DATA: What do happy visitors say?
- In Benchmarks
- Data bits
- 3 min read
Data from Dexibit’s global portfolio of visitor attractions.
When we focus on visitor happiness data, our attention often turns to complaints. Yet real value exists not only in focusing on the negative, but the positive, too.
Understanding what happy visitors say creates moments for celebration with your team, highlights to use in marketing and insights into what creates value for the public.
Visitors with positive reviews usually describe their visit with adjectives such as ‘amazing’, ‘awesome’, ‘nice’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘cool’. Unsurprisingly, ‘free’ makes a common appearance too! Most commonly, compliments are directed towards exhibitions, the quality of experiences for the kids and the whole family, as well as the staff. When it comes to exhibitions specifically (including temporary exhibits), happy visitors use words such as ‘supportive’, ‘different’ and ‘powerful’, with ‘amazing’ making an appearance again. When it comes to staff, happy visitors frequently use the word ‘nice’ or similar. For example:
“Girlfriends trip to *****. We were impressed by All the exhibits, the life history and everything about the Museum.
The food in the cafe was delicious. The staff was very pleasant and helpful.”
(venue specifics have been omitted)
In analyzing remarks, our technology also has to allow for reverse negatives (such as ‘it wasn’t too expensive’) and other oddities such as emojis. For example:
“Yes, the entrance fee of about 30 for adults, 15 for kids is high. (Family 🎟 are available.) But they maintain it perfectly. It’s either a place for those who are interested in history or people who just want to look and be impressed. 😮 I wish you will have the same amazing weather we had since walking around outside was wonderful. Tip: the 🚻 are a bit apart from each other. 🚺 more to the outside wall in the South, 🚹 100 yards to inside and more West. 😉”
In their remarks, happy visitors most commonly use words associated with joy, often in relation to the quality of the experience for kids, followed by trust and surprise. The most frequently used notable nouns in positive reviews are ‘kids’, ‘experience’, ‘fun’ and ‘family’ and ‘staff’. Interestingly, positive reviews tend to contain a greater proportion of capital letters – in fact a remarkable 24%, double what negative reviewers use.
Using Dexibit?
Dexibit uses a form of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide a first pass of visitor sentiment and key terms from freeform visitor remarks:
- Integrate with your digital reviews (e.g. Google My Business, Facebook), visitor survey system (e.g. Survey Monkey) and/or Net Promoter Score system (e.g. Ask Nicely)
- Alternatively, upload freeform remarks from a manual spreadsheet (e.g. from in person surveys, compliments and complaints or visitor attendant notes)
- Navigate to Insights > Sentiment and choose a channel to review
- Use the query feature to include or exclude terms from your dictionaries
Joy and trust are the most common emotions detected in visitor reviews, though in trust it is almost evenly split in both positive and negative contexts
Victoria Alogna
Lead Data Scientist
Victoria’s data science practice in and passion for machine learning, natural language and measurement comes from a unique perspective into visitor behavior, inspired by hear background in the cognitive and behavioral sciences.
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