Collecting liability waivers might not be part of your process that you think much about.
Name? Check.
Basic guest details? Check.
Signature? Check.
All done? Not quite.
The legal necessities may be accounted for, but there’s also a huge opportunity for you to get even more out of your waivers than you might realize. Find out how your waiver can be so much more than just a liability form.
Demographic Data
Any attraction or facility needs to know their market, and your waiver is the surest way to find this out(opens in a new tab). You could have hundreds of Facebook followers or website visitors. But your guests are an even more specific different demographic because, although they are one component of your known marketing demographic, they’re the customer that your experience attracted enough to actually take your tour. The only way to know for sure is your waiver.
Your waiver is a receipt of every single person who arrived onsite. You don’t need to know exactly who liked your photo online – if you take beautiful photographs, then in theory this could be anyone. Even the person who booked the tour is only telling part of the story – after all, what if they booked it after pestering from the kids, or on behalf of their friends who championed it?
The information you need is who came in and what makes your activity or service perfect for them.
Your waiver should already be asking guests for basic personal information like their age, where they’re from, and where they heard about you. This information is a treasure trove of demographic research! If you use paper waivers, you may need to allocate time per month for yourself or a team member to accurately record this information. Using a digital waiver solution like Wherewolf means this is stored automatically in your digital database, where you can instantly create graphs and charts for business insights.
This information is a goldmine for any digital marketing suite. It helps you to understand your customers and refine your brand, and it’s a valuable business asset to accumulate in the background if the time ever comes to sell or pass on the business.
Manifests
How do you create your tour manifest?
Paper-waiver users might ask their guests to complete a waiver, retrieve these completed documents, check them individually to make sure they’re all signed correctly, then fill in the guests’ names and any contraindications to a grid on a piece of paper. Then all those pieces of paper are stacked away for years in a clunky file cabinet.
But if your guests are completing a waiver for a certain activity at a certain time, then you could have them doing your tour manifests for you, while cutting out the storage. Find a digital solution that collates these guest records into a tour manifest with a birds-eye-view of their responses in real-time, and stores your waivers securely online.
Downstream Actions
Let’s look at that storage cabinet again. Whether it’s a file cabinet or an online PDF database, it’s not exactly earning its keep.
Your waivers can contribute to your operation even after the guest has left. Collecting an email address is a standard part of completing any form, especially when it comes to identifying individuals where you need as many unique identifiers (like name and date of birth) as possible. That email address on their waiver can then carry the final sign-off of your experience, with a personalized ‘thank you’ message, a link to a photo gallery online, and an invitation to like your social media page or leave a review online. Your guests have just had a great time with you, so you should be striking while the iron is hot and encouraging them to boost your online profile.
To achieve this, you could create an email template and ask your staff to send an email to each guest at the end of the day. It might be a pretty repetitive task, but if you have a template pre-prepared then it should be straightforward enough!
Alternatively, send your staff home on time and use a digital waiver solution that sends your follow-up emails automatically, or includes an integration to an email marketing platform.
Customer Research
Your demographic data covers the information you should be familiar with already, but customer research is something that can be incorporated into your waiver too. This depends on how much time your guests have to complete their waiver so it should be considered carefully, because it’s blending your compulsory data fields with your nice-to-haves. But when executed properly the results can be astounding.
Think about what real, actionable information you’d love to have from your guests.
Maybe you’re in a remote location, so you would like to ask how they got there – was it a rental car? Or what airline did they fly in on? Having this information could help you find new places to advertise, like in-flight magazines or brochures at rental car companies.
You might be trying to decide between adding in a new combo package with other operators in your area, so you add in a question for what else they’re interested in doing while they’re in the area. You might find your guests are having an adventure-fuelled weekend, and you should partner with another adventure tourism company. Or you might find that guests want to relax, so a partnership with the local hot pools makes more sense.
Including two or three purposeful questions can elevate your liability form; just remember that if this form is mandatory for your guests, you don’t want to make it too cumbersome or nosey! That’s why it’s important to consider why you’re asking these questions before you add them in.
Avoid any questions that ask for long-winded responses too such as a text entry. Using a multi-select format for your customer research questions reduces the time it takes guests to respond compared to typing in their response, and it means you’re getting uniform information. You might get a group who flew into town yesterday but, when you ask them how they travelled, their answers could be “plane”, “airplane”, “flew”, “Delta”, and an unlimited amount of misspelled versions of those words too. A multi-select response means you’re getting that one piece of information you need, as quickly and tidily as possible, and with minimal work from the customer.
Sometimes it’s the simplest parts of your day that can make the most impact. Evaluating and fine-tuning your current processes can take your business from surviving to thriving – or from thriving, to franchising!
Many of these ideas can even be implemented with a paper waiver, although we don’t recommend introducing more than one to your business unless you have room in the budget for dozens of additional administrative hours a month. A Wherewolf subscription streamlines all of these into one custom-branded digital waiver solution at a fraction of the cost.
Talk to Wherewolf today to find out what we can do for you!(opens in a new tab)
Find this article useful? Enter your details below to receive your FREE copy of 95 Epic Places To List Your Tours and receive regular updates from Tourism Tiger and leading industry experts.
By submitting this form, you agree to Tourism Tiger contacting you via email.