Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. CX in the real world

In this Skip the Queue podcast episode, I speak to Stephen Priestnall, the CEO of oomph, a CX focused agency based in the UK and UAE who help clients to understand people and design better experiences.

“I would say that the world of CX thinking is about bringing the importance of the human into the overall experience.”

Stephen Priestnall founded oomph, now an accredited B Corp, in 2005, acquired Decision Juice in 2009 and is globally recognised as a specialist in CX driven transformation projects and digital innovation. He has advised at a senior level across public and private sector organisations in the UK, Americas, Asia and the Middle East and is an instigator of international research studies into behaviour change. He is a Board Trustee with Aneurin Leisure Trust, advising on CX and communications strategy and a founding Director at Wellbeing Economy Cymru, part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance, advocating for a new approach to economic sustainability for people and planet.

What will you learn from this podcast?

• First principles and understand what customer experience is all about
• Understand what attractions can do better to serve the needs of their customers
• Customer Experience Basics
• Implementing CX Strategies
• Future Plans and Book Recommendation

Your hosts, Paul Marden & Oz Austwick

Our guest, Stephen Priestnall

Paul Marden: Hello, Oz. 

Oz Austwick: Hi, Paul. So this is the last episode of Season 5, right? 

Paul Marden: Yes, that is right. Can you believe after we took the reigns from. From young Ms. Molson not too long ago, that we would actually make it to the end of the season? 

Oz Austwick: Do you know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, five seasons of a podcast. Most podcasts don’t get through to the end of one season. And I can remember listening to this podcast years ago and actually sending people links as an example of what a good podcast is. And now here we are, you and I, at the end of Season 5. It’s crazy.. 

Paul Marden: Yay. Guardians of this little baby. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah. Yeah, no pressure. So today’s quite an interesting one, right? 

Paul Marden: Yeah. I’ve got a guest who has been a friend of mine for some time, Stephen Priestnall of Oomph agency. And we’re going to talk a little bit about customer experience. So nice little chat between Stephen and I, and then you and I will come together in a little while and talk a little bit about. Let’s reminisce about season five and talk a little bit about what might happen in Season 6. 

Oz Austwick: Awesome. Great. I’m looking forward to it. 

Paul Marden: Let’s get on with it then. Welcome to podcast, Stephen. 

Stephen Priestnall:  Nice to be here, Paul. Thanks for inviting me. 

Paul Marden: Good to have you on. Longtime listeners will know that we always start the podcast with some icebreaker questions, which hopefully not too challenging, but we get to know you a little bit better before we start talking about work. So both of my icebreakers are all about visiting attractions this time. So how organised are you in advance? If you go to an attraction, do you take a picnic with you, or are you always partaking of a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the coffee shop? 

Stephen Priestnall: I think it would have to be a particularly kind of informal attraction for me to have thought about taking a picnic beforehand. So normally it’s just the anticipation of going to the place, and then I’ll utilise the services in the place. 

Paul Marden: I love a good slice of cake in the coffee shop afterwards. Scone, cream, tea and scone that would be me. 

Stephen Priestnall: No way. Maybe a bit of our breath or fruitcake. It’s probably more me. 

Paul Marden: Oh, lovely. I was at the Roman Baths yesterday with my little girl and we had a lovely wander around and they had a brilliant self guided tour. So if you’ve got a choice, do you go for a self guided tour? Do you wander around and follow your nose? Or would you rather have a guide take you around and tell you the stories? 

Stephen Priestnall: I almost never have a guide to take me around. And then sometimes I even find the self guided tours a little bit invasive. If I’m in a different country where there is kind of a language barrier, a filter, then I might use it then. But you know what? I kind of like that the ability just to bump from one bit to another. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. 

