Chester Zoo roars into action using PDAs to survey visitors
February 2007
Along with many attractions all over the world, zoos face a number of common obstacles: How can we encourage repeat visits? What factors most affect visitor experiences and satisfaction? Addressing these questions is vital to the long-term sustainability of any zoo.
Visitor surveys are now widely used to help identify and profile visitors. The purpose of these is to give an insight into customers’ views and opinions and to help identify low satisfaction areas. Tourism is the world’s largest industry generating annual revenues of almost $500 billion, which makes it a very competitive business. For this reason, it is imperative to ensure your visitors have an enjoyable experience.
It’s not only crocodiles that Snap at Chester Zoo!
One of the UK’s largest and most beautiful zoos receives approximately one million visitors a year, making it one of the most popular zoos in the UK. It has recently undergone a multi million pound investment that has completely changed and improved the attraction. In addition, a new satisfaction monitoring system has been implemented to examine the zoo experience and Snap’s mobile interviewing software was chosen to administer this.
Having always designed visitor surveys using Word and analysed the results in Excel, staff at the zoo were looking for a more integrated solution and so attended one of Snap’s free Regional Roadshows. They initially chose the traditional face to face interviewing method of paper and clipboard but this was gradually replaced with PDA devices. These have now been so successful they have fully abolished the paper visitor survey and now use PDA interviewing for a wide range of other projects.
Gate staff have been trained in conducting visitor surveys using PDAs; data is downloaded on a weekly basis and a report is created. Combinations of paper and PDA surveys are being used at the Frost Fair to evaluate the success of the annual event amongst stall holders and visitors. The Zoo also conducts a user satisfaction survey using comment cards at the newly opened Café Tsavo.
Snap helps Chester Zoo maintain the lion’s share in visitor satisfaction
Visitor response rates saw a significant increase as soon as Snap software was implemented. This was directly attributed to the fact that employees were excited and motivated that the zoo had found a proper solution to the survey problem. The results are also displayed on the staff Intranet to involve the staff further and to show they are valued. Visitor feedback has maintained an excellent response rate and Martha McKinley, Chester Zoo’s Marketing Assistant thinks this is because of their new interviewing method. “The survey task before we implemented Snap was time consuming and labour intensive. Since switching to PDA interviewing we have seen increased staff satisfaction and a positive response from our visitors.”
Snap is already helping many Travel & Tourism companies around the world to profile their visitors. For further information on how Snap can help organisations in this industry please click here. For Chester Zoo visitor information please visit www.chesterzoo.org.