Resources
Customer Experience
Redesigning the Future of Museums: Turning Audiences into Participants
Recently, Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, spoke to arts and culture administrators at the Cultural Center on January 11, 2011.
Social networking, audience engagement, user-generated content, and architectures of participation. These are all hot concepts in the museum world now, but how do these buzzwords become pathways toward more effective practice? Nina Simon believes that every cultural institution can grow its audience if it is willing to grow with that audience through shared experimentation. She has been called a “museum visionary” by Smithsonian magazine for her participatory, audience-centered approach to exhibition design. In this presentation, Nina talks about the ways museums can become more engaging, community-based, vital institutions.
2011 Ticketing Software Satisfaction Survey
In January 2011, Technology in the Arts launched the second iteration of a survey of arts and cultural organizations to learn about their ticketing needs and to gauge how well current ticketing tools are meeting those needs.
Over 950 arts and cultural professionals completed the survey to evaluate their satisfaction with over 50 ticketing software tools. The survey report explores the following questions:
• Which attributes do arts organizations consider critical in a ticketing tool?
• What factors influence organizations’ ticketing software choices?
• Which tools are arts and cultural organizations using?
• How satisfied are arts and cultural organizations with their current ticketing solutions?
• How do desired attributes and levels of satisfaction change based upon the budget size of the organization?
Some interesting findings from the report include:
• Universally, organizations choose online sales (91% of respondents) and credit card processing (90% of respondents) as the most critical ticketing system functions.
• Approximately 1/3 of ticketing software users indicated that they had inherited their current ticketing system from a previous employee. They had no role in choosing the system they are currently using.
• About 30% of organizations outsourced or shared in a consortium at least one aspect of their box office operations, either for online sales, phone orders, walk-up sales, or discounts.
• Organizations classified as “small” and “mid-sized” (budgets under $3 million) indicated the most important factors in their software choice were price and user-friendliness, while “large” and “very large” (budgets over $3 million) prioritized customization and specific functions and features.
Included in the report, you will also find information on the most popular ticketing systems for organizations of your size, rankings of popular features and functions, and a 5-step guide to choosing a ticketing system, complete with questions to ask vendors.
To read more, click the link below to download a copy of the report.
Writers’ Theatre on Audience Engagement
Kate Lipuma, Executive Director of Writers’ Theatre, shared the recent successes and challenges they’ve had with audience engagement at an AEE roundtable. Check out her presentation to learn more about Writers’ positioning, customer service and social media strategies.
Casting Customer Service Learning Circle Worksheets
In Session 2 of Casting Customer Service, instructor Philippe Ravanas, took participants through the steps of building a customer service blueprint. Download the blank documents to build your own Service Blueprint and Customer Journey
Casting Customer Service: The Theater of Audience Experience
In the seminal book titled The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore urged every company to find inspiration in the performing arts to improve their customer services. “Work is theatre” they wrote. “Whenever employees work in front of customers, an act of theatre occurs. Every action contributes to the total experience being staged. Business performances must rival those featured on Broadway. With theatre as the model, even mundane tasks engage customers in a memorable way.”
Ironically, by focusing all energies on the art on stage or on the walls, arts organizations can make this “customer theatre” feel like work, neglecting an important aspect of the total audience experience. This AEE Learning Circle series presented all the dimensions of customer experience and satisfaction and provided the tools to assess them and ‘script’ customer experience beyond the mere attendance of the play. Whether your organization focuses on writing, visual arts, or performance, these learning circle presentations will help you find ways to give your audiences experiences to remember, and talk about.
Session 1 presentation
Casting Customer Service: Session 2
In Session 2 of Casting Customer Service, instructor Philippe Ravanas, took participants through the steps of building a customer service blueprint. View session 1 here and session 3 here.
Casting Customer Service: Session 3
Customer service is all about people and session 3 of Casting Customer Service focuses on just that. View the slide show on improving patron experience and learn how to train a winning team of front end staff that will ensure the best possible experience for your audience.
Click here to see Session 1 and here for Session 2.
Beyond the Art: Build Audiences by Designing Branded Experiences at all Touchpoints
To view just the slide show, click here.
Artistic quality is critical, but other factors also influence what audiences see, hear, experience and talk about. People start to develop impressions about your organization’s work from the moment they receive your program announcement, and continue to be influenced by everything from their box office experiences to the time it takes to exit the parking lot after your event. All of these touch points shape your audiences’ future decisions about ticket purchases and attendance. Knowing how many chances you have to convey your organization’s view and approach to your customers and how to maximize each of those opportunities is critical to building a satisfied and loyal audience.
In his AEE Open Forum presentation, Denis Weil, Vice President, Concept and Design at McDonald’s Corporation, explains how to apply a user centered approach to develop or re-design your customers’ experiences. Learn how your arts organization can use low-cost, iterative design and prototype testing methods to innovate the service aspects of your customers’ experiences. His presentation was followed by a “fishbowl consultation” during which Denis strategized with several arts organizations of varying sizes and artistic disciplines that were working through the same real-life challenges that you face every day.