Stephen Priestnall: And experience the experience through my own kind of filter. So that’s what I would normally do. I haven’t been able to wander around with the headphones on, almost never with a guy. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, they had a lovely one at the Roman Baths yesterday. So it had both adult interpretation and kids interpretation, and I found myself switching to the kids one so that I was experiencing what Millie was experiencing, because I was saying to her, “Oh, did they tell you what that was?” “Oh, no, that wasn’t in the kids version.” So I swapped the kids one and it brought it to life. It was really. It became much more shared experience for us. 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, well, that’s like that’s like the horrible history stuff. Yeah. But actually, it’s brilliant. Rattles that was what they were on about in the tudor period, then. I didn’t get it until now. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, look, listeners, Stephen and I have known each other for quite some time. We’ve been working together a lot on different projects, and his agency, Oomph, does a lot of work in customer experience. And so today’s episode is going to be a little bit more about a primer on what do we mean by customer experience? And really, what I’d like to get to the bottom of today is what can attractioners do better to serve the needs of their customers. Yeah.

So, really, Stephen, what I want to do is pick your brains. Let’s introduce this whole subject of CX and customer experience and help people to better understand a little bit about what does that mean and how can they bring that into their day to day work in running attractions and meeting customers. So, before we start that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Oomph. So that listeners can better understand the context. 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, thanks, Paul. We’ve positioned ourselves around the concept of customer experience for about ten years now, and customer experience ten years ago was a bit of an oddball place to be. It kind of grew out of the user experience, the UX world, with a little bit of event management thrown into it and a little bit of actually, you need to think about people in the middle of all of this.

And we come from a background of combining digital and data quite successfully to kind of help devise communications campaigns, kind of brand engagements, that kind of thing. And what we could see was if you brought all these things together as data was getting more sophisticated, with digital interactions on the rise, that you could get yourself much more informed about the way in which people’s customers were actually behaving. 

And not so much what they were actually how they were behaving, but also what their needs were that drove the behaviours. And so we have, we’ve grounded our work and customer experience around a very clear desire to understand the needs of our clients’ customers, and then to hold that mirror up for our clients and say, “Look, I know you have these products and services to sell and to engage with, but what we’re going to do is a job of letting you know at the point of engagement they’re hitting your customers needs in this way.

And if you then flip the lens around from the customer need first rather than the product or service first, you might determine a different way of building that service or designing that interaction, or maybe even changing the way in which you invite customers into a journey with you.”

So a lot of data and digital inside are our space port that inform CX. And then in the last couple of years, AI has been another transformative technology that we’ve started to utilise. And we know we treat it as good AI. We know there’s bad AI out there, but the good AI is really helpful. 

Paul Marden: That’s really interesting. We know from the Rubber Cheese Survey this year that most attractions have dabbled. They’ve played with ChatGPT, or something like that. But there’s still a large portion of attractions that have done nothing with AI. And then there’s a couple that I would consider at the leading edge. So they’re doing things beyond GPT. They’re looking at AI enabled CRM or AI enabled workforce management solutions.

So there’s some interest in here, but it’s definitely, there’s a conversation that we’ve had on the podcast just recently with Oz and I talking about the idea that we can’t quite figure out if we’re in a bubble because a lot of people that we talk to talk a lot of good game about AI, but when we’re talking to the businesses, the clients, they’re only just getting into this in the most shallow way. Agencies like yours and ours are kind of. We’re leading the conversation on this, I think. 

Stephen Priestnall: Well, I think it’s really interesting you frame it like that, because one of the things that has informed our approach to CX is the idea of understanding behaviour change, which is a science in itself. So if any listeners are familiar with behaviour change, you’ll know how long the tail of kind of investigation evaluation that is. We launched a study in 2020 which ended up over three years and three waves, 10,000 respondents looking at the impact of Covid-19 on people’s behaviour and their interaction with organisations. That is part of our research centre which we call tide of events, which is now about to launch another study which is going to be looking at the impact of AI. 

Paul Marden: Oh really? 

Stephen Priestnall: As employees, as citizens, as customers, as service users, as members, as supporters. I’m expecting some very interesting things to come out of that study as well. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, very interesting. So there’s this idea of kind of CX thinking and embedding that, embedding it the heart of your agency, but you then helping your clients to embed it into the business. So how can CX thinking help an attraction to improve its offering? And I think if we can look at that in two directions, because obviously most visitor attractions are an in person experience, there’s lots of thinking around their interaction and the experience that they feel when they’re in the attraction itself. But there’s a lot of us looking at either side of that interaction. How do we use marketing to get more people to want to do stuff? And then how do we make sure that they got the best experience after they did and reengage with us. How can CX thinking offline and online help an attraction? 

