Activating Guest Data for Attractions with the RFM Framework with TJ Christensen, CEO & Founding Partner of BlueGator

TJ 00:00
So if you take that stroller brigade, again, high recency, they came yesterday, high frequency, they're coming three or four times a week, but low, low monetary spend.

TJ 00:09
So what you could do is then you could say, Hey, here's a surprise and delight. So here's a kids eat free lunch for the next time, right? Cause we know it's a family membership and we know they're coming in the morning and they're most likely leaving for lunch. If you can get them to extend for lunch, maybe now once a week, the kids are begging to stay for lunch at the zoo

John Pendergrast 00:43
Today we're joined by TJ Christensen, CEO and founding partner of BlueGator Consulting and one of the sharpest minds in our industry when it comes to bridging operations and technology. With 30 years in the industry from Disney parking lots to executive leadership at ExceSo, TJ has seen firsthand how attractions struggle to activate the mountain of data that they collect.

Now through BlueGator, he's helping theme parks, zoos, and museums make sense of that ocean of guest data, turning it into meaningful, actionable insights. His latest obsession, taking the same framework McDonald's uses to get you to buy that egg McMuffin and applying it to how attractions think about guest engagement.

He calls it from French fries to fundraising. And it might just be the mental model operators need to finally turn their data into action. Welcome to Signal, TJ.

TJ 01:35
Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

John Pendergrast 01:37
So why don't we just jump in?

You've had one of the most eclectic careers in this space from Disney, Windham, Accesso and now BlueGator. Tell us a little bit more about your journey. How did you get from parking cars at Disney to building a Salesforce consulting firm for attractions?

TJ 01:52
By accident is the short answer. I did the Disney college program when I was in college. So I was an undergrad at university of Delaware and saw a flyer to do the Disney college program. And I was like a semester away in Florida. Sounds awesome. We're going to do that. And that's where I went and parked cars at Disney's Hollywood studios back in the day. And then upon graduating,

John Pendergrast 01:54
Ha

you

TJ 02:15
It was right after nine 11 and the job market was really bad. And, I sort of joke around that I had, I had finished an all day set of interviews with date paper company. So I could have been like Jim Helper because it was a, it was in a paper company office above Philly. So like not quite Scranton, but you know, about an hour north of Philadelphia. ⁓ and I got a call back down to Disney and work in the sales and marketing division. So on that job. move back down to Disney.

thought it was going to be six months and then I'd be back up North and ended up spending, you know, over a decade in Orlando, working for Disney, Windham and Accesso. And just sort of like stumbled forward from one thing to the next. So at Disney, I was working with Timeshare Resorts and that's how I ended up at Timeshare. And then 2008, the market crashed and our department got laid off at Windham and I had no background in technology.

And a buddy of mine was working at Accesso at the time and they had just come through a bankruptcy and rebranded as Accesso. And they're like, Hey, you know, I talked to C Brown and he's like, Hey, know, we survived bankruptcy. We're going to think about, you know, growing a little bit. Would you like to come? So I joined there and it was right at the intersection when I was doing my MBA. So could take all of the stuff that I was learning from a brand and business perspective and apply it at Accesso and got to ride that.

know, growth train for about 10 years and learned a ton there. So, you know, got to learn from some amazing minds in the industry, both at Accesso and outside and just working with, you know, brands like Merlin and SeaWorld and, you know, Columbus Zoo is a big client of ours. Six Flags is a big client of ours. Cedar Fair. Just working with all sorts of folks around the world on all sorts of fun things.

Tim Samson 03:43
Thank

TJ 03:50
that's where I really sort of saw the intersection of how technology can power guest experience. And, you know, one of the acquisitions Accesso made along the way was a company called The Experience Engine that powers a Carnival Medallion program on Princess Cruise Lines. It also powers some mobile apps in different parts of our industry. their, big thing was like, if you know who someone is and where someone is and when someone is, you can deliver them a pretty amazing what and

that's really hard to do at it's hard to do it when you have enough resources at the enterprise level. But if you are a single site operator, it's really difficult to do one because you don't really know how to pull everything together. Two the task is just seems too big because of that and the siloed data is and how do you solve it? And it feels like it's too far out there. And after leaving Accesso, I found myself in the Salesforce ecosystem and I started

going on Trailhead and learning Salesforce. And I was like, my gosh, if you pull in this point of sale data into Salesforce, into a CRM and you can de-duplicate it you have an engine that you can then start taking action on. you, know who someone is, where someone is, when someone is, and you can send them a message. And so that's what we've set out to do at, at BlueGator and have an opportunity to work with.

some really great clients over the last six years. So it's been, it's been a fun ride.

Tim Samson 05:02
TJ you mentioned this idea from franchise of fundraising, you know where you compare People buy coffee at McDonald's to to guests at a theme park everyone out there who hasn't heard it. What's the what's the idea?

TJ 05:11
Yeah.

Yeah. So the idea of from French fries to fundraising is for clickbait. No. ⁓ what is, is so RFM is a strategy. It's a marketing strategy that, is employed by a lot of large brands, McDonald's being one of them, Starbucks being another, lots of brands use it. And RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary. So the best way to describe it is the McDonald's example. So,

Tim Samson 05:21
Hahaha

TJ 05:40
If I go to McDonald's every day and buy a cup of coffee and that's all I get on my way to work, I stop in through the drive-through, I grab a cup of coffee and I go. My recency was this morning, right? That's how recently I was there. My frequency is five days a week on average, because I'm going every day on my way there and my monetary is my spend. So my spend per visit or per cap in our industry is probably, don't know what a cup of coffee at McDonald's is, three bucks, something like that. So.

So they look at me and they say, okay, and they scored on a Rubik of quintiles, right? So one to five. So recency, I'd have a high recency, probably a five because I was there today. My frequency is probably a five because I go five days a week, but my monetary spend is probably like a two, right? So my RFM score is a five, five, two. And that puts me in some sort of category like loyalist low spender. I don't know what they call it, but that you could just sort of get your head around that. So they say, okay,

Tim Samson 06:21
Thank

I think.

Thank

TJ 06:36
How do we take

this collection of loyalists, low spenders and get them to start spending more? How do we ladder them up from a per per cap perspective? Right? So that's where you start seeing these loyalty programs come in where now I get a coupon. So next time I come to McDonald's, I get a free egg McMuffin or half off an egg McMuffin or something like that. So then next time I come, I do that. Maybe I have such a good experience. Now every third visit I'm grabbing an egg McMuffin or a hash brown with my coffee and they've just laddered up my spend a little bit. Right.

Tim Samson 06:52
Thank

Mm-hmm.

TJ 07:05
So when you think about that, you might have folks that are like that. You might have folks that come once a week with their families for breakfast on like Saturday or Sunday mornings. They have a little bit lower recency cause they can't, they came last Sunday. they have a little bit lower frequency. They come once a week, but they have a lot higher spend. So how do we turn that family person into a daily coffee person? So, right, I'm trying to increase their frequency. Maybe it's a low monetary spend to start, but I'm increasing their frequency of visit and

Tim Samson 07:23
Thank you.

We will finish

with our interview with the chair. So I'd like to invite the chair to come forward and have a talk.

TJ 07:33
you have a category of those folks that you then take action and message to or, you know, on and on. So in our industry, you might have, you know, if you look at season pass holders, you might have, ⁓ what,

one of the cohorts that I'll always like to use is the, the stroller brigade at like zoos and places like that, you could look at a cohort of members that turn up when the gate opens at eight o'clock, right? You know, they're our family membership, cause they're scanning their family membership. They arrive

eight o'clock and they're out of the venue by 10 30. But they're not spending anything and they come three, four, maybe five days a week, right? They come with all their friends. You know, my wife was one of these, they go walk around, they talk about all sorts of stuff with the kids, the kids have stuff to do and then they leave and they head home for lunch. So if you take that stroller brigade, again, high recency, they came yesterday, high frequency, they're coming three or four times a week, but low, low monetary spend.

Tim Samson 08:13
Thank

I think that's perfect.

