Better box office and front of house service keeps your customers coming back – almost as much as your programming

Several months ago, I wrote a post on market research for theatre – who to talk to, where audiences might come from, and initial methodology that I have been meaning to revisit for ages. My Harvard Business Publishing update reminded me of it but brought up some really important ideas that I wanted to address as well. Of course, since many don't have access to HBR website I pasted the post below.

Peter Merholz makes some really important points about staff right up front. I have had many conversations with other leaders about our box office staffs. They are usually the youngest and worst paid staff members. We work diligently to keep them up-to-date on programming, updated information, and institutional information, but many if not most are part-time and more often than not our work to keep them informed is subpar. And let's not face it customers are not always nice, so when you are young, underpaid, and unprepared, it is pretty easy to be short or even rude to customers. And for a large part of our constituencies this is not on the first contact that they have with our organizations but the majority of our audiences probably only meet or talk to the front of house staff. Many of our subscribers only ever interact with the front of house staff. This is more than our "front line." So how do we improve customer care?

Perhaps we should do some analysis on what we pay for part-time employees, telemarketing and other interactions and really explore the idea that the box office staff and house management staff should be experienced, middle managers who are capable of handling difficult decisions.

Also, by nature, most box offices are separate from administrative offices. I really recommend to any one building a theatre, think of connecting the two. Satellite offices naturally receive information at a different rate and are by placement alone separate from the day to day conversations and camaraderie of the general office staff. The box office should be closed for full staff meetings and all box office staff should be in attendance at these meetings.

Of course staff structure is different at each theatre, but there must be a strong connection between marketing and development functions, as well as a system for staff education that makes sure that these front of house staff members are in the loop as decisions are made. These key intermediaries between the audience and the organization MUST have interaction with the artistic department and artists – and not just booking their tickets, showing them to their seats or letting them know about house sizes. It must be healthy, quality interaction about the work happening on stage.

As for the information that these staff members collect about customers from conversations and sales interactions, it has to be recorded somewhere. I don't care how busy the phone lines are – we have to learn more about our customers and what better way than through the person talking to them.

If we are going to connect with people, the connection should be as intimate as theatre itself with as many of our patrons as possible and at all levels of the organization. People can get cold, canned, impersonal experience from the majority of businesses they interact with throughout the day. If they don't want a human experience they will buy on-line. But most people who come to the theatre are coming for the human connection whether social, emotional or intellectual, they want a connection. We have to give them a positive, well-informed one.

From Harvard Business Publishing Blogs:

It's Not Who Your Customers Are, It's How They Behave by Peter Merholz

9:28 AM Wednesday February 11, 2009

Businesses cannot exist without customers, so it's sadly ironic that many, if not most, businesses, actually understand so little about them. As a company grows, a smaller and smaller percentage of the staff interacts with the customers. In fact, those folks on the "front line" (think call centers, service counters, retail stores) are typically among the lowest-paid and have the least authority.

Meanwhile, back at headquarters fundamental decisions are made with extremely limited information about customers. There, understanding the customer is often considered someone else's responsibility, because, "we have a department for that." No department has a complete view of the customer, however, and so in place of true understanding are models and frameworks that attempt to describe the customer. Many companies don't go beyond demographics and market segmentation. While it's helpful to know how they break down by age, sex, income, region, and other easily measurable characteristics, there's actually very little you can actually do with that information. In order to become customer experience-driven, you need to go beyond who your customers are, and understand what they do.

When companies think of how their customers behave, it's typically in one of these four ways. See if any of these resonate with you:

1. "A gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash"

That quote comes from The Cluetrain Manifesto, still one of the best books on how companies should embrace a new way of communicating with their customers. Very few companies would admit it, but you know that some still see their audience this way (I'm looking at you, broadcast media.)

2. Sheep

This view holds that with the right "messaging", you can guide people to behave in certain ways, because they're docile and gullible and respond only to emotional tugs. And while this might be fine in the world of packaged consumer goods, where there's not a lot of complexity in using (i.e., literally consuming) the product, it breaks down when your offering is more complex. During the first Web boom, I remember companies spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising, and a tenth (or even a hundredth) of that on the site experience. You can no longer simply hound people into buying your product.

3. Homo Economicus

If Sheep are one side of the behavioral coin, this is the other. This view argues that customers are highly rational beings who want to maximize the utility of their purchases. This leads to an assumption that what matters most is "bang for the buck," which in turn gives us products with bloated feature lists, because who wouldn't want to buy the item with 14 bullet points on the packaging over the item with just 10? Sadly, there's research that suggests that many customers do make just this purchase decision; however, there's also research that up to 50% of product returns are for items in perfectly good working order -- they're just too confounding to use.

4. Type A Personality

Perhaps the most sophisticated common view of customer behavior is the one that understands customers are completing tasks in the process of accomplishing a larger goal. This view comes out of the world of software and Web design, where the functionality can get quite complex. This perspective becomes problematic when taken to the extreme -- that people are some kind of flesh robot seeking to maximize productivity. This leads to offerings that work, but can be joyless and dull. Perhaps you've used some of Microsoft's products?

Now, these perspectives aren't wholly wrong (well, maybe the gullet), but clearly they're not quite right. In order for a company to deliver truly outstanding products and services, it must embrace the messy complexity of human life, and endeavor to understand its customers as people. In other words, understand your customer as you understand yourself.

This means going deeper than tasks and goals to appreciate behaviors and motivations. A few years ago, I worked with a large national bank to help them better understand how customers decide to purchase the bank's products and services. The bank had a sophisticated demographic model, but didn't understand what cinched the deal.

Our initial efforts focused on the "goal" of buying a product, and we were able to outline the steps that people took to achieve that goal. They researched banks online, then compared products within banks as well as across banks. They visited nearby branches, and spoke with representatives in person or on the phone. And once they amassed enough information, they committed.

In our analysis, we realized this was only part of the story. We asked the research participants to retrace their steps, focusing on the Web site, to walk us through their experience. And in doing so, we saw that while there was a set of discrete tasks that lead to achieving a larger goal. More importantly there was an underlying motivational layer of emotion that actually guided their decisions. Buying financial products is challenging, because unlike physical goods, it's hard to define what you want ahead of time. At Best Buy, you can point to a 52″ television and say, "something like that." You can't do that with a loan or a line of credit.

So what happened was that while people appeared to engage in the appropriate steps to make a purchase decision, because they couldn't articulate an end state, they were simply going through the motions and would never commit. We realized that customers must satisfy three sets of requirements -- functional (does the product meet my basic needs); intellectual (through comparison, am I confident I'm getting the best deal); and, crucially, emotional (could I have a relationship with this bank?). The bank wanted to drive all applications for new products online, but the customer research analysis made clear the importance of maintaining a quality cross-channel experience. Potential customers often wanted to meet representatives, either in person or on the phone, before committing to an application, even if they've done all their research online.

Peter Merholz is a founding partner and president of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm. He has worked with a wide variety of clients from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups. Past clients include Hallmark, Socialtext, Intuit, United Airlines, and The Vanguard Group. Peter is an internationally recognized thought leader on user experience. He co-authored Subject To Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, published by O'Reilly. Peter's thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term "blog" in 1999 when it was a nascent genre.