Stephen Priestnall: The principles of customer experience thinking, certainly from our perspective, is to deal with the reality of that there are people involved. And I think you and I both know, Paul, in the digital world it’s kind of quite easy to forget as a person we spend a lot of time in front of technology, trying to get technology to do stuff that we think is helpful.

And then it’s easy to lose sight of the goal, which is to help a person achieve a task or do something which they have, they enjoy doing. I think in the world of attractions, destinations, then when you’re in a kind of physical world, that you’re sat in that environment designing something, and you’re a physical person yourself. 

And as a designer, looking in that environment, feeling that, okay, well, if I walk from here to here, it’s going to feel like that. If I put this in the wrong place, if my member of staff is trained in the wrong way and uses the wrong language, that’s going to have a direct impact. So you kind of get brought back to the people side of it quite a lot when you’re in it in person. So I would say that the world of CX thinking is about bringing the importance of the human into the overall experience. So you don’t treat the digital experience with kind of it in a different frame set than you treat the in real life, in person experience. 

And that’s quite hard to do, because sometimes you’re trying to drive the digital experiences as a kind of conversion funnel to get people to do something and buy something or consume some content. And you can kind of get hung up on the word optimisation and funnel management, and you then get drawn into, how can we push people through to the next phase? And push people through to the next phase? And imagine if you’re in an attraction, and yeah, you might make certain parts, physical areas, a place where you would want people to go to, but you wouldn’t have somebody walking up and nudging them in the back, pushing them down the aisle and stopping them from turning around and staying in one place. 

Stephen Priestnall: And yet, that’s often what happens in the digital world. It becomes an optimisation process to kind of channel a particular behavior that we think is optimal for the organisation. So the world of CX stands back from that, identifies the needs that were satisfying, and looks at Paul and Stephen as two individuals who are unique as individuals, and can be defined by a set of age, gender, sociological, economic characteristics.

But actually, Paul and I might have five or six relevant needs for the attraction of which two are consistent. And, you know, two or three are completely different. So we can’t treat Paul as Paul and Stephen as Stephen. We have to understand the relationship between the needs that we have as individuals and the thing that we’re doing, or the point of the point on the journey we’re on. And I think that’s tricky to kind of link the digital and the in real life worlds together. But that’s the trick I like to think the kind of CX approach would bring. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. Just as you’re saying that it can be hard to think about the person. But also many of the attractions that we work with have very different offerings. And so consequently they have very different audiences that have very different needs. And, you know, are you trying to serve online an audience that’s never going to attend? How do you serve those people’s needs?

If you’ve got an educational remit, how do you serve those people’s needs whilst at the same time serving the needs of the people that you want to bring in and spend money on site with you? If you’re a historic house that also has a golf course and it has a hotel and it has some sort of kids attraction associated with it, there’s so many different audiences. So that kind of CX thinking can help you to step back. 

Stephen Priestnall: Absolutely. And actually just maybe think of a great triangulation process between three different clients that we’ve been working with recently that show that kind of breadth of differences. So we work with the saudi arabian government on a new, one of their giga projects on a new destination out in the desert near Rhea called Duria.

And that is an amazing set of destination components. Golf courses, equestrian centres, hotels, business centres. And that’s creating a destination for a country which has never had any tourism in it before. So with a whole bunch of high net worth individuals that you’ve got to think about, then also a challenge to get people who live in Saudi to not spend the $90 billion a year that they do going to visit the rest of the world and to actually visit somewhere in Saudi. 

So we’ve had a set of kind of challenges around how do you drive a customer journey, a visitor journey for that. And we’ve been working with an organisation called Marketing Manchester, helping them devise a new segmentation so they can, I’m going to use the term, attract the right kind of visitors to go to Manchester to hook in with their sustainability strategy. They don’t just want people in the shopping malls and going to the football, sports events or shows, albeit they would like that.

