Creating a haunted attraction that keeps thrill-seekers crawling back for more, year after year, is no small task. Guest feedback is essential to maintaining the appeal of your haunt. It can help you enhance the overall experience, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure your haunt’s longevity. In this blog, we’ll go over the importance of guest feedback and explore different strategies for using it to improve your haunt attraction.
Why Guest Feedback Matters
Guest feedback can guide future decisions about your attractions. Are guests happy with the price they’re paying and the quality of scares 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 haunt more engaging for every guest walking through that front gate.
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 the attraction 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 attraction 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 go through the terrors of your haunt. 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 attraction’s 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. HauntPay can help you set up promo codes easily, just set up an onboarding to learn more.
- Monitor spirits on social media: Don’t forget that you can use social media platforms to find additional feedback about your haunt. Monitor comments and direct messages for insights as to what people are saying about your haunt. 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 haunt registered on platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, FrightFind, or The Scare Factor where customers can submit their own bone-chilling reviews of your haunt. Here you can find very direct feedback on your attraction 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.
Conclusion
In the ever-evolving world of haunted attractions, keeping your heart-pounding horrors feeling fresh requires dedication to careful strategy. Using guest feedback allows you to get inside of the twisted minds of your customers to provide them with an experience that fulfills their greatest nightmares.
