The Digital Tools: Supporting the “Inner Lives” of Customers/Visitors in Museums

Abstract

Few areas are so challenging/exciting as the world of museums. Although we are accustomed to look at the museum world in a rather romantic way, we must not forget that they are in fact service providers. Museums fulfill these roles today, especially with the help of digital tools. The digital channels and platforms used by museums shape the user’s personal context, stimulating his/her behavior, interests, previous knowledge and personal commitment to art. The same channels and platforms support the formation of human and social interactions in museums but, at the same time, create the premises for new challenges for visitors and museums alike. The aim of this paper is to answer the following questions: to what extent the digital tools used in museums change behaviors, satisfy interests and offer upgrades to their visitors’ knowledge? What are the relevant experiences lived by the consumers likely to attract new audiences in the future? In order to fulfill our purpose, we made a qualitative and quantitative analysis based on a questionnaire designed to investigate the visitor-museum relation. 341 (randomly chosen) visitors of four major museums located in Bucharest answered, providing a reasonable statistical base. The hypotheses of this study – most of them confirmed – converge towards the idea of the necessity to evaluate museums from the challenging perspectives of experiences the consumers have by using digital tools.