They also want to understand the community engagement, the cultural engagement and the environmental footprint that they leave behind. And then we’re just in conversations with North York Moore’s National Park. And then there’s a whole different set of conversations about engagement with the local community, communities, a little bit arms folded about tourists. How do you make that come together? And all of this is about people and it’s about understanding people’s relationship with people and things. 

Paul Marden: Brilliant. So let’s have a little think about given that those are the ideas behind CX thinking. If you were starting out down this road, what are the simple things that people can do to start to bed the customer at the heart of their thinking as they’re planning their services? And I’m thinking in terms of, we’ve got very different types of attractions in this country, very small, up to, you know, big international attractions. Let’s pick the small guys. Yeah. Imagine you’re running a small town museum and, you know, you’ve got a handful of people working in the team. How can you start to embed the customer into your thinking to improve the service? 

Stephen Priestnall: So I think, I don’t think the principles change with scale. I think that the executional methods will change with scale, but the principles. And you can have, you know, if you’ve got a small team of three or four people, you can have these three or four people working together in a room. You can support a research or not, if you can afford the research that great. If you can’t, then you use. So we use a term called foundational intelligence.

So before we start any research with a client which might go and look at their customers or prospective customers or visitors. We say, “Right, let’s go all of the information in your organisation on the surface, first, because there’s however many people around the room’s years of experience, which is not necessarily formed in a cx way, but if we get that on the table, we’ve probably got a 60, 70, 80% starting point for what we’re going to need to know in the end.

I think that’s the first thing I would say, is take confidence in the fact you’ve got some foundational intelligence about customer experience. But there might be a clever way of bringing that out through a little workshop. So you ask the right questions of each other. And one of the ways which I think is useful to do and quite practical is to think about three different ways of looking at people as individuals. 

So think about themselves as a, you know, a standard attribute based, if you like, cohort or segments, you know, age, demography, all those things that we talked about, but then move those to one side and then ask a relatively straightforward question, what needs are being satisfied by your services? So it’s kind of, what’s the point of what you do? Yeah, well, harsh question. 

But it’s devoid from, if you like, knowing your customers at that point, devoid from any transaction based evaluation or business case to say, what’s the point of what we do? Why do people turn up and then be quite hard about answering those questions. And when you get the first answer in your head, which is based on what you’ve always thought you’ve always done, just go right. Is that really why people turn up? 

Paul Marden: Is that right? 

Stephen Priestnall: Really why people walk through the door? Is that really why people tell their friends about us? 

Paul Marden: There’s a little bit of lean thinking there, isn’t there? You’ve got five whys, haven’t you? You could go, but why? But why? But why? Just to keep pushing yourself to think that hard thought. 

Stephen Priestnall: Exactly. Whatever, you know, whatever little mental games you want to play with it, that’s the kind of point. What’s the point? And then the next lens to look at it is the journey your visitors are on in order to not just get to your destination, but get out of your destination and be reflecting on it to their I, peers, friends, colleagues, family.

And that journey doesn’t mean I book a ticket, I turn up, I walk around the attraction and then I go home. It means what are the component parts of that journey when they’re in planning more just you asked me earlier on about whether I plan a picnic. What are they planning? How likely are they to plan? Do they not want to plan? Do they just want to turn up? 

You know, when they’re getting to, when they’re coming, when they’re traveling to the destination, how are they traveling? What’s their preferred method of travel? And then what are the different ways in which people engage with the attraction itself? And then what happens afterwards when they walk out? Do they walk out and go for a beer? Forget about it.

Did they do that thing you do in a golf club where you spend the next 3 hours talking about what you did for the last 3 hours? And what’s the version of that could be done in social media afterwards? And again, do that. Do that without necessarily worrying too much about who does what. So you end up these kind of journey components. 

Now all these things can be really heavily researched if you’ve got resources and the time to do that, but you can do it in a room with three or four people in 2 or 3 hours. And what you’ll end up with is a set of right. The people who visit us look a bit like this. Typically, here’s five or six types of people, here’s a pool type, here’s a Steven type, here’s a whoever else type of. We’ve got ten or eleven needs. Well, who knew we had ten or eleven needs? That were satisfying. 

