5Es: Map the Journey

You are reading the final chapter of our 5 Es of Visitor Experience article series. Click here to start from chapter 1.

Grab some paper or a whiteboard and start mapping out the path you’re expecting your customer to walk.

Are you creating a good experience?

If you were a visitor, would you be happy?

If you’ve done the what it’s like today mapping, you’ve probably been left a bit underwhelmed. Resist the temptation to over sell your current situation to make yourself feel better and use that energy to design a fantastic future journey.

Service Design

How do you find ideas about improving your customer service journey? My suggestions is to look to what others are doing. Take ideas from businesses that you admire, and not just ones from your industry. Think back to times when you’ve received exceptional service – what made it so noteworthy?

Little Things

How much does it cost to learn someone’s name?

How much does it cost to greet people with a smile?

How much does it cost to send a follow up email?

Looking back at the example posts, you may notice that many of the good examples don’t cost much to implement. A well-timed message, careful folding of clothes, minimalistic shop windows, free beer with haircuts, liquorice oil in air vents, a curated music playlist… these things aren’t huge expenses.

What’s Right for You?

Great experiences are what helps people understand the value of what you do, how it is one of a kind, and why purchasing from you is the obvious choice – it’s what creates brand loyalty. Those experiences are already linked to a place, but when you’ve on holiday and visited 5 places already, some of the context can get a bit blurred. We need to make sure that what people see, hear, smell, feel, taste and experience at your place is strongly branded so that as the memory fades your visitors can still identify the location.

We believe brand should be at the centre of everything, and that a brand that has a bit of character is relatable, and it can be brought to life in 3D. Brand is more than just a logo. It is the essence of what your product is about, what experiences you provide, and how you provide them.

It’s what makes you unique, and what can make you memorable if you are consistent about it.

For businesses that don’t have a good handle on what their brand is like – what it’s personality might be like if it were a person – we’ve put together a profiler quiz. You answer 10 or 11 questions, and it gives you a base personality to start from. Its free to take, you can take it as many times as you want.

We’ve got some blogs on the base personalities on our website, but we’re architects, and what we do give your place a personality – so there’s things that identify you from everyone else that you can use in your marketing to entice people, and that exists in people’s memories that reminds them specifically where they were. Once you’ve completed the quiz, email us for your personality specific character card that starts to look at colours, patterns and atmosphere that might be right for your brand.

Click through to the profiler here.

Keep Evolving

This is your first attempt. It won’t be perfect.

Know your brand and keep looking for ideas. Try something new when you can and evaluate what impact it made.

Keep thinking about your customer; how they’re feeling while they’re with you, and then developing a keen eye for potential improvements that fit with your brand.

It will give you a competitive edge, and the best chance of success.

 

This is the final chapter of our 5 Es of Visitor Experience article series. Click here to start from the beginning, or jump to Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, and Extend, and Mapping the Journey.

LET'S JUST START WITH A COFFEE

For most tourism businesses, working on your buildings and grounds is a big deal. There is a lot of money and time at stake and can be difficult to know where to start. So let’s just start with a coffee.