TJ 08:25
So what you could do is then you could say, Hey, here's a surprise and delight. So here's a kids eat free lunch for the next time, right? Cause we know it's a family membership and we know they're coming in the morning and they're most likely leaving for lunch. If you can get them to extend for lunch, maybe now once a week, the kids are begging to stay for lunch at the zoo or the aquarium or wherever you're at. Right? So again, same sort of the methodology for, for like McDonald's that you could use for a venue.

Tim Samson 08:44
Thank you.

TJ 08:51
And then you can extend that. And I use fundraising because of the alliteration. We work with a lot of nonprofits, but same thing with fundraising, right? Do you have people that are, they give five bucks a month. You may have people that show up once a year at the Gala and cut a really big check. How do you turn, how do you, how do you think about engagement of those different donor bases in a way that's more actionable? And what I like about RFM is it takes all the data that you have scores it and puts everyone into buckets that you can get your head around, right? I can get my head around.

Tim Samson 09:00
Thank you.

TJ 09:19
a loyalist low spender and ideate on how I ladder them up from a per cap perspective. I can get my head around the stroller brigade and try and getting them to stay for lunch. I can get my head around someone that bought a daily ticket online and did a $5 donation that maybe I want to maybe get to adopt an animal or something like that, a checkout. by being able to score it that way, can get teams that are often

Strapped for resources and time. It gives them a tool set to then use and start taking action.

John Pendergrast 09:50
So fascinating conversation. Let me start there. It's fascinating because I think other industries around us have spent a lot of time and money and resource to do this kind of thing, like adding personalization to the retail side, you know, at McDonald's level, food and beverage. I mean, these are really smart people who have spent exordinate amounts of time and money to really dig in and understand this. in some senses, it's become a mathematical formula that they're running. And as long as they have the appropriate

inputs, they're able to get the appropriate This industry that we're in and we know and love isn't quite that mature yet. What's the path? What do you see as the path?

TJ 10:28
So I think the first thing is, know, when we, Eric Petruzic, is my co-founder at BlueGator, we spent a lot of time at Accesso together working on hard problems. you know, when we first got into Salesforce, we got really excited about the analytic tools and we're like, you know, there's all these predictive analytics and these sorts of things that we could do. And actually, you know, we started working with folks and they're like, yeah, our data is a mess. We can't get it together. It's all siloed. So.

The very first thing and what we're seeing now is a lot of organizations are making collective efforts to centralize their data, whether it's a data warehousing project or they're moving off of silo data and using Salesforce as an aggregator for a true CRM. just to speak to that a second, one of the things that I think a lot of people in our industry think about, they're like, well, we have a CRM, our ticketing system is our CRM.

Tim Samson 10:51
So, you.

Thank

you

TJ 11:17
And I think that's a terrible way to think about ticketing. Ticketing is meant for issuing entitlements, processing transactions, and getting people in the gate. It's not for identity resolution. It doesn't do a great, like some ticketing systems have varying degrees of, of analytic capabilities and stuff like that, but they're not CRMs. what we've seen is when

you know, we're coming behind other folks in our space that have done integrations. They're like, well, the ticketing system is terrible because it does this, this and this. We're like, well, that's not what the ticketing system is supposed to do. You can solve the identity problem in Salesforce and not have to worry about the ticketing system. It can do what it does. And then that gives you the power to level up. So what we're seeing is a lot of people are setting that foundation. There are a few, venues that are, you five, six years into it that have a really good base of this. And they've been,

they're starting to cook with gas a little bit. but there are more venues that are just now kind of coming to see that like, oh okay. you can get good results with, with this sort of approach and you can set a foundation that can then you can start building up building on and not feel like you're locked into, you know, a rigid platform or something like that. So we're starting to see a lot of folks that have, made that choice. They've set the foundation, they've taken a breath and now they're like, all right,

Tim Samson 12:22
Thank

TJ 12:29
we know what we got now and we've got a better sense of our data. Now how do we start taking action on it? And then that's where, you know, we can, we're either along from the, from the beginning to the foundation and now moving forward or, know, there's other organizations that we're working with where they've had that foundation set and now they kind of have a dental, they've seen what we're doing in the space or talking about in the space. They're like, we want to go do that thing. Can you help us with that?

Tim Samson 12:44
Thank

Thank

TJ 12:53
So I think more people, more attention is coming to it because the data is coming together in a more intentional way across the industry.

John Pendergrast 13:00
Yeah, I think it's interesting. I've done the last two or three years of trade shows when I've gone and I've done talks. A lot of them have been about data. And what's always fascinating is you've got an audience of people that, you know, usually those draw a pretty big audience because everybody recognizes.

that data is something that they really need to be actually aware of. And it's more than just collected data. It's useful data. It's not just data at rest. And I drew this analogy probably a year and a half or two years ago now. I said, in the same way that you hire a marketing consultant or a marketing person to manage your website and your outside spend and so forth and so on,

Tim Samson 13:35
Thank you.

John Pendergrast 13:35
you need to start considering having a data

person on your staff that can start really helping you dig to the bottom of some of these things. And some of our customers have now gone off and done that and started to hire data analysts. How do you approach that? I mean, obviously, you run a company that does this for people, and feel free to jump in with a shameless pitch. That's totally fine. But how do you suggest that larger operations and smaller operations would approach this?

TJ 13:43
Thank

Yeah, I I think, our industry in general, some folks get a little bit scared of Salesforce because they, see the commercials or they've had bad experiences with it in other companies or platforms or things like that. And it has perception of, being expensive. and it's certainly not cheap.

Tim Samson 14:13
Okay.

TJ 14:14
But when you do the ROI on what you can unlock with it, it can be a real revenue generator for you. Like, you know, a way to, you know, not necessarily put $1 in and get $3 out, but certainly, you know, there's a positive ROI in these projects. And I think finding someone that can help you, it's not just a lift and shift of data for data's sake, it's really about empowering some of these things. I think that's one. I think two is what gets us excited about, you know, the Salesforce ecosystem is, they've had

a CDP for a long time, they're re-architecting all these different solutions to have data cloud as their backend sort piece that, you know, a couple of years ago is like where you'd migrate all your data. Now it's all zero copies. So you can, you don't have to move your data anymore, you can access the Snowflake instance, or you can access,

Azure or they opened up like at DreamForce a couple of weeks ago, they're announced 140 other connectors, including SQL databases. So being able to envelop that data and not have to move it and then bring it into an environment that you can start, you know, manipulating it and using it and taking action on it. You know, from an analytics perspective, they, they acquired Tableau several years ago.

they have now a semantic data layer that you can put over it. So when you think about, you know, turning AI, on top of your ticketing systems, to be able to really interact with it on like what are top sellers and things like that. it's still a little bit out there, but those things are coming fast and quick. So if you choose the right platforms, like you're going to be leaps and bounds ahead of other organizations and you know,

Tim Samson 15:33
Okay.

TJ 15:43
you can outperform some of the biggest players in the market if you make really wise sort of tech stack decisions and make really wise people decisions. And I know that's no secret. Like it's just like operations. Like in our industry, everyone focused on operations and rightly so, and everyone's a fantastic operator, right? World-class operators, not world-class data people. And, what we're seeing is that happening now that's coming more and more into the industry. They're attracting that kind of stuff because the model is changing to,

John Pendergrast 16:00
Yep.

Tim Samson 16:05
Okay.

TJ 16:11
too as Right? So like the model used to be, Hey, we need to drive. We want to take admissions. It was not as simple as this, but it's we got to increase attendance. Let's go put in a big ride. We'll take the attendance. We'll take the ticket price up 5, 10%. We'll get an bump in attendance and voila, we'll hit our number. Our time much more competitive than it used to be. You know, you can sit on your couch and stream a bazillion things or

go do a bazillion things and that trip to their local theme park or FEC or zoo, it's a much more competitive time landscape that's shifting. And you know, you've got to be smarter with your data and people just expect it. they expect like just better, better communication, more robust, like they just to be known. Yeah.

John Pendergrast 16:34
Yep.

Yeah.

Well, I mean consumers, this struck me a year or two ago that the consumers that are buying on Amazon are the same consumers that are buying at the zoo.

TJ 17:03
100 %

John Pendergrast 17:03
and that they

a certain type of interaction. And as an industry, we've been unable to really respond to that yet technologically. We're getting there. We're doing kind of these one-offs here and there with companies like yours, but it's been really challenging. And I think that over the next decade, we've got a lot of work to do to really catch up to some of those ancillary markets.

