Are Theme Parks making the most of social customer service? Introduction
When it comes to driving higher levels of engagement over social media, some industries have it easier than others in terms of a place to start from. Companies whose mission it is to thrill and delight customers on a daily basis should have no qualms about doing the same on social media. Theme parks fall into that category.
Theme parks set out to be world leaders in branded, location-based, entertainment that is capable of delivering memorable experiences for families and groups of friends. They are blessed with a wealth of content to bolster their marketing campaigns - including situations and images that highlight genuine extremes of emotion - but have they taken that content, that emotion, and used it to deliver a superior customer experience?
Social media allows brands to provide an experience based on customer context. For UK theme parks like Legoland Windsor and Thorpe Park, this should include a social customer service strategy that reaches out and engages with not just potential or previous visitors, but also people who are in the park at that moment.
Done correctly, proactive engagement will improve the quality of customer experience leading to higher satisfaction, loyalty and, hopefully, brand advocacy. However, before starting proactive customer service, it is important to have a strong foundation in the basics: speed and responsiveness. There is little sense in reaching out for engagement and then either responding slowly or not responding at all.
Taking a sample of popular theme parks within the UK, we used Conversocial’s Twitter Performance Tracker to give an indication of each brand’s current social customer service performance on that platform - a list of the Twitter accounts included in the analysis is provided at the end of the report.
Key Findings
From the sample taken for this report: • All eight theme parks fail to respond to 80% of @mentions on average.
• Five of the eight brands take more than four hours to respond to @mentions on average.
• Of responses given, five of the eight brands sent 50% or more in less than one hour.
2 Enhanced customer experience through social engagement
Being a social customer service agent for a theme park should mean more than just responding to complaints and questions. Developing the brand’s personality through two-way dialogues with customers should be a key part of their engagement strategy. On Twitter, this includes responding to a high percentage of @mentions, even if it is just to acknowledge a post:
Table 1: @mention Responsiveness (%)
Legoland
Chessington WOA
Thorpe Park
Oakwood Park
Blackpool Pleasure Beach
Gullivers World
Disneyland Paris
Drayton Manor
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Table 1 shows that the theme park handles reviewed in this report are poor responders to @mentions on Twitter - all eight fail to respond to 80% of @mentions on average. This means that more than two thirds of people contacting these brands on Twitter are not receiving a response.
Missed opportunities
Aside from not responding to people tweeting pictures and warm messages, Drayton Manor is also ignoring potential customers who clearly show an interest in visiting the park. See the full conversation here:
Costa Coffee @CostaCoffee • Jul 29 Thinking of a trip to @Draytonmanor with 6 & 10yr old. Anyone been?? Good bad or indifferent? #AskTwitter Expand Reply Retweet Favorite More
One of the advantages of engaging customers on social rather than traditional channels, such as email or phone, is that useful content can be viewed by more than one person. Brands should be taking advantage of every opportunity to place useful information online, where it can be located by anyone showing an interest in the product or service. Eventually, this would prove to be a cost-saving measure as it would lead to less incoming volume to customer service due to questions being answered by older interactions on social media.
3 Social reinforces and destroys reputations
For many people, a visit to a theme park is a once a year, or even a once-in-a-lifetime, event. Once customers enter the site, park employees have that day and various - but limited - touchpoints to try and create fans that will encourage others to follow in their footsteps. Making sure the rides are running smoothly, that the facilities are clean and refreshments are good quality are items of the highest priority. If a customer reports an issue with any of these things to an attendant offline, they would act to resolve it quickly and efficiently. The same should apply to social:
Table 2: Average Response Time (mins)
Disneyland Paris 56 mins
Thorpe Park 1 hr 34 mins
Chessington WOA 2 hr 52 mins
Drayton Manor 4 hr 30 mins
Legoland 4 hr 38 mins
Gullivers World 5 hr 50 mins
Blackpool Pleasure Beach 7 hr 13 mins
Oakwood Park 25 hrs
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600
Table 2 shows that five of the eight brands take more than four hours to respond to @mentions on average. Disneyland Paris has the best average response time of 56 minutes, while Oakwood Park takes more than a day to respond to @mentions on average. A largely positive experience can be forever marred by a single negative. For example, it is human nature to always remember a bad meal on a trip, no matter how happy the attractions make us or how clean the facilities are. Therefore, these brands must be doing everything possible to resolve issues while the customer is on site. Apart from losing out on return customers, research has suggested that 48% of people will tell their friends about a good customer experience on social, while 56% will talk about a bad one (Ebiquity, 2012). For more information on the amplification of complaints and other challenges on social media, read this report.
4 Surpassing customer expectations in social customer service
Opinions on which park has the best rides vary. People seek different kinds of thrills - neck- breaking speed, stomach-churning twists, a flying sensation, rides that soak you with water, rides that plunge into inky-black darkness… whatever the preference, all of these rides have one thing in common: at peak times, there will be a queue at some point. Theme parks can leverage social customer service to make queues an opportunity to surprise and delight, rather than a place nobody wants to be, if they are able to reach out as quickly as possible:
Table 3: Responses under one hour (%)
Thorpe Park
Chessington WOA
Disneyland Paris
Legoland
Gullivers World
Blackpool Pleasure Beach
Drayton Manor
Oakwood Park
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Table 3 paints a generally positive picture for most of the brands featured in this report. However, given that they have been shown to be fairly unresponsive to @mentions in general, we should expect that when they DO respond, they manage to do so quickly due to the low volume of responses made. An impressive 81% of Thorpe Park’s responses were sent in less than an hour, but they are only responding to 12% of @mentions. Or in other words, for the week that was measured in June 2014, the handle received 1753 @mentions, but only responded to 227 of them; 183 of which were sent in less than an hour.
Imagine this scenario: a customer is queueing for a ride on a very sunny day. After waiting for 30 minutes, they tweet to the park to complain about the lack of shade and the waiting time. The social customer service agent immediately responds to the tweet by asking an attendant to go down to the queue with bottles of water and lets the customer know they have done so…
The queue has not been shortened and the heat is just as intense but that park has just gained an advocate for life by detecting and responding to that customer quickly. Which of the brands in Table 3 would be capable of achieving this scenario before the customer leaves that queue?
5 Closing thoughts
Traditional proactive customer service can take a number of forms, from FAQs and forums to knowledge bases and instructional videos. Proactive customer service over social media means something slightly different. Due to the public nature of most of its content, Twitter allows brands to reach out when they’ve been indirectly mentioned or when the customer uses a key term relating to that brand. With Twitter, you’re not just listening or monitoring; you are engaging with the customers who need you most.
Other than responding to indirect mentions, theme parks can be proactive on social by:
• Telling customers about a problem before they hear it from someone else - this helps build trust and avoids negative PR.
• Not just reaching out when something is wrong - theme parks should constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to surprise and delight.
People appreciate brands that offer hassle-free, speedy and efficient assistance - and are willing to share positive customer service experiences. Conversocial is a cloud solution that enables businesses to deliver customer service over social media at a large-scale. Our software is used in the contact centres of hundreds of major retailers, banks, telcos, and other brands to enable them to manage the high volumes of complaints and questions they’re receiving through social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
How are these figures calculated?
We used the Twitter Search API to find mentions of each Twitter handle. We then gathered and matched the replies to mentions and calculated the time taken in each case, excluding the slowest 5% of tweets (which can otherwise disproportionately affect the results).
Twitter handles analysed: @DraytonManor, @Disneyparks, @GullyMouse, @Pleasure_Beach, @OakwoodThemePK, @ThorpePark, @CWOA, @LegolandWindsor
6 @conversocial conversocial.com [email protected]