Stephen Priestnall: So you write those down. Oh, look, we got a journey which looks like planning, engagement, reflection. And I use those three terms because we use them all the time because they’re nice and easy to get your head around. Planning, engagement, reflection, and within engagement here are all the different bits that are happening in engagement here. At the different bits that, all right, we might have a dozen, maybe even two dozen components underneath those kind of three big things.

And you’ve then got a bit of a jigsaw. And it’s also objective at that point as well. You’ve then got this objective jigsaw to say, which of those five or six groups of people have which of those needs do we think you might end up with that funny place where.

Oh, actually that cohort doesn’t have any of those needs, so we think they really like coming to us, but we’re not doing anything to satisfy their needs or this other group that we don’t get many of. Look how many needs we’re satisfying in that group. Maybe we should be targeting that group. 

So whether you’re. Whether you go outwards and change your segmentation, your targeting, or whether you come in with and change your service design, you’ve already got some things to think about. And then when you map the journey on top of that, and again, you know, nice. It could be a done on paper, it could be done. There’s loads of tools online you can do this without getting too scientific.

You’ve then got the points at which, all right, so if that need is being satisfied for those people at that point, we now have a design intervention to work out. So we now have, essentially, we have a brief, we have a specification now that might be a piece of digital interaction, it might be a piece of communications design, it might be a piece of signage in the attraction, it might be a follow up social media nudge. 

You’re then not inventing what you think it is that you need to do for your attraction. We use a phrase which I think clients are pretty comfortable with in the end because it. It’s a real reflection. It’s completely normal for organisations to kind of end up with an inside and view of the world. Everything is all about the product and the service because that’s where the investment goes, that’s where the thinking goes.

And what we try and do is just to persuade people to take an outside in view. So actually look at this from the point of view of the customer. And I think what the exercise I’ve just described does is help you take that outside in view. 

Paul Marden: I’m smiling for those listening. I’m smiling because I just, it reminds me of so many times where I can, you know, I can see observing in the projects that we do or just, you know, interacting with the outside world, where you can tell that people often take a very parochial internal view and they’ll communicate with the outside world in their own internal language. They will try and, you know, influence people to do things rather than thinking, how does this appear outside? 

Stephen Priestnall: Yeah, and it’s, it, but it’s also, it’s not a critique. It’s normalised behaviour. If you just think about how organisations grow, you end up with an idea, you know, where often it is about the customers. You’ve got this entrepreneurial, innovative spark that kicks the idea off, satisfying the needs. And then you build up a bunch of teams who, by definition, have broken out into departments with different roles and responsibilities. And then, and then the sense of self of the people in those teams is derived from the departmental responsibility. 

Paul Marden: Yes. 

Stephen Priestnall: But as a consequence, you then are trained, naturally trained to be inside out. And so, it’s normal. And then when that, then when the salesperson comes back and says, “Why did you build it like that?” You know, the designer, the product person says, “Well, because that’s the best way of doing this thing.” And the salesperson says, “I can’t sell that.” And that actually, and I don’t know how much.

In your podcast, Paul, you talked about agile, but this is when the concept of squads really can work. I think that you have to take real care with squads because they can end up creating rooms of people who don’t understand each other. I think unless there’s one other thing I would say about the human part of CX, you have to take this into the culture of the organisation as well. So you asked me earlier, how do you present a CX focus for an organisation? 

Well, you can’t just drop the results of that little workshop on top of everybody, because it’s the going through the process of looking at those three lenses that puts you in a different mindset. If you then just end up telling the product people or telling the sales people or telling the ops people, can you do it like this now? They’ll just add that onto their list of things to do. It won’t be a change. 

Paul Marden: But when you bring those people into the conversation, I think it brings a different perspective, doesn’t it? And I think that’s the one thing I’ve learned from you in the few years that we’ve known one another is that when you boil it down, everything is a CX project. And I don’t think I ever really thought about that. That there can be something which to me seems so navel gazing, internally focused as a technical project to deliver in the business.

But actually, when you think, when you apply the rigor of thinking about the client, the customer, then you find that it is a CX driven project, even if it is completely internally facing. It can be about the communication between two teams, but in the end, because they don’t have good communication, it’s resulting in this poor customer experience over here. So when you think about it hard, then these projects have a CX focus, even when they are very kind of internally facing.