Tim Samson 17:14
you

TJ 17:24
Yeah. And part of the reason for that is, know, we're not Amazon, right? Like the frequency of purchase isn't enough to warrant necessarily remembering my username and login. Right? So, and even if I have a username or login, I've been a member somewhere for a, you know, five, 10 years. I use it once a year to renew my membership. Right? So like even that gating is like kind of silly when you think about it.

Tim Samson 17:24
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 17:28
Right.

Right. Right.

Tim Samson 17:36
you

TJ 17:48
It should be more like a magic link of like, you know, Hey, renew your membership. Then it sends you that magic link that logs you into your profile that like, no one's remember in there. I'm gonna member ID, I got a phone with my card. And if I don't do digital cards, I mean, it's just like, you know, so yes.

John Pendergrast 18:02
Yeah, agreed, Tim, go ahead. I've been taking all the questions on my own. ahead.

Tim Samson 18:07
No, you're

fine. You're fine. I'm just engaged and listening. No, I was going to actually one up you on the Amazon customers are your customers because they buy on Amazon. They're probably buying Amazon at the zoo. Right. They're buying on Amazon at the zoo while they're there TJ, we talked about like a lot of larger concepts and I know that some of this can be, I want to say a little scary, but unapproachable to smaller parks. So, so

TJ 18:19
Right.

John Pendergrast 18:20
Yeah, right.

Tim Samson 18:32
Let's consider you're a smaller attraction. You don't have a data team. You're interested in RFM What would a good first 30-day experiment look like

TJ 18:43
if you were a smaller attraction, say you're doing 150,000 in attendance, I would say that's probably, you know, on the smaller end ecosystem. with Salesforce, what's nice, especially if you're a nonprofit, so there's a, has a nonprofit cloud and inside nonprofit cloud, it has RFM capabilities. So you literally can go in and click through the interface

and point it to the data that you want it to analyze. It's built for fundraising, but you could point it to membership records or things like that. And it has a data processing engine in it that does this for you and will segment people on a daily basis. It will run and it will give you the segment. You have to decide what you want to do with the segments and you have to name the segments and how many segments do you want? Do you want seven? Do you want one five? But honestly, if you're looking to get started with it and just trying to wrap your head around it and you've got like,

Tim Samson 19:17
Hmm.

TJ 19:32
chat GPT license or something like that, just firing away. you know, cause like I don't want to go down too far down the AI, the AI path, but like, it's a great ideation partner of like, Hey, I heard this podcast about RFM. I'm a science center or I'm a local amusement park in, you know, XYZ. And, you know, it sounds interesting. How can I, how can I implement it?

Tim Samson 19:50
Thank

TJ 19:55
How would I use like what, what McDonald's uses? Like literally that could be your prompt. And then you're just like rating on it like, well how would I do this? And what about that? And you know, you can, and you can get pretty far, pretty fast on like at least how you could then take action on it, right? The, the hard problem, the hard problem to solve after that is like, okay, is your foundation set, is your data pulled together? Do you have tools to be able to score these things or, or apply scores to things manually? Cause instead of dynamically splitting it up in quintile, you could just say like,

Tim Samson 19:57
Thank you.

So thank you.

TJ 20:24
they visited in the last week, there are five outside of two weeks to a month is of four and so on and so forth. and then run, automations on that to automatically score stuff. But, you could get started. I mean, it's not like a, I don't want to say it's like a super easy list, list, lift, unless you have nonprofit cloud already, but it's certainly something that you could start ideating on and thinking like, okay,

Tim Samson 20:28
to the first class.

that we have no problem with.

TJ 20:44
If we have them into this, like how could we prove out the ROI? Again, you could use ChatGPT for that. Like, hey, so if I did this, you know, I was able to action on these things. What do I think my conversion rate could be on sending a targeted program to these different segments? And help me build a model to prove out ROI against RFM for my venue. You can start iterating with AI and it will help you.

Tim Samson 20:55
I don't know.

TJ 21:06
think through those things. You don't have to go get a consultant to go tell you all those things. They can get you at 70 % there. Just kind of like, all right, is this worth exploring for my venue or not?

Tim Samson 21:16
So what would you say to an attraction that says my gut is telling me that more than half of our customers only come once a year Right. Does that does that blow RFM out of water?

TJ 21:26
No, I think that gives you a good starting spot, right? if over half your folks are coming once a year, you need to dial in to frequency, right? So your frequency is one on a, on a, on an annualized basis. How do I think about activating those users? And stepping outside of RFM,

we've done or seen this in CRMs too, where you know where your venue is, you know where their zip code is, because they had to enter that in when they bought their ticket. And you can do math, right? As the crow flies based on 55 miles an hour, are they within 30 minutes, an hour, five hour, whatever. And then, we work with a lot of zoos and aquariums and a lot of zoos are gearing up for like holiday lights, right?

Tim Samson 21:49
Mm-hmm.

TJ 22:07
So you could say, okay, hey, Tuesday holiday lights are looking soft, right? How do we activate that without cannibalizing future sales? Well, with your CRM, you could say, okay, I'm going to get a list of everyone that's bought zoo light tickets already. that are for a different date. And then I'm going take the people that are in 30 minutes and I'm going to run a flash sale for today, for next Tuesday. That's only people.

Tim Samson 22:30
Mm-hmm.

TJ 22:30
within 30 minutes that have already bought. I'm trying to increase the frequency of the visit and I've targeted the people that are more than likely going to be able to take advantage of it like in a short timeframe. So, you know, that's not necessarily RFM, but that's looking at the CRM data to be able to like analyze that stuff and take action on it near term. Tim, to your question, like, okay, they come once a year. Okay. Well, how do we get them to come back? You've got to give them an incentive to come back.

Tim Samson 22:51
Thank

Well, I think that's what all operators want. They're trying to get that return visit. We talked about that for years within the industry, is how do get these people to come back? And we've done bounce backs and all kinds of other things. But they haven't been really targeted to the level of what RFM would do. You just kind of give it to everyone.

TJ 23:05
Yeah.

for

Yeah, well there's that, then also like it's not a, it's not a silver bullet either. Like, you know, if people are only coming once a year, maybe you have a guest services problem, right? it's a multi-thread issue. if you're doing surveys, exit surveys, right? collectively work with an organization that does this. When someone leaves and they do a survey, when it's like under a four,

John Pendergrast 23:23
Right.

TJ 23:35
and that comes back, it creates a case and they can follow up with that guest. that's a great way to build loyalty is the recovery. You know, Josh Liebman of Liebman group does this all the time he's got a great story about like how to turn those dissatisfied guests into loyal patrons, or guests or members or seasoned pass holders. It's about the recovery aspect of it and the speed of that and all those things.

Tim Samson 23:36
Mm-hmm.

TJ 23:57
So some of it is just guest service operations. Some of it is analyzing that data to figure out why people are having such a good time trying to get them to come back. Some of it is just giving an incentive, like a good offer, things like that.

John Pendergrast 24:10
mean, that's only one metric too, right? Like you're looking and go, I want a return visitor. Is that possible? We have some customers and vendors they're a bucket list item, right? Like you're gonna go to that, once. You're go see that once.

But how do you increase the other categories and spend? Like how do you get them to spend more money at, like if they're gonna go once, they probably are gonna wanna buy a memento of some sort of having been. And how do you ensure that they have what they wanna buy and those kinds of things as well? There's this great story someone told me years ago about a zoo where they had gone to the zoo with their son and he was 16 and taken picture at the zoo.

Five years later and periodically through that five years He'd gotten you know emails saying you want to buy this picture of you and your son And it was like $30 and he's like no. and finally they sent an email that said we're gonna delete this off of our servers next month Five dollars and it's yours and five years later. He bought it for five dollars, and they got five dollars of revenue

TJ 25:08
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 25:08
And they

did it because they knew exactly what the event was. They knew that it was important in their lives and they were able to continue re-engaging because of the data that they had. I always thought that was a great story because it's like, it's not just as people are on the ground at your attraction that those kind of opportunities arise. They arise all across that customer journey.

