www.parkworld-online.com
Industry Infl uencer
WHAT IS CONVIOUS?
now but rather than having a web shop working as a one size fits all, it’s understanding who is coming, what they want when they get there, and how you can succeed by delivering that to them. For example, in mainland Europe, we are seeing a huge
uplift in people purchasing tickets from sites other than the default language for the home site. So they’re going to a French-language site and changing it to German so they can purchase a ticket. That may not even have been possible 3-4 years ago. That’s attraction operators realising they have to service the whole market.
The attractions market
recovery is hinged on the move from quantity to quality. Quality of experience, quality of perceived value, and therefore the price they are prepared to pay for it
PW: The market is recovering, not recovered – is further relaxation where the rest of recovery comes from or is there something else?
AP: Further recovery comes from delivering a better service to the consumer so the customer is prepared to pay more for it. There is still a massive proportion of society – 25% of people – reporting that they are not comfortable going back to a park because they don’t want to be in crowds. The things we used to do in society have changed. The attractions market recovery is hinged on the move
from quantity to quality. Quality of experience, quality of perceived value, and therefore the price they are prepared to pay for it.
SPRING PART 2 2022
PW: Convious provides a platform for digital engagement, learning about the customer from the moment they visit the operator’s website. The data side of this is particularly interesting… Is a key facet of what you do data interpretation and reporting? It’s pretty simple to gather data but it’s knowing what to do with it and being able to do that in a cost-effective way that limits many companies.
AP: Data is no good unless you do something with it, and if it’s not contextualised in a real-world way. In the attraction space there has been a lot of talk
for 5-6 years about dynamic pricing and all of our competitors that offer this solution talk about their teams of economists crunching numbers from a financial perspective; our approach is different, we have a team of psychologists because what we want to understand is how people are interacting with what you’re offering. We’re in the attractions industry – our customers are great at putting on exhibitions, once-in-a-lifetime events, that kind of thing – so we need to be much better at understanding what our customers want when they come to engage with the attraction, online. That’s really our bag.
PW: It’s as though the other aspects of the business are about creating that data funnel, and that’s where your USP to the customer really resides.
AP: Our standard offering includes an app, and say you’re a theme park, we can put a map onto that app. From that we can start tracing where customers are, we can do mobile food ordering through the app. Say, for example, we already know the customer is vegan, we are then not going to send an offer promoting a burger joint – but it means we can promote the vegan restaurant close by for an early or a late lunch. Of course, we don’t offer a promotion at lunchtime because that’s peak demand.
Andy explained: “We sit in the grey area between a solutions provider and a service provider. The solution is e-commerce and the service is, unlike all of our competitors, we help our customers sell more. The Convious platform comes with a whole bunch of AI tools; we are obsessed with data and online conversion rates and we will take whatever pieces of information we can, and use those with the AI, and also through our Customer Success Team to actively try to help our customers more. “The platform is an enterprise- wide, linked e-commerce system running through website, app and on-site. We describe it as digital engagement. You’re not just selling a ticket – we start from before the visit, as soon as someone goes onto the website we put a cookie onto the browser so we can understand more about the visitor. We see how you are interacting with the website, the different links and pages you’re looking at; we can then use that information to promote something to you. Google might tell us you have a young family; if you’re looking at Thomas The Tank Engine on the website, when you click on the Buy Tickets button we can make sure it’s got something Thomas-themed at the top, because we have already identified your interest. “If you visit the website then go
away, we can understand how you have interacted and what worked and what didn’t; we are doing live A/B testing [seeing which options on a customer-facing website work best] at least once a week across our whole platform. The theory there is that by giving people what they want, we will then sell more! “We use long-range weather forecasts so we can anticipate what traffic is going to be like at a park the next Saturday; if attendance is looking great we can increase the price, and if it’s looking a little low we can increase the price that the attraction is spending on Google Ads, Facebook advertising, and we can re-target people who have visited the site but not yet purchased a ticket.”
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