Why do your visitors come to your museum, gallery, site, landscape? Is it for an experience?
Why do your visitors come to your museum, gallery, site, landcape?
What is there that gives them that?
What is there that gets in the way?
Our training is about the relationship between people and heritage and culture.
It's about the stories and how they are told, as part of interpretation.
It is also about the relationship staff and volunteers have with visitors and how this creates and builds the relationship visitors have with your museum, site, gallery, organisation…
In November 2019, we very excited to receive an email from Tate inviting us to tender, to propose training to develop their visitor experience.
We got hold of all the tender information and as we read it, the things we were excited about included the recognition by Tate, that all visitor facing staff are integral to the experience visitors could have, that Tate wanted to co-create the training and that it had the best chances of success if those taking part had a say and a role in it.
As part of the selection process, we had interviews with Tate's Heads of and with their front of house staff, and one of the practical ideas we demonstrated to them that became essential to the training was Engage + What we offered them was a series of 3 workshops, based on work we had done before and new work responding to their wants. The Workshops would define the experience they wanted visitors to have and how staff could make that happen, through their presence and interaction with visitors.
The process to develop the Workshops would take place as consultation with staff, pilot delivery and a train the trainers’ program where we would create a strong foundation for each workshop, and teach Tate trainers, who through the process of learning the Workshops would also evolve and improve them.
What we started with in the first workshop for Tate, was something that had already had various iterations over the years. And with each iteration, client or delivery we learnt more about how front of house staff and volunteers can influence the experience of their visitors. For many years, we had been asked by clients, and had ourselves got stuck with the idea, that front of house staff and volunteers need to be proactive, go up to visitors to initiate interaction. And therefore, our job had often been to help them find the confidence and methods to go up to visitors and to start conversations. It was an over-reaction to the problem of staff and volunteers not engaging with visitors as often or as well as their organisation desired. The issue with this approach was that it suggested that all visitors are open to be being spoken to all the time by staff and volunteers. And this is not something that is true or that staff and volunteers are comfortable to do or believe in.
What we think was true, was that visitors benefit from knowing and feeling that staff or volunteers are there and around for them and that there needed to be a methodology to make any interaction worth it for the visitor and the member of staff or volunteer. And recognition that staff and volunteers could either enhance or distance the engagement of their visitors.
As a way of trying to combine these two truths, we put our focus on to what visitor facing staff and volunteers do and say as part of their role. How could we help improve what happens in the interactions they already regularly have. In thinking about the role or job description of visitor facing staff we were aware that there were many moments of contact and dialogue with visitors and periods of time when they are just in the same space with visitors: On duty in a gallery space while visitors look at art, walking from one part of a building to another, in the café tidying tables, sitting at the admissions or info desk waiting for visitors or working their way through a busy queue… The member of staff or volunteer is always visible and therefore influencing how visitors think and feel about where they are and how they behave. Either having no effect or creating a negative impression or potentially contributing to a friendly, welcoming - insert your preferred adjective – experience, just by being in the presence of visitors. And one of the clearest ways to influence the space in which they found themselves, was for staff and volunteers to not so much be more proactive about approaching people, but to expend that energy ensuring they were more approachable to visitors. If visitors came to staff quickly and more frequently, then the need for assistance is looked after quicker before a problem grows, and there are more chances to have interactions that engage visitors with where they are and what is there.
In both regular dialogue and interactions and in being approachable in the presence of visitors, we could encourage staff and volunteers to be themselves, to be natural and authentic around and with visitors. One, so that staff and volunteers didn't have to pretend or do something they didn't believe in and two, so that visitors could enjoy and appreciate meeting real people, who represent where they work and play a positive role in building a relationship between visitors and where they visit.
We’ve been using the word Engage and Experience a lot. Classic museum vocabulary and if they are important then we need to define them and find their value within the role of visitor facing staff and volunteers. We did some work with the Churches Conservation Trust, at a handful of churches where volunteers welcome and interact with visitors. With these workshops came the question and reflection on what the volunteers thought visitors could do in their church - so they could best experience it. Would it be ok for children to enjoy exploring the pews like a maze, could a couple come in and have a loud conversation inspired by a memory the church space ignited, could someone not familiar with Church of England practise go up to the altar to look closely at the crucifix? Volunteers could respond to each of these visitors and have an effect on how they experienced the church: what they could do and think and feel. So, in those workshops, and subsequently in the ones at Tate, we gave a lot of attention to what visitors came to think, feel and do and what staff and volunteers could do to positively influence what visitors think and feel and do. Which is a practical, functional way to define experience.