Stephen Priestnall: And it’s sometimes difficult. I mean, I think that’s a really good articulation of it. It sometimes can be a challenge to make that process seem worthwhile, because what you end up doing is spending more time challenging what you think is right at the beginning of the process. And there’s always a desire from somewhere to move things on.

I think that there’s a little value based model that I always apply in my head, which if we treat this kind of CX phase as the planning phase, and then you go through a design phase, then you go through a build phase. For every extra hour you spend in planning, without spending that, you would spend ten more hours in design and a hundred more hours in production. So if you leave that hour aside, you’re going to have a tenfold in design phase. 

And if you don’t deal with it in design phase, you’ll have it 100 fold, then build phase. But choosing to do that extra hour, which is tension filled, it might be a bit of conflict, there might be a bit of defensiveness. It needs to be carefully managed and kind of cajoled, but the value of it is meant. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. So you’ve described this kind of approach to take, identifying who the customers are, trying to use a little bit of intuition to be all science if you’ve got the budget to go and do the research, but to understand those customers in more detail and what their needs are, and then driving down and finding out where, you know, the journey maps onto that and where the gaps are and starting to look to fill those gaps. Is there room in the world for a dirty bottom up approach where you can see a problem already and you want to address that problem? Can you attack this from both angles or do you need to start from a top down approach? 

Stephen Priestnall: I’m an arch pragmatist and if we know there’s a problem to solve and it’s screaming for a solution, then that’s going to solve the problem. I would only cancel that try and stand back and look at the unintended consequences through a very objective lens. You don’t need to spend long doing that. But I think the magnetism of solving a problem that’s been a longstanding problem can also act as a set of blinkers. So that’s the only thing I would say.

Paul Marden: Yeah, you can be distracted by the screaming problem that turns out not to be the real root cause. If you take the bigger picture of you. 

Stephen Priestnall: If we got this horrendous problem just before checkout, whether that’s a digital or at the attraction itself and queuing up going on, you know, there’s a need to solve that through a piece of technology or extra stuff on the tills. But actually, it turns out that there’s a funneling process going on in the start of the process that’s causing everybody to end up at the checker at the same time.

And that can be solved by a different distribution of products in the attraction itself, or bringing in some different content to inform people in the digital journey. That means they don’t have to do task X and Y because they now know about it. You know, we’ve all had that before, which it looks like people can’t get through this bit of the funnel. Let’s try and make this bit of the funnel easier.

Let’s try and do more things. More buttons, more. Let’s just try and make it easier. But actually, it turns out, if only we’d given that visitor to the digital journey more time to consume content and not push them through the first stage of the transaction process so quickly, they would have entered the second stage much better informed and relaxed about completing the overall thing. 

Paul Marden: It’s just such a challenge, isn’t it? Because I can just feel me even now with our fictitious scenario, all I want to do is squeeze them down the funnel. But you have to focus at the end about getting the right outcome, don’t you? 

Stephen Priestnall: There’s another great metaphor I like to use, and we do this all the time because we talk about something called sustainable customer experience. And sustainable customer experience strategy isn’t about a green CX strategy. It’s about saying, if you get your CX strategy right, you will have to spend less money on acquiring new customers, so it’s more economically sustainable and there’s a really interesting kind of just different way of looking at it.

So normally if you look at the typical retail conversion process, if you get 100 people on the top of a digital funnel, you might get five out the end as a conversion there’s usually really simple numbers, five. So everybody works on how do we make five six? That’s the big thing because that’s like 20% improvement. If you get five to six, we’ve just put 20% on the bottom line.

Meanwhile there’s 95 people. Do you care? Are you interested? I came here for a reason and you don’t like me anymore, so. Well, goodbye then. So what we do is we say, right, we want to put as much effort into understanding the 94. It’s not wasted effort. I’m a pragmatist, as we do making the five six, because if out of that 94 we can get another 20 over the next twelve months to do the same thing.

