63. Tourism & The Customer Experience with Mark Evans
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TRANSCRIPTION: THE CUSTOMER-CENTRIC SHOW PODCAST
with Mel Telecican (Customer-Centric Coach)
Episode 63. Tourism & The Customer Experience with Mark Evans
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You are listening to the customer centric show with Mel Telecican where we talk with successful business owners and experts to share smart ways to attract more customers, profits and freedom by thinking about customers first. Now, here is your host Mel Telecican.
Mel: Mark Evans is my guest tonight. He is the owner of Paronella Park, a hugely successful heritage-listed tourist attraction in far North Queensland that has been in his family for over 20 years. During this time, customer service has been not only been their biggest focus, but has resulted in their biggest marketing successes. In this episode Mark reveals the many ways his family and team go above and beyond for every customer to ensure their visit is wonderful - focusing on the little details that amount to a superior experience. Paronella Park has an active and engaged Facebook community of over 20,000 fans, and thrives on partnerships and referral business. Great to have you with me Mark. Thanks for joining me.
Mark: Thanks very much Mel, nice to be with you.
Mel: Now we start the show by asking every guest with an example of customer centric business is that they are aware of and what it is that makes them customer centric. What’s yours?
Mark: There is a small but vibrant business just down the road from us. A business that is a carrier van park and it is called August Meeting and it is just outside in this farm and that business for years has had bit of check and career and new owners took it over just a couple of years ago. In fact I met the owner before they purchased and we had a chat about this exact subject but being in customer service and how people can improve their relationship with their customers. I must say that they have grown their business in a very short time which I think about 20 months now and they have set themselves up well and truly for this season to be to have a positive season and I think the things that they do extremely well is that they face it with the customer. On arrival, they took a bit of leaf out of their own book but they do greet the customer in the car park so the customer doesn’t have to be looking at around to whether that reception desk is. They also and I get to meet quite a few of those customer because they are also referred to our business. So you get a firsthand feedback on the experience that they are having and they always mention Julie and Cameron at august moon as having the ultimate in customer service and so helpful and I guess it is just as simple as being so helpful.
Mel: Yes absolutely. I think of who do care even and the amount of times they come across new people who are heading in the opposite direction into them and that you know unless they got every sort of stop mapped out then there is a great potential for referral business for them because they can actually refer to them by name and say you know they come out to you and greet you as to searching around as you say then that’s a big differentiator I expect in that space.
Mark: Yeah and it is the opposite too. The opposite side of the coin is if you are looking in good referral you possibly get in negative referral and for a long time we have looked at the value of things like social media and so on but at the end of the day if you have person at your business, at your door, ready, willing and able to purchase, if they leave and tell someone else, you really don’t have to spend a lot of money and time using other means that might cost money to get people to come back to you because those people that you looked after would be referring guests back to you. Particularly in the Caravan business.
Mel: Yes absolutely. So many people coming across each other and sharing that news 100 percent. Now do you mind Mark giving us a brief history of Paronella Park, what it is? And the family background attached to it?
Mark: Yeah look it is extremely hard to describe what paronella park is and quite often the first we say and you hear me talking a little bit later about meeting our guest but the first point I make is you arrive at paronella park, well and truly uncertain about what it is and that sounds strange for any business that you pull into the car park with friends to visit but still not be sure what it is and the reason for that is I guess there is no other place quite like it. it is a tourist park in North Queensland just outside the south at a place called Meet and creek, it is on the road that used to be the boost highway so it was the highway in 1960s and there was gentlemen by the name of Jose Paronella who came out from Barcelona around about 1912 and he saw waterfall just off the highway next to the highway and on the street called media creek and he decided he wanted to purchase that land and he finally purchased the property in 1929 for 120 pounds and his total dream and commitment was to present it as a pleasure garden. So to build castles and fountains and bridges and tennis courts and all these lovely pieces, and he built Paronella Park from 1929 to 1935 which is year he opened the park to the public. He actually planted it out with over 7000 trees and it was a hugely successful business. He had people from the local area. It was a wonderfully successful business. A couple of things about Jose Paronella, he was inspired by Gatti and work back in Barcelona. It was not an architect or builder. He was qualified pastry chef and so he I guess was competing against people saying we cannot do it and so it was a really and he harvest that in fact. It was a motivator for him to actually build Paronella Park against the words of maybe people that consider themselves more logical and the end result is he had a hugely successful business but only for a few years because in 1948 Jose Paronella passed away. He died at age 60 and I guess a couple of things that come out of that is no doubt he was the huge motivator and inspirer and dreamer for Paronella park but also we saw Paronella park to a degree start to fade over the next few years but certainly when things like highway diversion took place in 1960s, things really went quite badly and Paronella park fell away and it was in 1993 that we found Paronella park after spending a couple on the road with our children salivating this one different country and having someone suggest we might be interested in checking out this property called Paronella park as if it was for sale.
Mel: Okay and so you always run it?
Mark: Yes. There has been the Paronella has sold the property in 1977 and the people have purchased in basically abandoned a couple of years later and there were a couple of attempts over the following years to try and get going again but I think the thing that was lacking is we now own the freehold and if you don’t own the freehold it is very hard to commit time and for the dollars into something that maybe you are not going to get a full return on so it is a lot easier for us to be totally committed to putting an invest in the future and so we have earned it now for 22 years. We have been involved in all those years since we don’t certain say ourselves as anything else but doing this for a few years.
Mel: Great so where were you from originally Mark if you are cultivating around the Queensland region or you…
Mark: We in fact just came back from Singapore, Julie and I for many years in computer industry and we had transferred to Singapore for 6 years and in the computer industry you got to move around quite a bit in those years back in the 70s and 80s and in 1991 we decided to head back to Australia as a time to ditch the corporate world and try our own thing. So we travelled from Perth that was where Julie grew up and so Perth we called home for a while but we decided it was time to look at Australia and take our children and show them what Australia is like rather than Singapore and we certainly looked at couple of things. We were looking down in Tasmania, we loved Tasmania but in the end it got a little bit cold and we decided it was time to head north and hit the topping.
Mel: That’s it hah. So okay it is interesting because it is more than just resurrecting a business that previously existed so many decades before successfully and then you also have the potential obstacle of not knowing anyone in the area having to build the relationships in the partnerships with local business so that you can actually get some attraction. Was that a difficult process? Or was it a long process? How did you find it?
Mark: I think it still is part of the process because one thing is for sure, you hit a key point on head when attraction has had a check in career for quite some years in business. You cannot go in and say well you draw a line and we start from here. You don’t start from there. You start well back from the line and it is a true handicap. For example we borrowed some money to have property in Perth and the bank manager I can recall when I made the phone call, he actually said yes I can setup a meeting for Monday. Can I ask you what you are looking at buying? And I said we are looking at purchasing Paronella park and before he even met us he said well I wouldn’t and couldn’t recommend anyone purchase Paronella park and so we may have some issues there about lending other money and we got there on Monday and some percent of listeners would enjoy this, he walked up and shook our hand in meeting on Monday morning and said I apologize. He said I spoke to my wife on weekend and she actually suggested that if the right people buy Paronella Park, that would do very well. So we finished up getting the things we needed to launch the property and buy the property and get things going.
Mel: Wow that’