How to Unleash the Power of Your Guest Experience Platform - SSA Group

Written by Katie Reinhart | 8/1/23 1:58 PM

Often, the most challenging aspect of implementing new software or technology is understanding and grasping all the benefits it can offer.

Perhaps you’ve recently acquired a guest experience platform or are thinking about doing so for your cultural attraction and are struggling with how to use it to its fullest potential. While you probably understand the value that it offers in enhancing in-person experiences for your guests, it’s also a pretty common challenge organizations face in not using these platforms to their full potential.

Below, we’ll go through three key benefits guest experience platforms offer and how to utilize each feature to support your organization.

1. Leverage Guest Journey Data for Smarter Guest Segmentation

Organizing your guest data across a variety of marketing channels can often feel like an overwhelming task. With a guest experience platform, you can connect all of your onsite platforms in one place and let the platform analyze your data to help you build segments that you can then use to make even more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.

For example, you could use your platform to see things such as if guests are families or couples, how often they visit, if they come for special events, or if it’s more of a regular occurrence. Additionally, you can see if they purchase retail or food while at your location, along with other helpful pieces of data. From there, you can build user segments that highlight their specific interests and behaviors to reach them with the right message, on the right channel, and at the right time.

Our partners also use guest experience platforms to analyze interactive heat maps to understand and identify high and low foot traffic areas, which can then help you better optimize resource allocation and improve operational efficiency. A great example of this is putting a flexible food concept in an area of your park that has high traffic but no food outlets to help drive additional revenue and guest satisfaction.

2. Work Smarter, Not Harder: Automate Admissions, Retail, and Food

One of the main value drivers of integrating a guest experience platform into your cultural attraction tech stack is that it automates aspects that you might otherwise have to handle manually. This gives your staff more time to handle more complicated queries from guests and it makes your guests’ experience frictionless and more enjoyable. In fact, 96 percent of guests who use guest experience platforms such as Attractions.IO report having a positive experience with the digital companion.

A guest experience platform can help with this in a variety of ways. Here are a few ways to automate aspects of your visitor’s in-person experience:

Admissions: Consider embracing features like a mobile ticket wallet and automated check-in (using your guest’s location data) to create an efficient entry process and make it easy for them to arrive with very little wait time.
Food: Cut down on restaurant or food truck lines, by adding mobile food ordering and virtual queues to your guest phone app so they can order or ‘wait’ while they continue to explore and enjoy walking around your attraction.
Retail: Make it easy to purchase a souvenir straight from your app by suggesting options based on the different parts of your attraction visited. It will be waiting for guests when they leave. Or, pay for a product in the app and just walk out, no need for a traditional check out.

3. Make it Personal: Custom Guest Experiences = Long-Term Loyalty

A personalized experience can drive loyalty and return visits and guest experience platforms can assist with that by making each person’s time with you seamless and special. Here’s how:

Segmenting your customers by specific categories like behavior or demographics can help personalize marketing messaging as well as enhance their experience before, during, and after their time with you.
Build customized itineraries for your guests based on preferences and allow them to share their feedback for continuous improvement.
Finally, give guests the option to create their own personalized experiences, with in-app photo integration to access and purchase photo memories at their convenience, which can foster a deeper connection to the cultural attraction and extend the visitor’s engagement beyond the physical visit.

A Platform for Everything

Guest experience platforms continue to evolve into more than a ‘nice to have’ but a necessary addition to automate and improve in-person experiences, giving families more time to enjoy the live experience provided by a cultural attraction.

Learn more about how SSA and Attractions.io bridge the gap between physical and digital experiences to advance the guest experience at cultural attractions, here.

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