Cedar Fair Entertainment Company: Collecting Data Where it Matters

We are taking a moment today to highlight a customer and how they are using SurveyPocket to collect data and taking action from these new insights driving the business forward. Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, a leader in amusement parks, water parks and active entertainment manages more than 12 of the most visited Amusement parks in the United States. Some of their parks throughout the United States include Cedar Point which is labeled as The Best Amusement Park in the World, Kings Island and California's Great America. Growing year over year and setting ongoing record attendance numbers makes Cedar Fair an inspiration and leader in the Entertainment business. This year if you and your family are visiting the parks someone may come up and ask your opinion with an iPad in hand. Over the last year Cedar Fair has replaced its old paper driven survey and data collection processes with SurveyPocket running on iPads at all of its parks.

Mike Lott from Cedar Fair had this to say:

"SurveyPocket has really simplified the process. The iPads work great, and the interviewers seem to like them. I'd been looking to do something like this for a while. We had a whole new executive team come on board and it was an opportunity to do everything the way we had always wanted to do it."

They are applying the SurveyPocket application by having interviewers in the park approach guests with an iPad to collect a few questions about the visitors demographics and a secure an agreement from the respondent to participate in giving feedback to the park. Shortly following their visit to the park, the guests get a personalized survey sent out to answer questions about their visit. Hundreds and thousands of these surveys are conducted each year giving Cedar Fair a whole new spectrum of data and insights they did not get before. 

“Some of the interviewers who did paper surveys with us last year said a lot of the guests don’t seem as intimidated when they see someone with an iPad coming toward them than they do when they see someone with a clipboard coming toward them," said Lott. 

Cedar Fair's implementation of this technology is full of positive gains. Now the monthly insight reports at each park are not produced by hand and viewed in hand - they are easily accessed on a streamlined visual reporting dashboard accessible from computers, smartphones and tablets. Groups of staff at each park can access and share their data easier than ever before, making sure everyone is on the same page and they have hit their data collection mark on each target demographic. The data collected by field interviewers can be further analyzed and responses can be categorized in a few simple clicks to view responses by gender, age group and more. This is a reminder of how important it is to listen to your customers, find the voice of the customer, and to leverage your insights to help plan future development.  

Lott Also Added: 

“We used to have to hand-do monthly reports for all of the parks. That’s all gone away now. This year we set up dashboard accounts so a select group at each park has access so they can log on and see the reporting for their park. Everyone can access their own data; they can run their own cross-tabs. It works really well for us. The feedback from the park marketing directors has been really positive.”

View More Case Studies and Customer Success Here

Closing Notes

Collecting data from your consumers is more important than ever before. There are still many businesses out there relying on traditional methods for collecting data and are slow to adapt the new technologies available today. There are others that do not collect any data or report trends at all. Others are still spending lots of valuable time conducting traditional paper and pencil surveys and scanning all of this data in one by one and taking a lot of time to analyze and write reports. Making this change can not only streamline the way you get valuable insights and report them, but it will give your staff the ability refocus their time to growing the business, and more importantly growing the business together with your customers. Cedar Fair makes a great case of how you can improve the way you listen and learn from your customers and visitors. If you want to see how easy it is to implement this technology, Survey Analytics would love to set up a demonstration specific to your needs, a complimentary free trial and assist you with full support on deploying your first research project.