AUDIENCE MATTERS
SIX WAYS TO REIMAGINE YOUR VISITOR EXPERIENCE
1. Start with your mission and voice. Your visitor experience should feel like an extension of who you are. Use your institutional values and tone as the foundation.
2. Create a common purpose. Craft a short, unifying statement that expresses why your institution exists from the visitor’ s perspective. It should be energizing and memorable enough for all staff to easily recall.
3. Co-create with staff; don’ t dictate. Invite staff to shape your service values and behaviors. When staff help define principles, they take ownership and pride in living them.
4. Make the work real and specific. Pair each value with clear, actionable“ I” statements that staff can follow to embody the service values. For example:“ I go above and beyond to exceed expectations.”
5. Connect the dots across departments. Build opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration. A visitor-centered culture is only possible when internal silos give way to shared responsibility.
6. Train for mindset, not just procedure. Focus on mindsets like curiosity, presence, and collaboration, not just rules or policies. These shape how people respond under pressure and foster consistency.
Application: Bringing It to Life With the framework complete, we turned our focus to application. We designed a one-day, in-person customer service training and delivered the same session five times, ensuring that nearly 130 visitor-facing staff across departments could participate. These were not lecture-style training sessions. They were participatory, hands-on workshops built around real visitor scenarios, peer learning, and practical skills. Our aim was to go beyond theory and build muscle memory.
We focused on mindsets: the internal habits of thought that shape external behavior. If service values define what we aim to do, mindsets describe how we go about doing it. We taught four core mindsets:
■ Active listening and presence: Focused attention creates trust. We practiced slowing down, tuning in, and reflecting what we heard, even under stress.
■ Curiosity and open-mindedness: Every visitor is different. This mindset encouraged staff to stay receptive, ask questions, and challenge assumptions.
■“ Yes, and” thinking: Borrowed from improvisational theater, this mindset helps staff build on a visitor’ s request, even when they can’ t fulfill it exactly as asked. It shifts“ we can’ t” into“ here’ s what we can do.”
■ Co-creation and collaboration: Visitors are not problems to solve. They’ re people to partner with. This mindset fosters shared ownership and empathy, especially in challenging moments.
Staff practiced applying these mindsets to real-world scenarios, such as a tourist arriving just before closing or a visitor upset about bag-check policies. We also introduced service recovery strategies drawn from the initial hospitality program: practical techniques like apologizing with empathy, solving
26 MUSEUM / November−December 2025 / aam-us. org 42 MATAHEF ISSUE 03