We’ve not spent any money on customer acquisition. We’ve built and engaged in a relationship. We’ve had opportunities to talk and engage them, which probably means they’re going and talking to other people and checking about the experience. So they’re probably doing some recruitment for us anyway, which we can also nudge behaviour. 

And then what that does, it changes the mentality inside the organisation to not just think about, we’ve got six out the other end. Yes. Celebrate. And actually think about. Because imagine if you did that physically. Imagine if physically you could see the hundred people in a queue and everybody went off celebrating the 6th that went through. And then you look back and you looked at these 94 people just milling around having a chat with each other and what just happened. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, that would feel pretty uncomfortable, wouldn’t it? 

Stephen Priestnall: It will. Especially for an attraction.

Paul Marden: Yeah, for sure. Look, this has been brilliant. It’s nice. I think sometimes to take a step back and look at that kind of the 101 class, the intro to the subject. And I think this is a subject that we will come back to again and again. We’ve talked about taking it back to its first principles a little bit today, but this is embedded within the attraction sector. They know and understand the people that come through the door. This is something that they take really seriously, obviously. But I think there are ways in which we can take what we’ve learned today and use that as a springboard into some more deeper conversations.

Maybe in Season 6, which is coming up where we can talk a little bit more about, you know, your conversations about AI, the direction that you take these things in. How does AI help you in a world where you want to be cx centric? What does AI do for you? So thank you ever so much. This has been brilliant. Thank you. 

Stephen Priestnall: Really enjoyed it. 

Paul Marden: One last ask of you, though. We always ask our interviewees to come up with a book recommendation. And it can be fiction, it can be factual, it can be about the subject. But we will give this book away to the first person that retweets the show advert and says, I want Stephen’s book. So what is the book that you’d like to share with the world? 

Stephen Priestnall: Well, so I’d love to say it was. It was a book I wrote in 1986 on expert systems in context. I was doing AI back in the 80’s. That one is out of print. You definitely will get hold of it. Instead, it’s a book that I think challenges, whatever your persuasions about understanding of the environment and climate, challenges your way of thinking about. It’s a book by an activist called George Monbiot, and it’s called Feral. And it’s to do with the rewilding of Britain, the potential for rewilding Britain. And again, whether you’re minded to think that’s a good thing or not, it’s a great book to just think, okay, that’s my perceptions challenge. I hadn’t thought of things like that. 

Paul Marden: Excellent. So, listeners, if you’d like to get a copy of Stephen’s book, then head over to X, find the show tweet that we put out and say, I want Stephen’s book. And the first person to do that will get a copy. Stephen, this has been wonderful. Thank you all so much. And hopefully we will talk more about this in Season 6. 

Stephen Priestnall: Thank you very much, Paul. 

Oz Austwick: He’s a really interesting guy, isn’t he? 

Paul Marden: He is indeed. I said to Stephen afterwards, it was such a nice conversation because we’ve been working together for years, and today I got to ask the questions I’ve been too embarrassed to ask for the last few years because I really should, at this point, know the answers to them. But today I was able to take the place of the listener and ask those questions without fear of embarrassment. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, there does come a point where you kind of feel that you probably shouldn’t be asking this question anymore. You should already know this. Yeah, I love that. I thought, it’s really interesting. I love this concept of nudging that he talked about, and it’s something I’ve been aware of online for years, but the kind of putting it in the context of happening in the real world, I thought was really interesting. It gives you a bit of insight into how weird it is that we try and force people into certain pathways online. When you’d never dream of doing that in the real world, just having somebody outside a room just pushing you into it. Yeah, you wouldn’t do that. 

Paul Marden: You’re in a queue for the log flume and you get poked in the back to say, “Do you want to buy your photo? Do you want to buy your photo? You really do want to buy the photo, don’t you?”

Oz Austwick: Well, I mean, that does kind of happen, doesn’t it? It’s usually my children that are doing it, if I’m being honest. But, yeah, really interesting stuff. 

Paul Marden: A nice way to round out some amazing interviews and fireside chats that we’ve had over Season 5 and look forward to Season 6. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, I’m really excited about Season 6. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, we want to do something a little bit different, don’t we? 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, well, I mean, firstly, I’ll get to start the season of the podcast. Because I wasn’t here at the start of Season 5. I’ve kind of just weaseled my way in halfway through the season and gone, “Yes, mine now.” 