If you have a good experience – have positive thoughts and feelings and actions - then you can engage and have a relationship with where you are and what you are with. Which then becomes a circular process of engage and experience. But what happens in this relationship – engagement? Or who or what is the relationship between? At Tate it’s the relationship between art, the collection and the buildings - with visitors. So just as staff and volunteers can influence visitors’ experience, they can also influence their quality of Engagement. And just as their experience is particular to them so is their engagement.
Workshop 1 at Tate - also known as Taking Ownership of Visitor Experience - focused on staff who worked throughout the buildings, gallery floors, entrance, admissions, membership, shops, learning and information - acknowledging the power they had to influence visitors’ experience (what they could think, feel and do) and how this could influence the quality of Engagement they had with Tate. The experience visitors want, expect and/or have varies enormously depending on who is there, so we spent time considering who comes, why they come, and how their visit could be a successful one. We then asked the workshop participants, to think about what someone who works front of house, visitor facing does with and around visitors… Think of the different roles and what they say and do with visitors? What activities they perform? For example, someone in a shop will say hello and good bye to people, they will work on the till so that visitors can buy things, they will keep an eye out for shop lifters, they will have conversations about their products and the exhibitions those products might be related to, they will give directions to the toilet…
We categorised it that front of house is responsible and carries out 4 key areas, in varying ways depending on role, location and situation:
Front of house is there for Help, Security, Revenue and Engagement.
So, our friend in the shop is mostly responsible for Revenue – selling things, but they are still doing the other 3. Another colleague who works in the gallery spaces – would very much in the past be an invigilator who pays attention to Security – but is now placing more attention to Help and Engage. And a conversation could lead to Revenue if there was a recommendation to an activity, membership, donation, visiting the café… Therefore the Quarters – our name for them – simply define the varying skills and tasks necessary in a visitor facing role. In the workshops, it often came out that Help was by far taking up the most of everybody’s time, followed by the obvious role of what was expected of people: revenue at ticketing and the shop, security for security staff… But which one matters most to most of your visitors? Do they come to feel safe, to get help, to buy something (well yes actually, some of you have delightful cafes that are worth the visit alone, and shops that are perfect especially in mid-December panics – but if you took the shop or café away you would still have a museum and visitors)
The Engagement – to experience what is there, is why they have come to your museum.
Security, Help and Revenue are all important – they are all needed to allow for or to remove barriers for visitors so they can have a positive experience and so they can engage. If engagement with your exhibition or collection, your site, your history and culture is what people come for but the other three quarters is what your colleagues find themselves mainly dispensing, why not combine them throughout? Could all the Quarters be done and said with engagement? This would be a way of tweaking what your colleagues were already doing, whilst giving visitors that extra something that meant they were in a cultural or heritage space, rather than just getting the great customer service they could receive at Sainsburys or B&Q. With “Engage+” everything would be done with the intention of creating a good experience and building a positive relationship with visitors and the exhibition, collection, space, history...
This is not rocket science, and will feel instantly familiar to many of you. What we hoped would happen (and has begun to happen at Tate and other sites where we have delivered this training) is that by codifying it, and by having an opportunity in the training to practice it, it wouldn’t just seem obvious but employing it would become second nature to everyone.
“Connect+” is what generally came out first in our workshops, and is a great starting point. Connect+ is, put simply, being nice to someone else - showing interest, welcome, kindness, empathy etc. It’s about the relationship between people and in turn with your organisation. This is where your values, culture, personality is created and demonstrated. Connect+ builds a relationship between visitors and your organisation through the relationship built with your staff and volunteers. It is not so easy or is not always possible to do Engage+ in every interaction or dialogue but Connect+ is always possible.
Often Connect+ has to come first: by noticing the person in front of you and starting that relationship, you can get an idea of who they are. Following even the briefest of interactions, that relationship builds and then the Engage+ can be specific to what their needs/desires are that you have gleaned, making the interaction more satisfying to you, to your visitor, and to the reputation/brand/culture of your site.
