Building Customer Loyalty One Guest at a Time with Inquisite
Paramount Parks' mission of ‘making people happy by providing them with fun, excitement and memorable experiences is no laughing matter. Offering the ultimate vacation experience for the more than 13 million guests who visit the company's parks annually is a serious business, especially when consumers are selective in how they spend their vacation in a weak economy. With annual revenues of $500 million, Paramount Parks operates or manages theme parks in the US, Brazil, Canada and Spain. Paramount Parks is the theme-park division of Viacom, a multi-national entertainment conglomerate that generated revenues of $24.6 billion in 2002.
Mark Kupferman, Paramount Parks' Corporate Director of Research, has made the web-survey software from Inquisite Inc. the centerpiece of his company's extensive customer-feedback initiatives. After looking at several competing products, he chose Inquisite. Kupferman says, "Inquisite takes the guesswork out of online surveying by combining its intuitive nature with an arsenal of high-end features that allow survey administrators to build complex surveys from scratch."
Letting Park Visitors Have Their Say
"With millions of customers each year, it's almost impossible for us to develop the individual relationships with our guests that we think are so important. While it's easy to communicate with our guests via television advertising and our website, the communication is mostly one-way. We wanted visitors to play a more active role in telling us what they liked, what they thought could be improved and what they wanted more of to make their park experience better. Inquisite allows us to do that," Kupferman explains.
Although Paramount had conducted one-on-one customer satisfaction research via teams of employees in its theme parks for years, Kupferman was looking for a more convenient solution.
"Most guests aren't interested in spending 20 minutes to tell us about their experiences. It's difficult to record extensive qualitative information in the park environment, and our in-person surveys must be very short," he says. "Not to mention that guests are somewhat self-conscious about their responses when faced with a real-life interviewer. We wanted a solution through which guests could tell us as much as they wanted in the privacy of their own homes – where they didn't feel pressured to be anything other than completely candid about their visits to our park."
Kupferman has conducted more than 55 surveys using Inquisite since acquiring the application. Those surveys, which netted about 100,000 individual responses in one year, measured guests' satisfaction with rides, dining, shopping, games and shows at each park.
Rapid Feedback Allows Immediate Adjustments
"The flexibility of Inquisite makes it possible for us to easily collect both quantitative and qualitative data about the overall guest experience. Results from our satisfaction surveys are distributed to each area of each park on a weekly basis and are used to make almost immediate adjustments to the way we serve and interact with our guests," he says. "When we're deciding on new rides, we try to involve our guests in every step of the process, ranging from general research about the types of rides they prefer to the themes they'd like to see to the final names of the rides. After the rides are open, we use Inquisite to understand guest satisfaction with the final product."
Kupferman says Paramount Parks also uses Inquisite to help management better understand the impact of its advertising and guest visitation plans. "In terms of advertising, we've used Inquisite to survey guests about what they thought about our TV commercials before we air them. During the season, we use Inquisite to understand our guests' awareness of our advertising and to determine their intent to visit our parks, as well as our competitors. At the end of the season, we use Inquisite to understand why some consumers visited our parks, while others didn't."
Kupferman says Inquisite has already paid for itself many times over. "We've been able to do a lot of research we probably wouldn't have done otherwise due to the cost savings We also wouldn't have been able to do the number or variety of different surveys we were able to do this year," he says. "Inquisite also has given us the flexibility to do surveys quickly and, to some extent, on impulse. It's easy for us to test an idea that we previously might not have wanted to spend a lot of research money on."