This week, I visited New York, kindly sponsored by the company I work for with the intention of visiting venues and gleaning new and exciting ways to improve our venue. As usual, I had the opportunity to visit some great iconic venues in both New York and New Jersey, where Venue Managers gave freely of their time to show me around and answer my questions. Venue Managers are good like that.
Each and every person spoke with passion about their customer experience and the training they undertook with their staff to ensure the guest had a marvelous time and would return. They spoke about their responsiveness to customers and how they worked hard to meet their needs.
The trip from Australia is a long one. Eight hours to Hong Kong and a three hour layover before another 15 hour flight to New York. We arrived at 8pm and waited to clear immigration, which I must say, is not a great experience. Whilst waiting in line, it was amazing to see signs about customer service expectations being removed to be replaced with ‘no photography in this area’ signs. Three international flights had arrived and the “other passport” queue had 3 people attending to them. The only thing worse than being an “other” was to be an American as they also only had 3 people to attend to their entry and about 3 times the number of people to process. When we finally got to the front of our queue the immigration officer decided it would be a great time to go somewhere for 5 minutes and left us waiting. When our turn finally came, I would not call the person inviting or engaging. Now I fully understand the need for border control and to ensure the wrong people are kept out of the country, but let’s not forget the need for a thriving tourism business. I wondered if there was a better way with a more flexible approach:
New York, I was told, is full of rude people in a hurry. I found it quite the opposite. I experienced warm, friendly and engaging people. The need for security is obviously a priority and it is quite confronting for us to see the security requirements when entering buildings. The entertainment venue security is also very different from non-venues we visited. They presented as engaging, friendly and equally thorough. On the weekend, we decided to take a hop-on hop-off bus tour. We arrived early to exchange our vouchers for our tickets. We were told at the counter to enter the queuing lane and we were led through a maze that went around the building and delivered us right back to the point where we started. There was no one else in the queue. When I asked why we had been sent on a long, unnecessary walk, I was told that when the place is full they needed to direct people through the queuing system. When I told him that there was no one else in the queue, he went through the whole explanation again and said he wasn’t authorized to make changes to the system.
Flexibility is at the forefront of customer experience. Given the lack of flexibility shown quite often to us, I have spent some time thinking about how venues have become responsive, proactive and flexible beasts in order to embrace different consumers. Generally, operators hate change. It requires new work flows and different processes and procedures.
Here are a few pointers in being flexible.
- Embrace change: Embracing change allows for creative thought, less stress and the ability to offer a better experience.
- Shows diversity: Each culture, religion, and person comes with different experience, different views and requires different experiences.
- Win-win situation: Flexibility means employees are proactive and responsive to the guest offering a good experience and return business.
- Staff to flourish: Empowering staff and allowing them to fix issues through a flexible approach allows better and happier staff.
- Triggers flexibility: Allows positive response outcomes rather than negative ones. If our thought process is towards ‘how can we make this happen’ rather than ‘what we don’t allow’, we guarantee proactive responses to change rather than always being in catch up mode.
I have read many posts lately about filming. Photo taking, selfie sticks and the use of other technologies. The posts have being about how selfie sticks are banned from venues and could be used as weapons. I wondered rather how we could ensure that selfies and the sticks could be included in the experience of young people who we are all desperately trying to attract to events rather than finding ways to exclude them.