||| February 16, 2025 by Katherine Raz

Customer Service Profile: The HOUSE Experience

Customer Service and front of house experience is something the folks at The House talk about all the time. We probably talk about it too much. But it's a challenge a lot of itinerant theatre companies face and we're no different: how to put your stamp on the lobby of a building you don't own so your patrons -- first timers or returning customers -- not only want to come back, but know how, and when.

This was a way of saying, "We're not your typical theater company." And it worked.

The House started out pretty iconoclastic where front of house experience was concerned. Not only did the lobby of the Viaduct (the House's original home) feel more like a bar than a theater, there were no tickets and no programs. Instead, The House used trading cards -- a full deck constituted the program and a single card served as a ticket. This was a way of saying, "We're not your typical theater company." And it worked.

Fast forward to today. We have a new home at the Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park. The lobby feels more like a coffee shop than a bar, but we've tried to make the experience of coming to a House show feel like coming to a rock show. We ask our volunteer ushers to NOT ask our patrons to turn off their cell phones as they enter the show (who wants to get yelled at the second they enter a theater?). We purposely hire younger box office and house managers. We still use trading cards as individual tickets and sell full decks (complete with wrapper and -- sometimes, if we're feeling generous -- gum) at the ticket window. Our merchandise is sold out of a locked cabinet that gets opened during intermission and at the end of the performance. We sell 1" buttons, silk-screened show posters, and try, when we can afford to, to get everything designed by Chicago graphic artists who make posters for rock shows.

The Viaduct had the same set of bathrooms for actors and patrons. So even though we moved venues we've adopted the "no actor bathrooms" philosophy. Before the show and during intermission the cast hangs out in costume at the bar. And our curtain speech, performed impromptu nightly by an actor in the show, is welcoming, friendly, and only contains a brief reminder to silence your beepers.

However the feeling of a rock show doesn't inform our audience about who we are -- about how they can return to see more of our shows, which is an important part of lobby design, we realized.

So we have introduced traditional programs into the mix -- but we design our own. We've also introduced a donation box in our lobby to collect spare change on the way out of the theater. It's very DIY -- just a Plexiglas box with a pair of shoes from an old House show and a sign that says, "Help us cover our costs." And with our next show we'll again start selling subscriptions right in the theater at intermission, as the "subscription packet" we offer is just a rock poster with three tear-off tickets -- something you can buy at the show and bring home.

Despite all this we do sometimes feel like we're fighting an uphill battle -- with no permanent home and an ambiguous name like "House," people still sometimes think the Chopin is responsible for the performance they're seeing. But we try to make every person-to-person interaction with our company branded and hope something sticks.
I hope you will come check out the House experience for yourself and let us know what your customer experience is like. And if you are reading this blog…which you are, use the discount code “ArtsEngagementExchange” to get $10 tickets to any Thursday or Sunday performance of our current show Wilson Wants It All. (Purchase online or call 773.251.2195)