TJ 25:26
Yeah,

and there's like, I love the Pittsburgh Zoo, but like, I can't imagine their e-commerce, not ticketing e-commerce, but like the retail e-commerce is like that great. Like I would never go the e-commerce store there to buy that. But for iconic attractions, certainly there's a drive there for that. And I think the other thing too is,

You know, I think about, um, we, we have an experience where we had an opportunity as a family to go to the UK for spring break. And one of the bucket, one of my bucket list items was I wanted to go to a, uh, an EPL game. Like I've never, never been to one, wanted to go to one. Well, the best way to go to one is you have to become a member and then you got to do all sorts of other things like wake up really early and be there for the member tickets and all that kind of stuff.

Tim Samson 25:59
Thanks.

TJ 26:09
but our whole family had to be members and it was like 30 bucks or something like that. Right. But our kid, our kids were rest of the world members, right. And they sent them a branded box with a boot bag for your cleats gloves. So if you're playing soccer outside and a scarf and a card and our kid, that was three or four years ago, our kids still have it in their rooms up on the shelf because it's so cool. And the scarves are hanging in their rooms.

Tim Samson 26:33
Okay.

TJ 26:39
And, know, we may never go back there again, right? But we'll forever be tethered to that or, and then think about the brand affinity. And if you think about, you know, zoos and things like that, that where you may, you know, you may only visit the Columbus zoo once every two years or something like that. Cause it's, you know, it's far enough away from where I'm at that I'm not going to go all the time. It's like three hour drive. but.

Tim Samson 26:44
Thank

Yeah.

TJ 27:01
I might have a strong enough affinity where I want to be a, like a virtual member or something. And you know, you adopt an animal, you get a plushie or you can extend with commerce that relationship or that membership or you get, you know, videos or, you know, access to things and stuff like that. You can experiment with that a little You can do a lot of things digitally to sort of extend the relationship with, with your audiences. Just Just to go down a little bit of a hole on that, I was at AZA.

Tim Samson 27:11
Yeah.

TJ 27:28
I think it was Edmonton Zoo was talking about what they're doing with Twitch. they had like a red panda that was born and they started putting videos of it on Twitch and leaned way into it. they were able to generate $60,000 in donations that year off of Twitch and all the enrichment things that they wanted to get for the panda. Like in Twitch you can do sort of like a, like an Amazon wishlist. Every time they put something up there, someone automatically bought it. And there were people all over the world buying this thing, right?

Tim Samson 27:44
Thank you.

TJ 27:54
Because think about that because they were introducing it to the animals. I live in Pittsburgh. It's the Edmonton zoo. For some reason I stumbled on this thing and I see it and I'm like, Oh, you can buy this enrichment toy for the Panda. Let's buy it. And then they're going to live stream giving that thing. Like imagine you're, you have your family like, Hey, that's the toy we bought, whatever the name of the Panda and they're showing it. Like it's just amazing the way that you can extend your brand outside of four walls of, you know,

John Pendergrast 28:12
Yeah, huge.

TJ 28:21
It's physical space these days.

John Pendergrast 28:22
Yeah,

yeah, it is amazing. The level of connectivity behind that is incredible. And of course, we're building on that. We're kind building on the shoulders of giants, because there's other industries that have really built that whole ecosystem and the technologies around being able to do that. And then they were able to leverage that in their space to a high level of effectiveness.

This might be a silly question given what we just talked about, you had to pick one and say I'm going to concentrate on one in the so recency, frequency and monetary, as a small attraction or as an operator, where would you start?

TJ 28:53
Well, I wouldn't start at one because you take the collection of each one and make up a segment. like as Tim pointed out, it depends on my visitation and patterns, right? So like the monetary is probably about the same or it's probably, probably scales, right? The more spend the more monetary. I'd probably focus on, frequency. So how do I increase the frequency of visits and drive more, you know, clicks through the turnstile, and, try and,

John Pendergrast 28:56
Right, exactly.

Tim Samson 28:57
Thank you.

TJ 29:16
dial that in for sure. on the frequency side, there's the daily ticket side, but there's also the membership or season pass side. I would look at people that do have passes and have been inactive or dormant over a certain period of time. And I'd love to activate them so I could, so I could make sure that I'm retaining them as members year over year. so you're the closer to their out,

Tim Samson 29:31
Yeah.

TJ 29:38
I mean, I don't know the data on this. I would have to look at it, but like I would imagine the closer the last visit is to the, you know, expiration within reason, right? Probably too close. might, you might not renew, but there's probably some sweet spot on there on like, you know, Hey, maybe three months out from expiration. You want that person to come because you're going to be in the back of their mind that, we were just there. We need to go back anyways. And you know, let's renew sort of thing.

John Pendergrast 30:04
Yeah, I feel like a lot of our traction operators over the years have fixated really heavily on the monetary side and gone, we just, we need to increase revenue or we need to do these kinds of things and almost at the exclusion of the other two. But I recognize that they all work together and they only really work together from that perspective.

Tim Samson 30:21
the industry in general has focused on revenue, but you know, coming out of COVID, you started to focus on not shoving people through an attraction, right? You had fewer people at a higher ticket ring and they ultimately get a better experience. So I think there's some other factors outside of that. But when you do get into that space, you know, you have fewer people.

Or fewer guests in general the RFM becomes important with that, right? so TJ I know I know we've talked and you said that you haven't really had anyone fully bite on this yet But you know, you're passionate about it. You've talked about it You won't shut up about it. But anyways, what what resistance are you hearing like from operators?

TJ 31:02
I don't think anyone's resisting it. We have, we have a couple of folks that like, you know, are again, they've set the foundation, they have the right tools in place, that tool being Salesforce and nonprofit cloud. It's stuff that they can now start looking at and, and as a second phase. So we do have some folks that are starting to look at it. For folks that don't have that tool in it, you know, we're looking at

you know, Hey, can we build a light application that can work in conjunction with Salesforce data within Salesforce to be able to like do these calculations and stuff like that. So you already have the tools. Great. If not, you know, we're looking at investing in those tools so that we can bring this to market in the near term. I mean, I think the hesitancy is just more about getting their arms around it.

It's amazing the hesitation folks have. We'll talk a lot about like, hey, when you connect ticketing with Salesforce and marketing, do things as simple as as soon as someone visits within 24 hours, send them an automated email to become a member or a season pass holder, right? people are like, yeah, I want that. But then you go and you go to actually implement those automated journeys and like, are we sure it's gonna work?

Are we sure it's going to fire the wrong person? And all these doubt and all the, and some of them are good, good questions to ask, but get nervous. It's like, it's like, you know, are you a person that's going to jump in a Waymo and be comfortable with the thing that's just driving itself or, are you still feel like you want to have someone to have their hands on the wheel and building those automated tools? people can be, can be resistant, not resistant, but just reluctant because

I was talking to someone the other day and I'm like, look today you're taking the data, you're exporting the data, you're reviewing the data, you're importing the data, then you're exporting the data from over here. You're reviewing the data and you're importing the data. It's eating up all your time. You don't like that, right? We can all agree, but in tomorrow's world, where all that's happening automated, you're going to have a hard time trusting that it's actually doing it because you were touching it so many times. So it's that like trust the technology, what the technology is supposed to be doing and

Tim Samson 33:02
Mm-hmm.

TJ 33:05
So it's very few folks are jumping in and like, yeah, full, foot on the throttle or whatever. And let's go. It's more like, okay, like let's try this over here and let's try this over here and this over here versus like all in.

Tim Samson 33:17
I don't know if you're intentionally doing this or not, but you mentioned data so much in your response to that question that you have segued us into the next part of the conversation, right? Which is taming data chaos. So that RFM is even possible.

TJ 33:25
⁓ sweet.

John Pendergrast 33:32
Yeah, so I mean, this is more of a statement than a question, and I'll get to the question part, but I mean, there's this old phrase, drowning in data, but starving for insights, right? That we're really in that position. And I mean, other, we're in good hands. Other industries have gone through this as well, and we don't have to step through all the same hoops. We have things that have been built for us now as an industry, like whether it's Salesforce or other tools that now exist. We're not reinventing the wheel. When you look at a typical attraction's tech stack,

Tim Samson 33:42
Mm-hmm.

