Museums are for everyone. This is one of the most fundamental principles of working in museums today, and it's something that every single person working in the organisation plays a role in delivering.

When it comes to welcoming our audiences on site, and ensuring a great visit for everyone, our front-facing team members are at the coalface of delivering this principle. They are part of a team we have come to call ‘Visitor Experience’.

Or, at least, some of us have come to call it that.

One of the hardest things about writing this book has been the definition of Visitor Experience. The team that looks after visitors, front-facing staff and the day-to-day operation of the museum has different names in different places. Visitor Services, Visitor Engagement, Operations, Front of House? Those are just the most common names; there are many more. Staff working on the frontline also have different names: Visitor Assistants, Warders, Hosts, Explainers, Front of House?

Not only that, but to add further confusion, the teams that make up this department might be different too. Sometimes these departments might include Security, or Retail, or Facilities Management. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes, in smaller museums, these are all the same people anyway.

We all have different preferences for what Visitor Experience means, but for the purposes of writing this book, I have had to come up with a couple of standard definitions.

For me, Visitor Experience is the name given to the people in the museum who look after the overall on-site visitor journey, ensuring that people who come to visit our museums have a safe, easy and enjoyable visit. I have come to split this responsibility into what I call the ‘hard’ Visitor Experience: the operational procedures, wayfinding, ticketing, and those twin banes of every Visitor Experience Manager's life, toilets and lifts. Then, we have the ‘soft’ Visitor Experience: our engagement with and delivery to our visitors; how we make our visitors feel welcome and personalise their experience through our interactions with them.

So, whilst sorting out definitions and names has been the tricky part of this book, the joyful, inspiring, life-affirming part has been writing about how we take on these responsibilities to look after the Visitor Experience.