Mark Schellenbach wrote on 02/23/10 8:35 PM

Paul,
I can’t recall having an excellent customer service experience at another museum as of late, but I did find some interesting information on museum customer service. According to ReachAdvisors.com, in their research of over 30,000 core visitors to museums, only one in ten think the staff really cares about them. But when they asked respondents what they would like to see changed in museums, only 2% indicated they wished the staff “cared more about them.” What this information says is that visitors don’t EXPECT excellent customer service. Given this, it seems that any positive changes made a museum’s customer service model can have a massive impact on the museum and its turn out. I can relate this point to the Zappos blog post in a way. Zappos’s customer service model is to “Wow” their customers – to offer a service experience that surpasses expectations. This model has worked well for Zappos. In a similar vein, by improving a museum’s customer service culture, a museum can surpass visitors’ expectations. This seems like the approach the Getty is implementing. This makes excellent sense considering Los Angeles’s competitive travel and tourism industry.

http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/museum_audience_insight/2008/12/why-should-we-care-the-perception-of-a-caring-staff.html

James Chung, Reach Advisors wrote on 02/24/10 6:09 AM

Paul, I'm with Reach Advisors, the strategy and research firm mentioned in your post and Mark's comment. I can't emphasize enough how good customer service can have a huge impact...even for museums...particularly in an era where there's such sharp competition for discretionary leisure time.

In our tourism industry research, we often find that a feeling of a personal connection established through good customer service is often the single-biggest driver for changing repeat visitation behaviors. While customer service is not often viewed as critical to a museum, driving repeat visitation often is. And when it's delivered purposefully and repeatedly, the impact can be huge. Perhaps one analogy is that when someone inserts a purposeful customer service system somewhere between five-cent copy machines and full-service print shops, something transformative can happen. While museums aren't in the same business of changing how people work, they are in the business of changing how people think.

So you ask the question about what other museums are delivering good customer service.

In the course of serving the museum field, we conduct occasional field-wide surveys and get to see what visitors think of hundreds of museums across America. There are some general trends, such as small local museums tend do much better than larger organizations when it comes to perceptions of care for the visitor (e.g., Family Museum in Bettendorf, Iowa). Of larger museums, outdoor history museums tend to do better (e.g., Conner Prairie in IN, Plimoth Plantation in MA, Hancock Shaker Village in MA, Genesee Country Village in NY, Living History Farms in IA outperform in our research). Perhaps it's a function of being outdoor history museums, where more creative staff interaction is part of their model. Perhaps it's a function that for the most part, that type of museum is indeed in the regional tourism business.

But it also helps when you're a museum like Conner Prairie (we don't work for them, but it's worth the visit), where everyone on the staff is totally wired around customer service. For example, there's a group of line managers there with the title of Guest Experience Manager for their unit. Sort of like at packaged goods companies where brand managers are responsible for making it happen for the consumer. Good customer service is not accidental at Conner Prairie. And it's probably why they are among the strongest performing museums in the country.