These include Vlad, the Siberian tiger that loves trying to lick Mee’s hand through the fence, a schizophrenic ostrich on Prozac and a bear named Fudge, with 5in claws that need constant trimming. Dressed in shorts, a dark-green fleece and a beanie hat pulled down over his shaved head, he talks quickly and animatedly about the 200 animals in his care. I meet Benjamin Mee at Dartmoor Zoological Park on a bright September day. Mee was faced with myriad expensive tasks just to keep it afloat – including dealing with a rat infestation (£9,000) – not to mention finding the money to feed the animals, something that the six members of unpaid staff he inherited had been doing out of their own pockets. He had also persuaded his wife that they should leave their barn conversion in France, where they had been living for two years, and move their young family back to England to live with his mother and his brother Duncan. After his father died in early 2005 Mee had convinced his 76-year-old mother to sell the Surrey home in which he and his three brothers and sister had grown up, and to buy an old house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon with a failing zoo attached. This is not a drill'. The home, which Mee had moved into four days earlier, was a dilapidated zoo, and a 150lb jaguar was on the loose.īenjamin Mee is a very persuasive man. Late one afternoon in October 2006 Benjamin Mee was sitting in the kitchen of his new family home, contemplating a list of jobs, when his brother ran in shouting, 'A big cat has escaped. I cannot think of an attraction which would not benefit from this service.This piece was first published in March 2012, to coincide with the release of the film We Bought a Zoo. Altogether a very healthy exercise which has left us with an easy to implement set of priorities for improvement. They noticed all our strong points, as well as the things we knew we were complacent about, and then, critically, several things we could never have seen for ourselves.

Even the posture and eye contact of the staff was noted. But the points raised were detailed and objective, giving us a clear roadmap towards improvement in key areas.Ĭustomer wise encouraged us to give them a detailed brief, and then carried out an extremely thorough customer’s eye view of the whole site. “The unflinching feedback from Customerwise made uncomfortable reading at times, and was definitely not the sort of thing we could generate in-house.

In addition, attention was paid to existing and potential commercial opportunities and opportunities.īenjamin Mee (writer of the best seller We Bought A Zoo), described the service: Dartmoor Zoo (aka Dartmoor Zoological Park) enlisted the services of Customerwise to provide an assessment of their baseline performance in relation to all aspects of the customer experience.

Dartmoor zoo benjamin mee