Difference Between Visitor Experience and Visitor Engagement

In the age of rising expectations from visitors, businesses are constantly trying to find new ways to elevate their visitor satisfaction rates. Ensuring that the visitors have a seamless experience whenever they visit an establishment depends on various factors. Two of these factors are visitor experience and visitor management.

Visitor experience and visitor management are terms that are often used by businesses interchangeably. However, both of them have striking differences that can make this practice a harmful one for any business. Let’s explore what both of these terms mean, and how they differ from each other.

What is Visitor Experience?

The visitor experience is the feeling of a visitor after their visit to any establishment concludes. It comprises how they felt about the interactions they had with the employees if they used any software on-premises like a visitor management system to provide feedback, how well they were services, and how seamless was their entry and checkout process. The visitor experience is a holistic metric, which develops an image in the minds of a visitor about the establishment based on their overall experience of the visit. Emotional delight, ease of use of the products, accessibility of services, and many other factors come together to form the visitor experience.

What is Visitor Engagement?

Visitor engagement is the reaction of a visitor to the various experiences they have while visiting an establishment. It depends on the tangible activities that are performed by a visitor, which can be visibly identified by the employees. For instance, if a visitor has a good experience on their first visit to a hotel, and they return to the hotel often, that is visitor engagement. On the other hand, if a visitor is overwhelmed with being greeted by a visitor management system in the hotel, and takes that away as a positive experience, then that is the visitor experience. Hence, visitor engagement can be defined as the tangible actions of a visitor that includes all the touchpoints that exist between the brand and the visitor.

Visitor Engagement or Visitor Experience – Which is Better for Businesses?

While people often try to find the better of two things, sometimes, both can be equally beneficial. The same is true for visitor engagement and visitor experience. Both of these are correlated to each other, and providing both equal attention is the key to any business’s success. 

Elevating visitor experience plays a key role in generating visitor engagement. And if your business isn’t prepared with any visitor engagement strategies, then you can be missing out on a lot of opportunities for customer retention and acquisition. Moreover, you can even miss the chance to interact with your customers, building a relationship with them, and ensuring that their experience with your brand remains positive.

Providing a sincere effort for offering empathy, simplicity, and clarity with your visitors can help you in generating visitor engagement. This helps in enhancing the visitor experience. From this information, it can be concluded that visitor experience is a prerequisite for developing a rigid visitor engagement strategy, and visitor engagement is necessary for maintaining visitor experience.

How to Generate Visitor Engagement?

There is a multitude of ways which your business can use to generate visitor engagement. Some of the most impactful of these ways are as follows:

• Providing them with undivided attention. To ensure that your visitors are engaging with your brand, it is imperative that they feel like they’re being heard. The frontline employees of your business must take all the appropriate steps for ensuring that visitors are provided with undivided attention. You can use visitor management software to offer automated responses to the visitors for any queries or guidance to enhance their visitor experience.
• Understand the needs of your visitors. They must never feel ignored or unimportant whenever they are in your facility. Visitor management plays a vital role in ensuring that visitors have all the information they need to conduct their business with you.
• Meet and greet your visitors. It will be a great opportunity for your business to get live insights about your customers if you interact with them. Try to interact with them online as well when they provide any reviews or feedback, as it will provide them with a sense of being heard and being relevant for your business. These efforts can go a long way to build visitor engagement.
• Create useful and impactful content for your visitors. This can be done through customizing your visitor management software in a manner that it can send out engaging and useful content to the visitors like offer updates, newsletters, etc. This can significantly boost your visitor interactions, and help the visitors in being aware of what’s going on with your business which encourages them to visit again.

Conclusion

Now that you know the difference between visitor experience and visitor engagement, you can comprehensively build strategies that can help you in elevating your brand image. Using a visitor management system like piLOBI can assist you in performing this task, and carrying it till the end.