The Customer Feedback Project ‘Listening to Our Visitors’: project review

The pilot Customer Feedback Project ‘Listening to Our Visitors’ (LTOV) was launched by the Scottish Government in 2007 with the aim of: increasing the number of tourism-related businesses collecting and utilising customer feedback; understanding and disseminating good practice in this area across the tourism sector; and encouraging better data collection and utilisation at business, destination and national level. The LTOV pilot involves supplier/industry engagement, practical resource, customer feedback workshops and area/national activity. The evaluation aimed to assess: strategic rationale; strategic fit; project performance and benefits achieved; delivery process; management information; linkage and dependencies; contribution to the equality agenda; and the preparation of a project monitoring framework.

Information sources consulted for the evaluation included strategic and policy documents, Scottish Enterprise (SE) approval papers and detailed LTOV project information. A detailed consultation programme and a beneficiary survey of a few participant companies were also carried out.

Aspects considered to be working well were the mutually beneficial package of the Practical Guide and the workshops, and the knowledge and enthusiasm of the delivery agents. The only aspect considered to be working significantly less well was the booking process for workshops. It was considered too early to judge whether the market failure underpinning the rationale for the pilot has been effectively addressed.

Overall, it was recommended that SE continue to develop the LTOV project for at least another three years. Some more specific recommendations were: the project should aim for an industry-wide perception change with regard to collecting and analysing data on customer experiences; more focus should be given to local destination areas, thus involving businesses located outwith the six key Scottish destination areas; workshops should be limited to 12 participants; LTOV should be more strongly promoted, marketed and signposted online; theme-based workshops should be developed to respond to the feedback of generic workshop participants; charges for workshop participation and follow-up activities should be developed and implemented; and the Project Monitoring and Evaluation Framework should be implemented.