You can save time and money by asking visitors what they want — and what they don’t.
By Craig Root
In a WIA article posted November 8, 2024, I discussed using onsite polling to evaluate customer experience. For example, if I have a bad time at a business, I don’t call the manager over and complain. I vote with my feet and don’t return. However, if I’m approached in a courteous tone on my way out and asked, “What did you like about your experience and where can we improve?” I’m happy to talk about what was negative. Especially if you keep it short and offer a small gift like your most inexpensive waiters corkscrew for my time.
Polling can also be used to evaluate public reaction to a change in the experience you are considering offering the public. Are you going to offer tours? Are you going to offer off-road tours? Are you going to offer food and wine tastings as opposed to just wine tasting? Are you going to offer picnic grounds and maybe have a grab-and-go cooler with picnic foods? There are many productive changes you can make, and in an era where sales are down, new experiences can increase profits.
As discussed in my previous article, you need two gregarious staff members to stand about 20 to 30 feet away from your exit (or another designated spot). One person is holding a clipboard to write down responses and one employee is doing most of the talking.
Zero in on choices
Here are two real life examples that I organized for two different wineries/organizations.
In the first case, a popular Sonoma Valley winery wanted to create a picnic area so customers would stay longer and buy more wine. First we tested for “Were people interested in using the picnic area?” There’s no point in going through the time and expense of creating the picnic area if no one is interested. After polling more than 100 people, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Approximately 90% of responders said they would be interested.
Since we had such a positive response to the creation of the picnic area, we wanted to increase profits and enhance the taste of wine with food from a grab-and-go cooler. We came up with a list of about 15 food items for inclusion. All of us (including myself) thought that vacuum-packed pate (and vegetarian pate) would be a good choice, along with cheeses, breads, charcuterie and more. Instead, pate finished dead last in our polling. The winery then tried pate as a small test and it failed miserably. These are good things to know.
Find what interests the audience
In the second case, I was helping a wine region in California create a regional visitor center similar to the one I helped create in Lodi.
Think of the Lodi Winegrape Commission Visitor Center as the hub of a wheel: Visitors can go there in the morning and taste some of the various wines from the region and learn about the region from the center’s knowledgeable staff. Based on their conversation with visitors, staff can direct them to the “spokes” of the wheel (that is, to the area tasting rooms that they are most apt to enjoy). In essence, creating a tailored day for visitors rather than random selections.
The proposed site for this regional tasting room was a small town in the heart of the region. First, we wanted to find out if there was enough interest in this type of facility. Would people want to visit?
The dilemma was where to do the polling. It turned out there was a large service station at a major highway intersection in the town. We got permission to question people while they were standing at their cars filling up their tanks. We identified tourists by luggage in their cars. Cars with wine boxes were especially interesting to us. Once again, after weeks of polling, the response was very positive.
Next, we wanted to find out what types of attractions people wanted. For example, should the site have a small “petting vineyard” of six different varietal vines, tasting, lectures, maps for directing people to tasting rooms in the area and computer kiosks that provided regional news, history, wineries, press releases and more.
The board of directors was especially keen on the kiosks and planned to have four at a cost of $15,000 per kiosk. I bet you can tell where this is going. The kiosks fared very poorly in the polling so we ended up only installing one kiosk — and saving much unnecessary expense.
These are just more examples of how polling can be extremely helpful — and it doesn’t take that much work.
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Craig Root
Craig Root has more than 30 years experience working with wine tasting rooms. For over 13 years he was first staff and then a successful manager. For the last 20 years, he has consulted with over 150 tasting rooms including over 90 start-ups mostly in the U.S. but also in China, Canada and France. He is the only person who lectures on tasting room design and management at UC Davis in its continuing and professional development division.