John Pendergrast 33:59
What's usually broken? And what do you usually have to assess first?

TJ 34:04
⁓ it's not that anything's broken. It's that it's all siloed and disconnected. if you look at like a, zoor or aquarium or museum, a nonprofit, they're more complicated, much more complicated an operation than, you know, a regional theme park or something like that. Right. They have, they have a donor system that's siloed either intentionally or unintentionally on-prem.

you know, sort of razor's edge type solution. They have ticketing that's siloed, not connected. They have marketing that's siloed and not connected. Then they're wrestling with imports and exports across all these systems to try and do stuff. And it's not that any one of those systems are broken on their own. They work just fine for the most part, right? And where they start to integrate these things, they end up doing it with these, these brutal point to point connections that if

one system upgrades, everything downstream is impacted. the first thing is, you know again, that's why we like Salesforce as a platform, because you can plug in a ticketing system and ticketing data comes in a certain way and you move your fundraising. So you got all your fundraising data in there and then it's in or out. if I want to use this online giving tool, great, or switch it out for another online giving tool. And my platform is the same.

Tim Samson 35:00
Okay.

TJ 35:11
and the data model doesn't shift much. I'm able to integrate data in and pull data out in a really easy way in that platform. So that's what we're trying to solve with the Salesforce stuff. But going back to your question, what's broken is it's not that anything's broken. it's just too brittle an environment because they used to all, know, 10 years ago it was fine when everyone was in a silo. Now they want to pull everything together. It's really difficult because everything's in a silo.

John Pendergrast 35:36
Yeah.

And I mean our industry has not been good at integration friendliness. Over the last 10 years, it's gotten a little bit better. But I remember companies like Redeem or Rezdy and things like that trying to say, you can use all of our channel management. You can use all of our tools. But we really need your ticketing system to do the integration. Because otherwise, you can't use those things. We've ended up with data silos of our own making sometimes that exist. And I think that's starting to break down now as well. And we're starting to see more and more people go, OK, integration's good for all of us.

Tim Samson 35:52
and

John Pendergrast 36:03
to the betterment of all platforms, but I think that that has certainly taken place in the industry.

TJ 36:07
Yeah,

that like so yes to that. So it's really I feel like

systems in general or a lot of systems in general think very much about like, I'm going to keep it here because the tighter I can keep you, the better I can keep you. And that's actually what is forcing clients to make a choice to move. Right. So the more open your platform can be, and this is what like I think Salesforce has done, like moving into that, that industry and seeing that ecosystem, everything's open.

John Pendergrast 36:20
Yep. Yep.

Tim Samson 36:34
that.

TJ 36:38
You want to use their stuff? Great. You want to build your own stuff? Great. You want to use some other tool that's integrated? Great. Whatever you want to do is fine. It's open. It's a platform. Go for it. Right. And when you think about that from a, from a ticketing perspective, being able to have clients build their own services on top of it or integrate other services or use the services that you have, having that open, architecture and ability to support those things and those needs as they evolve. I think that's going to be the winning play. And it allows, allows a whole,

Tim Samson 36:43
it.

Thank

you

TJ 37:06
industry to move forward in a way that's really exciting because they're not like dragging, you know, yeah, tech debt. And, and some of it is really hard because, it doesn't matter what your platform was, if you, if you built your platform 10 years ago or you built it 15 years ago like the tech is moving so fast that, sometimes it's a big lift to open those things up.

John Pendergrast 37:13
at effectively.

Tim Samson 37:25
Thank you.

TJ 37:28
There's a volunteer system in the space that like, they just can't integrate stuff. All they can do is give you a CSV probably because it's like spaghetti code and it's too hard to do that.

John Pendergrast 37:35
Yep,

Tim Samson 37:37
Yeah, TJ, we've talked before and you mentioned the need for having different RFM's like for different segmentation within an org, but can you have too many?

TJ 37:47
Probably like I wouldn't go crazy with it. Right? Like, you know, again, if you're a nonprofit, RFM for fundraising makes a lot of sense because you're trying to move donors in a different way than you're trying to move day visitors or members or something like that. Right? So I would think about it like RFM for fundraising and probably RFM for visitation or maybe just RFM for members because there's enough of, you know,

Tim Samson 38:03
Mm-hmm.

TJ 38:11
especially if you've got a really strong membership base, just there's enough there to try and get that incremental visit out of the member. like with a lot of organizations, if you can increase your membership retention by like one, every percentage point that you, that you maintain year over year is like, it'd be like a hundred thousand dollars or more that you don't have to go get next year. Right? So that might be a place to just start. Cause then if your retention's higher and there's a cap to that, you're never going to retain a hundred percent of your members. But you know, if you start,

Tim Samson 38:29
Mm-hmm.

TJ 38:38
hitting that cap and you're doing everything you can on that. Then you can shift to the next one on, on a visitation and visitation could be tricky. If you're, you know, if you're more of a touristy type attraction where people are coming into town and you're like that place that you go when you come to the city, then yeah, it's probably a little bit trickier. You might want to focus more on your, captive audience, which would be like members and donors.

John Pendergrast 39:01
Yep, yeah, absolutely. So let's say you're an attraction, you're kind of a mid-sized attraction. You have your typical silos, you have your ticketing, your separate retail system, your separate food and beverage system. You have a membership system that's kind of got a janky hookup to some sort of donor management system, because there's some of that going on as well.

and you've never thought about the data of this, what is the first step that you would walk in the door and say, okay, here it is, this is the first thing I want you to think about?

TJ 39:35
It's a little scary of a, like, first thing would be like, that's going to be a tough one. ⁓ because like, you know, there are organizations that I use this analogy because I, it's fun and to me it's relevant. So, my son played his first year of tackle football, like peewee football this year. Right. And there are kids that don't want to play tackle football and they don't play football.

John Pendergrast 39:37
I know I gave you a good setup, right?

Yeah.

TJ 39:58
There are kids that think they want to play football. Then they get there. It's hot. They're hit. They're hurt. They don't want to play football. They like the idea, but not the actual thing. But then there's kids that like, like it all. And it's just like change. Some people don't want any change. And if you don't want any change and don't play the sport, but don't expect to be drafted. Some people like the idea of change, but when it starts to happen, they don't like it so much. And you know,

Tim Samson 40:16
and

John Pendergrast 40:18
Yep.

Yeah.

TJ 40:26
that's where you have to look really hard at your organization. And do you have the right people in the right seats to get your organization where it needs to go? Not where it wants to go, where it needs to go. And if it doesn't need to go there, then you might be just fine with the status quo. Not everybody's got to be, you know, drafted.

But if you, if you want to play the sport and you like to play the sport, then you gotta get in the game. and that means, you know, you gotta come up with a clear why, why do you want to do this? What is the reason for this? Cause there is organizational pain in this and you've got to have a strong enough team and reason to get through that, to get to the other side of doing all the cool stuff that we talked about.

Tim Samson 40:54
But. ⁓

John Pendergrast 41:05
Yeah, no pain, no gain, right? I really like your analogy. I think that's a great analogy. Because the reality is that, I mean, I know lots of orgs. I've spent a lot of time with different organizations over the last, going on 15 years here. And you often will have someone inside the walls that's a little bit younger.

maybe coming from a different segment of the market, going, guys, is gonna, wow, my last job, this is so amazing, this is what is. And then they get up to ownership, and ownership's like, this is our family legacy, we can't mess with this, and that's where things die on the vine.

TJ 41:37
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 41:38
And it's scary, because I mean, you really are going to have to rip the bandaid off, live with the pain for a while, while you start to move things around and really get yourself in the position you need to be in. And you really can't see what it's going to look like until you've gotten a little further down the track. So no, I love the analogy.

TJ 41:54
Yeah. And as you were talking, I was sort of thinking about another point on that is like, you know, a lot of organizations, it's where you divert your dollars. So a lot of organizations will bring in really expensive agencies to tell them, build this huge five year strategy plan for me. Right. And spend a lot of money and a lot of time. And I'm not saying there's not value in these things, but they'll send lots and lots of money to get this

Tim Samson 42:12
Mm-hmm.