Paul Marden: Tell listeners, what is it that we want to do differently? 

Oz Austwick: Well, it feels a bit weird to me that we’re creating a podcast all about the visitor attraction sector, which is designed to get people out of their houses to a place and actually experience it in the real world. And yet you’re sitting in exactly the same room, and I’m sitting in exactly the same room. And as we pointed out not long ago, I’m wearing the same t shirt as I seem. This appears to be my podcast t shirt. And yet, you know, we’re not getting out. So we’re gonna get out. We’re gonna get in a car and go to a place and record a podcast in an attraction with a person. And I think that’s amazing. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, I just can’t wait. We’ve got a couple lined up. One’s crazy, one’s going to be a big event. It could be really fun, but we love listeners with attractions who would like two blokes and some cameras to turn up to invite us along. We would love to come and visit your venue. We would love to talk about whatever subject it is that you think our listeners would like to discuss, and we’ll come along and we’ll record it in real life at your place and see how amazing your venue is and talk more about the stuff that everybody’s interested in. 

Oz Austwick: Absolutely. But it’s not just that we’re going to do a little bit differently, is it? We’re kind of focusing a little bit more on different groups. 

Paul Marden: Yeah. There was some lovely feedback for those, for listeners that listened to Kelly’s final episode, her swan song. When Ross from Drayton Manor came on and talked about his experience of being on the podcast and how influential it was for him to have his 15 minutes of fame for Skip the Queue, and how important that was to him in his stage, in his career, that prompted us to think about, can we use this platform now that so many people before us built to help to shine a light on new and emerging talent in the sector? So if you are in early stages of your career and you are doing something interesting in the attraction space, could be digital, it could be something customer focused in real life. 

There’s so many different ways where we could have an interesting conversation about what it is that you do and why other people would find it interesting. You know, invite us in. We would love to have that conversation with people. If you know someone, if there’s someone in your team who, you know, you can see is doing amazing things and could grow in their career with the spotlight shone on them, and there’s lots of people like that, then point them in our direction. Point us in their direction. We can definitely do something to help them to share their story and hopefully to benefit from that springboard, that stepping outside and talking to the outside world about what you do can really have on a career. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s lovely that hopefully now, after five seasons, the podcasts kind of mature enough that we don’t need to lean on those famous, influential people in the industry quite as much. And hopefully that maybe we’ve got enough loyal listeners and enough of us standing as a podcast that we can tell stories just because they’re interesting. Yeah, you already know the name of the person we’re talking to, so, yeah, that’s going to be really exciting. 

Paul Marden: But, you know, there are stories to be told that we don’t know about yet that I’m sure will be going on inside listeners minds and, you know, hit us up, send us an email, send us a tweet, an X. I don’t know what. I don’t know. That’s another story, isn’t it? But send us a message by carrier Pigeon, if you can, that tells us what you think we should be talking about, the people we should be meeting and the stories that should be told. We would love to hear from you. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, and in the meantime, enjoy your two or three weeks without Skip the Queue. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully you’re all busy working in your attractions, being absolutely swamped. If the attractions I’ve been to are anything to go by, it is a rip roaring success of a summer. We’ve had some pretty good weather and yeah, we’ll be looking back at this September October time thinking what an amazing summer it was after a disappointing start to the year. 

Oz Austwick: So yeah, well, fingers crossed. Absolutely. 

Paul Marden: Thank you, Oz. It’s been delightful. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. 

Oz Austwick: Yeah, me too. Here’s to Season 6. 

Paul Marden: Yeah, see you on the other side. 

Do you know someone we should be talking to?

Do you know someone fascinating we should be talking to?

If so, email us at hello@rubbercheese.com – we’ll get back to you shortly.

Author:

Kelly Molson Managing Director

Host of the popular Skip the Queue Podcast, for people working in or working with visitor attractions, she regularly delivers workshops and presentations on the sector at various national conferences and universities including The Visitor Attractions Conference, ASVA and Anglia Ruskin University.

Read more about me