Headquartered in Madrid, Spain, and with assets in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Australia, Parques Reunidos is the eighth largest leisure park operator worldwide. Read how they changed the company culture by giving everyone ownership over customer experience.
Although Parques Reunidos is one organization, running 60 parks makes it for a very complex organizational structure: all parks have the same overall goals and objectives, in line with the overarching mission and values; however, they also have individual requirements, branding, and processes that are specific to each one location. It’s more like running 60 individual businesses under one umbrella.
Gerardo Laino is Head of Customer Experience for Parques Reunidos. With over ten years of experience working in customer experience, Gerardo’s background comes from the data-heavy insurance world, where it is essential to recall and analyze the minor details about dozens of client accounts.
At Parques Reunidos, the customer experience team oversees the improvement of the customer experience for the organization as a whole, at the same time ensuring that processes are in place for continuity and efficiency.
With hundreds of thousands of customers passing the gates of Parques Reunidos parks each year, the task of overseeing and scrutinizing this volume of data is immense. Information is gathered from each of the locations, in multiple languages, from various sources.
A highly efficient data processing and data analysis tool is necessary to utilize this data.
Parques Reunidos vast portfolio includes over 60 amusement parks, water parks, zoos, aquariums, and hotels across 14 countries. Over the course of a year, they receive hundreds of thousands of guests.
To understand the customer experience and continuously improve, the company collects and analyses data from three sources, that they then use to inform KPIs related to enhancing the customer experience.
Firstly, a post-visit NPS survey, secondly claims and complaints, and finally, post-visit reviews through third-party sites such as Booking.com, Google Reviews & TripAdvisor. Over 80% of the reviews they analyse come from Google Reviews.
Reading and reviewing this quantity of data was a time-intensive process before Lumoa, and Gerardo found it frustrating trying to translate reviews from multiple languages. He also found it difficult to group reviews by topic to evaluate how conversations and topics progressed over time and assess whether issues were being addressed correctly; he saw the data was too disorganized to segment and utilize the feedback effectively.
Some of the parks within the portfolio have very short seasons. In some cases, such as their waterpark in Norway, this can be as short as five weeks per year. Therefore, it is vital that management can make rapid decisions to act on customer feedback and ensure that visible efforts are being made to improve customer experience – all within a narrow timeframe.
When starting at Parques Reunidos, Gerardo found it difficult to access and analyze the information within the short periods of time needed to make these decisions for all the parks.
Most of Parques Reunidos parks are “proximity” parks rather than “destination” parks. That means that they are designed to appeal to the local market, and therefore they tend to be visited by people who live in the 200km surrounding each location.People who visit Parques Reunidos parks often return year on year.
Building long-term relationships and ensuring the attractions remain interesting and satisfy customer expectations is imperative to the long-term success of the business. Standards must remain high; if a customer has a bad experience that isn’t handled correctly or improved upon by the next visit, it will be challenging to regain trust.
We were handling the reviews, but we weren’t able to perform any hard analysis, we could only perform soft analysis before.
Gerardo Laino – Head of Customer Experience
While many reviews were being received even before taking Lumoa into use, it was difficult to determine the overall sense of what customers were trying to say and to understand what that meant for the business.
This was mainly due to a fragmented and decentralised approach in examining customer data. The feedback was segmented to each park, which was effective at a micro-level, but at the same time proved unhelpful at a macro level, as it was only possible to perform soft analysis rather than complicated analysis for broader business decisions.
Gerardo Laino first discovered Lumoa in 2019 while working in his previous role, and having worked in customer experience for a decade, he was already knowledgeable about NPS and the impact it can have on improving customer experience.
He realized that Parques Reunidos was struggling to review the vast quantity of comments and feedback received and that segmenting and analyzing this data could have a quantifiable impact on the business.
When selecting a provider for analyzing NPS, Gerardo discussed options with three vendors before deciding to work with Lumoa. He needed a product with a rapid ramp-up to minimize the time to market.
