we can overextend ourselves – offer too much; or make promises that our current resources can’t consistently deliver on.
Too often when we look at our visitor experiences and envisage how they could be improved, we look at the best case scenarios: how can we improve the best of what we have to offer? Conversely, this blog post argues that we’d do better to have a closer look at how we are doing on a bad day: how can we make sure that the minimum we have to offer is at the very least acceptable?
In other words, it’s a call to get the basics right: investment in whizz-bang technology or slick marketing campaigns is well and good, but it will not take away the bad memories of poor basic infrastructure or surly service. (Similar to the hierarchy of visitor needs in this presentation I gave to the Interpretation Australia conference last November)
It’s also about managing expectations – underpromise and overdeliver rather than the other way around.
So when we think about ‘raising the bar’ of visitor experiences, we should remember that it’s not always about making the best better. It’s can also be about improving ourselves at our worst.