The story of Imagine Exhibitions

The story

Imagine Exhibitions is currently producing over 40 unique exhibitions that travel to museums, science centers, zoos and non-traditional venues around the world. Millions of guests visit these exhibitions every year. Since Imagine team members are located in various locations globally and are not always on-site at the exhibitions post opening, we were looking for ways to collect feedback from exhibition guests quickly and in real-time in order to provide the best customer experience and make data-based decisions that help our clients in an ongoing fashion. Our solution was to install self-service survey kiosks within several key exhibitions and to monitor the incoming data from those kiosks remotely. It was crucial that we be able to monitor, control, adjust, and lock the kiosks from a remote location in order to prevent guest tampering without burdening the onsite teams of our clients and partners, whom we wanted to stay focused on face-to-face guest interactions.

The survey kiosks contain an Android tablet running Hexnode software that locks it down to a single URL linked to a survey application. The survey is set up to capture feedback from guests and loops back to the beginning for other guests to continue to provide feedback through-out the time that the exhibition is operating. Once the kiosk is set up on site, I can monitor performance and trouble-shoot issues remotely. It allows me to track location, know if the tablet needs charging or if it’s been kicked off the internet. I can also change settings on the device and control it remotely if needed. This includes watching as a guest is taking the survey to see how long they take to answer the questions.

After signing up for the free trial, customer support immediately scheduled an on-boarding call to walk me through the set-up process. During the early days as the project was being implemented, the Hexnode customer support team was ready to help almost instantly via chat as I learned more about how the software worked. Then as we fine-tuned operations, they worked closely with me on extensive calls to make sure the kiosks were ready for the first deployment. I have been very impressed with Hexnode’s responsiveness, thoroughness and willingness to try many things to work through issues.

As our team was first exploring this project, we researched customer satisfaction survey companies to provide this kind of feedback as opposed to running our own kiosks. The cost to retain their services, install the hardware and analyze the data would cost more on an annual basis than what we’ve invested so far, and the results would likely be comparable. After this initial trial period, we have minimal additional costs to continue to gather this valuable feedback from our guests for years to come. The ability to gather this information directly from exhibition guests has been invaluable to our sales efforts.

In a nutshell

Through our use of Hexnode, our team has begun to collect and analyze valuable data on several of our exhibitions, and we are looking forward to launching additional kiosks in a second phase of the project. The data we collect helps us understand our customers, provide real-time recommendations to our clients, make improvements to our products, and arm our sales team with valuable facts and figures. Being able to control the kiosks remotely has saved us money and allows us to maintain autonomy over this project in a way we wouldn’t be able to achieve otherwise. We pride ourselves on our reputation as the “experts behind the experience,” and Hexnode has been a huge help in our goal of delivering the world’s most compelling immersive experiences to consumers around the globe.