One of the concerns for me was the time to market. In a typical project when working on AI, or linguistic AI the typical ramp-up is no less than two months, considering the complexities that we have and including the 14 languages. I needed something that we could plug-in and basically start working with. That was one of the biggest selling points for me about Lumoa.
Gerardo Laino – Head of Customer Experience
He also knew that the service he would receive would be practical and precise – working hands-on with a member of the Lumoa team meant that the service was designed to fit precisely with the complex requirements of Parques Reunidos.
In such a rapidly moving industry with so many moving parts, it makes sense that the tools used to support the business also need to evolve and adapt.
Lumoa works hard to give clients the functions their business needs.
“The team at Lumoa is very responsive, even when it comes to missing functions or possible product improvements. In some cases, it only took 2 weeks between us signalling a need for improvement and the new function being available in Lumoa.”
For Parques Reunidos, this approach has reinforced the trust that our tool can grow and evolve alongside with their business.
Data gathered and analyzed using Lumoa offers clear insights into which touchpoints across the entire portfolio need improvement.
After analyzing the NPS scores and comments, Parques Reunidos have decided this year to add more touchpoints to gain an even deeper understanding of customer experience. Some areas they will track include after a customer buys the ticket, after using the restaurant, after using the toilet, and more.
For this, Parques Reunidos will install physical devices in the parks to collect this data, which will be transferred to Lumoa for analysis and evaluation.
Using Lumoa enables Parques Reunidos to track specific customer interactions, both in real-time and historically.
For example, when re-opening parks after the Covid-19 pandemic, a decision needed to be made about how many restaurants to maintain open and staffed in each park. Some parks might have up to 15 restaurants, and by estimating an average attendance lower compared to pre-pandemic times, the management decided to have only a few restaurants active in most parks.
However, the demand turned out to be much stronger than expected, and real-time data in Lumoa showed that customers were complaining about staff shortages and long wait times.
Management could go as deep as to see where the issues were stronger, and this created an immediately actionable set of data to make rapid improvements.
What’s even more important is that they could see that after implementing the changes, complaints were going down week after week, while sales were going up. This proved that taking action quickly was the right thing to do and convinced the different stakeholders of the value of analysing customer feedback with a tool like Lumoa.
Lumoa has become the go-to tool for customer experience insights at Parques Reunidos, and its use is not solely limited to those who sit within the customer experience team.
In 2021 few people in the organization were using Lumoa. In 2022, almost everyone in the company uses Lumoa, and over 200 people use it regularly.
The Chief Customer Officer, for example, is a strong advocate of Lumoa and checks it before visiting any of the parks to assess the overall situation and understand any issues that need addressing.
We went from only a few people knowing Lumoa in 2021 to everyone in the organisation knowing and using it in 2022.
Gerardo Laino – Head of Customer Experience
Some of the executive directors of the group check the analysis every week. Other regular users of the platform include Marketing Directors, Customer Directors, and General Managers from each park.
Lumoa has become ingrained with customer experience at Parques Reunidos, so much so that Lumoa data is used in the weekly meetings with the top 20 parks of the group.
Each park has created its private dashboards where comments about specific things (such as restaurants, attractions, services, etc.) can be easily accessed and discussed during such meetings.
Working with Lumoa in so many areas of the business has encouraged traction and created an overall cultural change within the group.
Giving team members tangible data and a transparent scoring system that directly reflects customer opinions has offered a platform that allows this data to be observed, discussed, and addressed in a more honest and impactful way. This has led to more ownership of customer experience from teams worldwide.
Using Lumoa quite simply saves time by getting straight to the point. It’s easy to see and understand exactly what the problem is at any point in time, in any park, in any segment.
With Lumoa, I can go straight to the insights in real-time. When management comes and says, look, we don’t have time, what happened? What exactly was our problem last month, or last week? I can give an answer straight away so that we can go there and try to fix it.
Gerardo Laino – Head of Customer Experience
This allows management to fully understand both the micro and macro issues and the overall picture.