TJ 42:19
you know, back in the day you would print it out, but it'd be like this binder, this deck of your, like your five year marketing strategy or whatever it is. And then they hand it to the marketer that just graduated college. like, we want to do this. And they're like, yeah. So, one, our socials aren't even set up and, two, you know, like everything's disconnected and three, all these things. So like you're paying for all of that stuff. And one of the things that we've talked about is

John Pendergrast 42:30
Right.

Tim Samson 42:41
about

TJ 42:42
When we understand enough of the strategy, I can't, we're not going to be one of those shops that comes in and helps you build like a five year strategy or something like that. Well, what we can do is if you have, we can make sure that your tech stack is in place to execute your strategy versus, cause what they'll then do is say, well, actually if you just give us your ticketing exports on an XYZ basis, we'll run your marketing for you and we'll do all those things. And they're charging you all that stuff. You don't need to do that. Just set up your technology to be able to enable those things in an automated fashion.

Tim Samson 43:00
Thank

TJ 43:10
and you can be in the driver's seat and you don't have to be waiting for, I want to know how this campaign went when I got to go chase, you know, so and so to give me the report on, what the conversion was and all this other stuff, cause they have all the data. Then they have all the power, you know, build your tech stack so you have the power and you can execute it. And it's oftentimes it's probably the same dollars. It's just, you're bringing that in house and there is risk in bringing in house, right? You have,

Tim Samson 43:21
Please move.

TJ 43:36
you know, mastermind behind all this stuff and then they leave and then you've got to backfill that. But I feel like that at least you're in control of your own destiny in that manner.

John Pendergrast 43:44
Yeah.

I love your passion about it. feel equally passionate about it. And oftentimes I find, and it's become significantly better in last three years. I find that there was a point where we were radicals, this idea that we were just radicals in the industry. That's crazy what you guys are talking about doing. We're so far behind that. We're never gonna get there. And now I'm starting to feel like the tide is starting to move and we're gonna start seeing more more attractions make this move because it's not just interesting, it's essential.

TJ 44:14
Yeah, I think that's right. And there are so many smart people in the industry. Like there's just, there's tons of brilliant operators that are now seeing, they're seeing what's possible and they're connecting the dots really quickly. And that's why we're starting to see the momentum behind kind of what we're doing is because, you know, five years ago,

Tim Samson 44:23
Okay.

Good night.

TJ 44:36
we would shop some of this stuff around people like that looks awesome. Can you actually do that? Like, that possible? And like that seems I've heard about some of those things that go terribly wrong and like that seems risky, but we've gotten lots of good reps and ups and, and we, talk with the Salesforce team a lot about just, just, you know, sort of evangelical in the ecosystem about arts and cultural organizations using Salesforce.

John Pendergrast 44:40
Right.

Yeah.

Tim Samson 44:46
You

TJ 45:00
Cause the more people that are having success on this platform, the more the whole industry moves forward. It's not necessarily about, we hope we benefit from that too, but it's actually more of like being super passionate about these venues because you know, the, why we do what we do or why I, you know, me and Eric hung the shingle or I hung the shingle of, of blue Gator up was my personal experience, you have so many key family memories at

museums and zoos and theme parks and things like that. And these experiences that you're having as a kid can change the trajectory of your life. I was going to work at a paper company, right? Like I could have been like, you know, and look where I look where my career ended up. This is how people become world-class conservationists. This is getting exposure to these things. This is how you become a curator, a passion for art, passion for science, you know, passion for theme parks. I was just doing a career day and I was talking to kids about like,

Hey, if you love math and science, like you could go build roller coasters. That's a thing. Like, you know, it can change the trajectory and it's such a fun industry. And I think with what we're doing and why we're so passionate about it is we, play a small part in those experiences for those guests every single day, right? we can connect what we're doing with those experiences. And I think that's something that like, it certainly wakes me up in the morning and has me, you know, sort of lock in at work and stuff like that is like,

Tim Samson 45:58
Yeah, yeah.

John Pendergrast 45:58
it.

TJ 46:20
We're not just here to do the thing because it's easy. It's like we live and breathe this thing and we know what benefits it can have for the industry and the subsequent benefits it can have for, you know, our societies and our communities and all that kind of stuff. That's why we're doing what we're doing.

John Pendergrast 46:35
you know, it's really interesting. You find these synergies in guests that you speak with, and I definitely have a synergy with you in regards to the why. The why is not because I inherently love databases, or I inherently love ticketing. That is not the why. The why is because you see that six-year-old kid light up and have a permanent memory.

TJ 46:45
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Pendergrast 47:00
wherever their experience, and I always actually say this, I say, you could have someone from different parts of the world that don't speak any of the same languages, sitting on a roller coaster next to each other, experiencing the same levels of joy and the same levels of a wild abandon of having this experience, and now you've created a connection.

Tim Samson 47:02
Mm-hmm.

John Pendergrast 47:21
that wouldn't have otherwise existed and that's worth doing. And all this is a means to an end which is facilitating a world where those kinds of things are easier to do ⁓ and more people can experience them.

TJ 47:30
Yeah. Yeah. I

had a coworker at Disney where her sibling was a, I think I'd like a, uh, one or two star general in the military. And she was like, when she has a bad day, like bad things are happening. When I have a bad day, I can go to the main street and watch people turn the corner and watch their faces light up when they first see the castle or watch their their eyes tear up and stuff like that. Like, you know,

John Pendergrast 47:44
that things happen.

Yep.

TJ 47:54
you can connect yourself with the product really quickly in this industry. what i'm about to say, we take our job very seriously. we take the role that we play in moving data and all that stuff very seriously. But at the end of the day, no one's lives on the line. We're about helping people have a better day and people tend to be a lot more fun to work with.

Tim Samson 47:56
Mm-hmm.

John Pendergrast 48:08
Right. Yep.

TJ 48:11
So that's the other reason why we do it. Because if we were working in public sector and with the military and stuff like that, I'm sure it's not quite as fun as, you

John Pendergrast 48:21
I've got no experience in that area, I don't know. But I suspect you're probably right. Everybody I've worked with in attractions and in tour space does it because they love the vision and mission of it. It's not a job. In fact, I think if it was just a job, you just wouldn't do it.

TJ 48:23
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Samson 48:26
Thank

TJ 48:34
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 48:38
Like Tim, you got your story of how you ended up in this space and you did it because you loved it, right? It was something that just all to you. And I think that's just true. And I think that's true just as much for technologists in the space as it is for the people that are meeting the guests in the front line.

Tim Samson 48:43
Yeah.

TJ 48:52
Yeah. I think a great example of that is I think Mark Locker at attractions.io. Like you can tell he loves this stuff. Like you just look at his LinkedIn, like he just posted something about 20th year in a row at Alton Towers at the fire end of your fireworks. Like that dude loves what he does. You could just tell.

Tim Samson 48:59
Mm-hmm.

John Pendergrast 49:08
Yep. Yep.

And you have to. I mean, that's the only reason, the only way you survive in this industry is you have to love it. You have to be just crazy enough to think this is where you want to spend your time. Go

TJ 49:13
Yeah.

Tim Samson 49:18
Ha ha ha.

⁓ On that note, I'm gonna I'm

gonna I'm gonna keep us moving So we talked about a lot of stuff And you know the big the big topic that everyone wants to talk about is AI, you know and how that plays into the guest engagement guest experience You know over the next I'll say five to ten years, but I mean over the next year maybe you know the speed that it's moving so

We've talked a lot about museums and nonprofits, but they're different than theme parks in general, or attractions, or passenger vessels, or any of those. So does RFM still work?

TJ 49:50
Well, I think the topic is different for AI. where I go with AI is, how can I use AI to help with operational support things like call deflection, support, maybe from a sales perspective, from a content perspective. I think that's where AI takes a place. I mean, certainly you can tune AI models to do,

and you're using analytic tools to sort of segment and stuff like that. But I think the place that AI plays, we're seeing it as in a couple of different pockets. So one, you know, every venue out there has a group sales, private events, catering sort of function. And we're seeing clients experiment with or really lean into agents for SDR agents. like Salesforce agent of course has SDR agents so they can do the outbound.

