Offering plant tours are an excellent way to help clients understand your production practice while also expanding brand awareness. However, you don’t want to put on a poor tour. A poor tour at best will only waste a visitor’s time (and your own), and at worst it might potentially leave guests injured or unimpressed with your business. If you’re going to offer a tour you need to do it right. That is why you need to always look for ways to improve plant tour services. No matter what your industry is, here are some of the best ways you can go about doing this.
Different ways to improve plant tour services
Keep It Clean
There is already a certain level of cleanliness you need to maintain within your plant to keep everyone safe. However, there might be other areas of the facility that are not as clean as the production floor. Perhaps offices and other areas are a bit dirty or have items out that you would not want visitors to see. Prior to any kind of tours you should go through and make sure everything is clean. This includes some areas you might not consider, such as clean windows and bathrooms. While your employees may not even think about some smudges and dust collections on windows those visiting your plant will. So do what you can to clean your facility.
Energetic and Exciting Tour Guides
There’s nothing more boring than a tour given by someone who obviously doesn’t want to be giving the tours. They will come across as disingenuous, which is a major turnoff. If you’ve ever been to Disney World or Universal Studios and gone on one of the tours you’ve probably noticed just how excited the tour guides are. There is a level of enthusiasm in their voice that makes the subject that much more exciting. Sure, they’ve talked about the oversized ants from “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” a thousand times in the past, yet it sounds like they are just discovering and sharing these facts for the first time.
This doesn’t mean you need to go out and hire someone with an acting or stage background. It simply means the person giving the tours needs to be excited about what they are talking about. This will rub off onto the visitors, allowing them to take more from the plant tour.
Safety, Safety, Safety
One of the ways to improve plant tour experiences is to make sure the plant is up to code and everything is safe. It might seem like overkill for guests to wear hard hats, but if there is even the remote possibility of something dropping or a guest slipping you need to play it safe. Safety is king when it comes to your plant tour. Above everything else, you must make sure the tour is safe for guests.
Open-Ended Communication
You give a tour to educate guests. Sometimes guests will have questions. Allow them to ask questions as you go. Yes, you’ll want to finish a thought before questions are asked, but your plant tour should be a back and forth experience. There will be times when the only way you can answer a question is if you’re standing right next to the machinery or if you’re viewing what the guest is talking about. If you force guests to wait until the end of the tour to ask questions they may forget their question, or they may not be able to explain something they saw in a different room or at the beginning of the tour (which can be rather frustrating).
So make sure you invest in audio equipment that makes it possible for not only you to give a tour that’s easily heard, but also allows for guests to ask questions as well.
Adjust Accordingly
Make sure you listen to your visitors and take into account what they find interesting. When you’re developing a tour you will want to highlight the areas you find interesting. Perhaps this is a particular machine that produces a certain number of units per hour. Maybe it’s the history of the facility or even the building itself. However, sometimes guests will find something totally different interesting and there are story points they enjoy more than others. Try to be aware of this and then evolve and adjust your tour based on how visitors respond to the tour.
One way to do this is to let visitors fill out survey cards following the tour. This will help you learn what they liked and what they didn’t like. You should also try to be aware of what questions are asked and how responsive guests are. With this kind of information at your disposal, you should then alter your tour to better fit the needs of your visitors. One of the best ways to improve plant tour experiences is to provide varying tours based on the clients. A client looking to partner with you may want to focus on aspects of your business that are different from a general guest. So by offering different tours, you’ll find these ways to improve plant tour experiences will greatly enhance your visitor’s ability to enjoy the tour and retain most of what you discussed.
Improve Your Audio Presentation With Plant-Tours
If you are in need of new audio equipment or the ability to improve how your plant tour sounds, you need to turn to the pros at Plant-Tours. These plant tour specialists know a thing or two about how important it is to have quality audio during your tour. If your guests are unable to hear the presentation nothing else matters. That is why Plant-Tours offers a number of microphones, sound amplification, and headphone options. No matter if the headphones need to be worn with hard hats or you need equipment that can easily charge for multiple tours in a single day, Plant-Tours has you covered. So no matter the kind of audio equipment you may need, now is the time to check out what Plant-Tours has available.
