Improving the Experience of Visitors to Public Museums: A Managerial Perspective

Visits to museums can promote lifelong learning. However, the extent they do so is strongly influenced by the quality of the museum guides, especially their narration. In this study we examine aspects of such narration using a 10-quality questionnaire completed by 114 visitors to public museums in Taiwan. The findings suggest specific strategies for managers to improve narration (of guides) and so make museum visits more beneficial and worthwhile. 1. Introduction Among employees and managers there is now realization of the value of lifelong learning to enable them to deal with, and perhaps even benefit from, the rapid changes that have become such a feature of national economies. Among the variety of places for such learning to take place are museums, places that have been described (Tufts and Milne, 1999) as among the 'best places' to encourage and stimulate lifelong learning. In line with this, museums have gradually been transformed from institutions concerned just with the conservation and culture into 'centers for teaching' that are also important for tourism and the local economy . Combs (1999) argued that the main reasons why tourists visit museums are for learning and entertainment. He claims that museums are good places for these things because they are seldom closed, are convenient easy in most cases, have interesting exhibits and frequently are free to enter. Giving audiences a positive happy in the museum and encouraging them to visit again is the main goal of the museum's guides or narrators. At the heart of the museum visit is the guide or narrator, he or she can make a significant difference to the experience of the visitor. In this respect, Ryan and Dewar (1995) argue also that whether a narrator's description is good or not will influence the audience's understanding of exhibits and their attitude to the museum as a whole. It follows that if the quality of the narration can be improved, the satisfaction of the audience concerned with their visit to the museum and to the museum itself should be increased. The present study uses the 6-Sigma MAIC model (Michael, 2002), hitherto employed mainly in the context of businesses, to investigate how the quality of narration in museums can be improved, to make them more effective. As Wu et al. (2003) have made clear, 6-Sigma MAIC can be regarded as a set of quality improvement methods. It was first adopted by Motorola in 1980, followed by many other companies, notably General Electric and SONY. Based on the DMAIC scheme as defined by Micael (2002), we employed the five-stage process, summarized as Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. First, the ten service quality dimensions suggested Parasuraman et al. (1985, 1991) were used as the basis for a specially-develop questionnaire. Secondly, using this questionnaire we measured the extent of each subject's satisfaction with their visits to public museums in Taiwan and the importance they attached to their visits to these museums, each on 7-point rating scales. Thirdly, by analyzing these results we develop a number of suggestions to improve the quality of these visits, chiefly how to raise the quality of the narration they receive from the guides at the museums. Background to the Study We used the Standardized Service Quality Performance Matrix, as developed by Hung et al. (2003), to transform the satisfaction degree quotas (I^sub Yj^) and importance degree quotas (I^sub Yj^) for the items into a so-called 'performance evaluation matrix' for the guides or narrators, as can be seen in chart 1: Since the transverse coordinate represents the service items and the ordinate represents J^sub XY^ values, the J^sub XY^ values lie between -1 and 1. When the coordinate value is above the diagonal line Y is positive, indicating that too many resources have been are invested and should be reduced to lower costs. When the coordinate value is below the diagonal line, it is minus, indicating that too few resources were invested and should be increased to improve the service provided. …