So their sellers can focus on selling. So like, the example I always use is in the fall, when all the teachers come back to school, everyone's reaching out to the teachers because they have their budgets and they're back in school about booking the field the spring. And you know, all the schools and all the teachers and all the stuff, and it's a million emails to send out and conversations to manage. You can now have AI do that. They can reach out to everybody in the school district or the 10 school districts in the area. It can handle.

Tim Samson 50:47
you.

TJ 51:00
the back and forth emails or questions and return things based on a knowledge base. And then if the teacher is interested and wants to book time, AI can book time on your calendar to get it closed. So you, as a seller, your time is much more focused selling versus, and booking the business and trying to make more of that visit with add-ons with catering and other experiences and things like that versus like just the email chat or back and forth.

Tim Samson 51:22
Mm-hmm.

TJ 51:26
So I think it's one pocket of AI. I think another pocket of AI is on the service side. So being able to have, you know, not just a chat bot on your website, but a chat bot on your website, they could also, change or interact with their data inside behind the website. Right. So when's my membership expire? Can I extend my membership? How many benefits do I have? You know, where can I use these loyalty points on property? You know, those sorts of things.

you can deliver within AI and all of that kind of stuff, which I think is super cool. I think another thing, you know, we were talking about Amazon earlier I talk about like the grocery store. So you get our groceries, we buy them online, pick them up, bring them home. And every once in while, like the apples are rotten or something's not good or this, that other thing. And you message in the app and it's like, boom, it's refunded. Imagine using AI, you know, they know your record. They know if you're a,

Tim Samson 51:59
Bye. ⁓

TJ 52:16
you're a sort of frequent complainer and maybe you don't get the apples refunded right away. Or if it's your first visit we, and you had a bet you had a stale pretzel and we can just refund you on the spot, using AI, right? We know that you're a first time visitor. We know that you just had a bad experience. We can recover immediately using AI

Or we can escalate it if not like maybe you're a constant complainant. like, so sorry about that. Please go to this place and we'll have a guest service person. You can offload it to a person if you need to versus just like, you know, having revenue at risk. That's a good use for AI. And you think about that on your website as well. And then I think the third pocket of AI is around content generation, which let's face it, probably everybody's doing their emails already in and all that stuff anyways. But, you know, if you think about

the type of content that you can generate, you you can go talk to your ride safety operators and do interviews with them like this and take that transcript. And then you could have a whole STEM sort of education series based on ride safety or how this thing was built or, you know, or what a zookeeper does on a day in day out basis. And you can build these repositories that they can then supercharge your messaging to be more targeted to your RFM segments, right? Cause I'm

Tim Samson 53:23
Thank

TJ 53:28
I'm I as the writer or the marketer at the, at the location, don't have to come up with these unique ideas for the blog or for this or that I can go out and interview people. I can store those interviews. I can plug them into AI. I can riff on that and get like, you know, blogs or posts or all that stuff. I can just sort of rip that stuff out. And, you know, I've got a content engine that is never ending.

John Pendergrast 53:51
I think AI has a lot to offer in so far as the edges of communications with people, where there's a lot of make work. And to your point, like, I need to ask a quick question. Can I ask this quick question of an AI bot of some sort? And I mean, we've been doing this with phone lines for a long, long time, right? Like you call in, get your quick answer about the weather on the ski slope, and then you can decide if you're to go skiing that day. And AI, of course, in

Tim Samson 54:08
Mm-hmm.

John Pendergrast 54:16
enables that to be a much faster experience. What do you think about the intersection between human, and we talked about this a little bit on the offline side, what do you think about the intersection between human to human connections?

TJ 54:27
Yeah, it doesn't replace that. that's the connective tissue of these experiences, right? Is experiencing these as a collective group of visitors or your family or that kind of stuff. if I have a question about an exhibit or something like that, or, you know, I'm genuinely curious about something, having a person to interact with and learn more and go deeper is certainly better than a, than a bot or an agent.

John Pendergrast 54:31
Yeah.

Yep.

TJ 54:47
But, you know, it's changing. I mean, there's, generations are changing and you can say what you want about Gen Alpha or the other ones, but a lot of people are a little uncomfortable with person to person interaction and things like that. So I think there's a world where both exist, but, you know, I don't know.

John Pendergrast 54:49
It is.

Yeah, and this is where, okay, so, I mean, this is, we might strike this from the record too, but this is where I start getting like.

I start questioning my role as a technologist. So is my role as a technologist to ensure that we have the best technology or is my role as a technologist to ensure that we do things that are culturally going to be important for us? So I clearly come from a generation of Gen X. I turned 50 this year. So I definitely fit into a certain category. And I'm probably the person who, it's a 50-50 if I'm going to call in and make a ticket reservation or if I'm going to use the website.

I probably use the website more but I still like the human to human interaction component. Is it good? I know I look at Salesforce, Salesforce was famous about this. They started to teach a lot of soft skills courses to incoming Gen Zers. I have two Gen Z kids myself who are in their 20s and learning all those soft skills of how to have human to human interactions.

Tim Samson 55:52
Okay.

John Pendergrast 56:00
Where's that, and this is an absolutely philosophical question, but where's that line with AI where we say part of our responsibility as technologists is not just to say, hey, you don't have to talk to anybody, but rather to drive some of those human to human interactions that are probably really important to society as a whole. And once again, we're way beyond the scope of the initial conversation, but I'm curious as to what your thoughts are.

TJ 56:21
I think there's two ways to think about it. I think if we're thinking about it from a visitor venue engagement perspective, I think you can scale operations up using technology in a much faster, more efficient way. You can maintain a much higher level of service or much better standard of service across, you know, it'll be much more even as you go through different things.

John Pendergrast 56:43
Agreed.

TJ 56:44
And if you can layer in, person to person interaction and engagement as part of that, I think that's a win. I think in the workplace, there's a real disservice because I mean, we're a hundred percent remote. we won't be a physical place ever. We're all remote employees. think there is a disservice for people coming out of school that don't have the benefit of, going into an office and

It's all the conversation that happened in between the conversations, micro interactions, and your manager or mentor hearing you blow a call, then coming into your queue and be like, hey, I just heard that. like do this a little bit differently or that, like that. And you can have AI do that, but it doesn't have the same impact as someone that you have an actual relationship with and that you know, took you out to lunch and has your best interest at heart and is trying to like grow you and all that.

John Pendergrast 57:06
Yeah, the water cooler.

Tim Samson 57:06
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 57:17
Yeah.

Tim Samson 57:30
Hmm.

TJ 57:31
if you have a good work environment and stuff like that. I think that's a big gap of like going from entry level to above. That's going to be a tough one for a lot of younger folks coming out of college to bridge, but I don't know how to do that. Yeah.

John Pendergrast 57:45
Yeah, what the answer is, I don't know.

I mean, like I said, it's a philosophical question. It was just curious as to what you thought.

Tim Samson 57:51
when you asked that my head went to this this place, I'll condense it as much as I can but there's this there's this comedian Ronnie Chang I don't know if you've ever ever seen him, but he does this bit about his mom sending him a picture of Bigfoot buying kombucha at Whole Foods and she's like Do you know that Bigfoot is real? He's a picture of him buying kombucha at Whole Foods and he's like No mom. No mom. That's that's AI, you know

And she goes, well, no, there's a picture of him at Whole Foods. You know, where would this technology come that can fake pictures? You know, and it kind of, goes through this whole bit and he's like, no, no, it's, it's, it's, it's fake. Like it's fake. It's, it's been, it's been, manipulated and she's like, but how do you know? And at that point he kind of like breaks down and he goes, well, the aspect ratio goes wrong with lightiness and it's pixelated and he's like,

He's like, I've just learned all these things from all these things on the internet over the years. This world is not made for you anymore. Right. And this is, this is kind of the thing. and, the reason my head went there is, you know, as we think about AI and these interactions and how they engage with people, we have a pretty, built in bullshit detector,

TJ 58:46
Yeah.

John Pendergrast 58:47
Ouch. Yeah.

Tim Samson 58:59
And just looking at something or, or seeing like dashes in context, we know it came from AI now or, or looking at a photo we can, we can usually tell. And I think as a society that takes away the authenticity. So I think as technologists, we have to balance the authenticity with if we can leverage AI, to, give humans the tool to create those human interactions, like surfacing data or.

offers like you talked about TJ. I think I think that's an important place.

John Pendergrast 59:28
If operators listening could do just one thing differently after hearing about RFM and your French fries to fundraising framework, what should that one thing be?

TJ 59:37
I think they should look at their tech estate and assess is the stack that they have in place today, somebody that can take them forward over the next five to 10 years or not. And if so, it's time to lean in and start really thinking about some of the segmentation and things that we've talked about. If not, you've probably got some foundational work to do first.

John Pendergrast 59:58
Great. All right. We're going to move into the lightning round.

So starting off, super important question. everything hinges on this. McRib or Big Mac?

TJ 1:00:07
I don't do fast food.

John Pendergrast 1:00:08
the analogy is good with McDonald's, but it breaks down on the actual food side.

TJ 1:00:11
Yeah, I

Tim Samson 1:00:11
Yeah, okay.

TJ 1:00:13
will have McDonald's coffee every once in a while, but yeah, I don't do the Big Mac or McRib.

John Pendergrast 1:00:16
There you go.

Tim Samson 1:00:19
so drive through our mobile order for you?

TJ 1:00:21
drive-through. I don't like the mobile order.

mainly because my usually when I'm doing it, I'm getting stuff for everybody else. And then I it takes me too long to like without this and extra that. And I'd just rather just do it.

John Pendergrast 1:00:23
Interesting.

Tim Samson 1:00:29
Hmm.

John Pendergrast 1:00:33
There is an

irony to that. And that also puts you in a specific age bracket as well. you know. Listen, we grew up setting our parents' VCRs. I don't, you know, we know all about this.

TJ 1:00:37
Yes, yeah. And the fact that I see it up every time.

Tim Samson 1:00:46
But how are they gonna RFM you? If you don't use the app.

TJ 1:00:50
that's their problem. I don't know.

John Pendergrast 1:00:51
Yeah.

Tim Samson 1:00:53
Yeah, but

you lose out on all those points. You can have free coffee. See in this... Yeah.

TJ 1:00:56
I do, I know, but my wife gets them all. So

she is the collector of all things points.

John Pendergrast 1:01:02
Yes, I can definitely agree with that. And she does all the online ordering as well, right? She probably mobile orders. Yes, I know.

Tim Samson 1:01:05
You

TJ 1:01:08
She's got them all saved. don't, I don't, don't go enough

to save. like, she's just like, click there. Like we're reordering. I'm like, that's awesome. usually mine's like super easy. It's just like a black coffee or something like that. So I don't know.

John Pendergrast 1:01:20
Yeah,

totally. Yeah, this is where we get to the point where we realize that our wives are what make our lives make sense, because the rest of us will be lost in this world. Yeah, we feel it, exactly. OK, I'm going take your question, and Tim, we're back and forth here. Email or SMS?

Tim Samson 1:01:25
Mm-hmm.

And we failed the lightning round again. I would just.

Okay.

TJ 1:01:35
I have text.

Tim Samson 1:01:36
Salesforce or build your own.

TJ 1:01:38
Salesforce, come on.

John Pendergrast 1:01:39
Dynamic pricing, yes or no.

TJ 1:01:41
Ooh. ⁓

John Pendergrast 1:01:42
Just to be

off the record.

Tim Samson 1:01:45
hahahaha

TJ 1:01:46
I would abstain.

John Pendergrast 1:01:48
Okay, okay, what would you?

TJ 1:01:49
I think I'm

not, I know venues have had really good success with it. And I really liked the folks at the dynamic pricing companies. Um, so I'm not disparaging their products or anything like that. I'm just, if you do variable pricing, can you get the same lift? Do you need it to be that involved? Like, right? You know, if I do a $10 swing weekday to weekend, and I do that season by season, can I get the same lift and the same visitation? I don't know.

John Pendergrast 1:01:54
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, that dynamic. Yeah.

Tim Samson 1:02:10
Mm-hmm.

TJ 1:02:17
And folks at Disney would tell you, you can.

Tim Samson 1:02:17
Okay.

John Pendergrast 1:02:19
Yeah, I mean the folks at Disney also just doubled their pricing on memberships and then said the darnedest quote which was, we still haven't been able to determine what our upward bound is on pricing. they have a certain kind of market that they're in there.

TJ 1:02:31
That's unreal.

Tim Samson 1:02:32
Yeah.

AI revolution or evolution?

TJ 1:02:35
Evolution.

John Pendergrast 1:02:35
I would agree with that. Biggest data sin in one word. that's tough.

TJ 1:02:41
Ignoring.

John Pendergrast 1:02:41
What's

ignoring it?

Tim Samson 1:02:43
Loyalty program is essential or optional?

TJ 1:02:45
Optional.

John Pendergrast 1:02:46
Best metric nobody tracks.

TJ 1:02:47
Average visitation per member.

Tim Samson 1:02:50
percentage of attractions using data well

TJ 1:02:52
Less than 10.

John Pendergrast 1:02:53
Project killer, budget or politics?

TJ 1:02:59
I don't know. Usually it's budget.

Tim Samson 1:03:02
One tool everyone needs.

TJ 1:03:04
Salesforce.

John Pendergrast 1:03:05
Wait, you getting, I don't see any Salesforce mug behind you. Are you getting paid by Salesforce to say that? Yeah, yeah, it's okay. Good to RFM adoption by 2030 in our industry, over or under 50%.

TJ 1:03:11
Indirectly. Yes.

I'd say under 50 % but close.

Tim Samson 1:03:23
Season passes, blessing or curse.

TJ 1:03:25
blessing.

Tim Samson 1:03:26
Worst vendor buzzword.

TJ 1:03:28
Worst vendor buzzword?

Tim Samson 1:03:30
AI.

John Pendergrast 1:03:31
cloud.

TJ 1:03:32
Yeah.

And then, don't know, synergy or,

John Pendergrast 1:03:39
guest focus.

TJ 1:03:41
Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking of all the things I've written and every time I write it, I cringe. There's a ton of them. Guest engagement, like, you know, probably guest engagement. I am probably at the top of, list of people that overuses that.

John Pendergrast 1:03:46
There are a ton of them.

Tim Samson 1:03:47
Hahaha!

John Pendergrast 1:03:50
Yeah.

One segment everyone ignores.

TJ 1:03:57
Do a callback to the stroller brigade.

Tim Samson 1:04:00
if McDonald's ran a theme park, what would they do better than anyone else?

John Pendergrast 1:04:09
I tell you, they have the best kiosks in the world. I've never... Incredible kiosks. Yeah.

TJ 1:04:11
Yeah, their kiosks are pretty slick, yeah. Yeah, I shouldn't

say I don't have a habit of eating. Like, I can't remember the last time I had a Big Mac or a McRib. Like, it's been decades. yeah, their kiosks are slick. they would own all the real estate. They'd be great at the real estate, because that's their game anyways.

John Pendergrast 1:04:21
I can't either.

Tim Samson 1:04:28
Mm. Yeah.

John Pendergrast 1:04:28
Yeah,

100%. This has been a fantastic conversation and ⁓ we really enjoyed our time here at TJ. Talking about RFM as an unblocker and a new way of thinking based upon different industries' thought processes and how we can apply that into our industry.

how we can like ladder people up from low per cap spend to higher value segments and really kind of work them through that quintile of where they fit in that. I don't think a lot of attractions think that way. I think that the ones that do are super of their time, so to speak, which is great. Someone needs to lead that pack

This has been great. Anything else that you'd like to say before we sign off for today?

TJ 1:05:08
we've covered a lot of topics. if you are sort of looking to set the foundation, it can be a little bit scary. but there's lots of people that are, that are out there forging the path. So, we're happy to help. There's lots of attractions that we can point you to that have,

Tim Samson 1:05:11
Yeah.

TJ 1:05:21
we've interacted with that are further ahead than some of our clients that we've worked with or some of our clients that are making their way there. So there are people out there that are doing it. it would be just get in the game and get started.

John Pendergrast 1:05:32
You're one of the forefront people on that topic out there right now. And so it's been a real pleasure. I look forward to more conversations in person.

TJ 1:05:40
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks guys.