Let Them Through

Empowering your team = investing in your audience

Last week I went away for a couple of days and, as part of the journey, bought a ticket from Wakefield to Leeds for a certain day and then another ticket from Leeds to Wakefield for another date. Both tickets were singles and only valid on the particular date of issue - which was annoying when I realised, arriving at Wakefield to start my first journey, that the person who’d sold me the tickets had got the dates the wrong way round. The ticket for today’s journey was dated two days hence, and the ticket for the future journey was dated today. (And yes, I do still buy tickets from a physical person at the station, as I have a jammy discount (due to my partner’s noble profession as a train driver) that’s only available when you present your discount card).

The first journey was no problem - I went to talk to a member of platform staff at Wakefield and outlined my issue, and she let me through. When I got to Leeds, I proffered my tickets to the person manning the ticket barriers and he also waved me through. This didn’t come as a particular surprise to me - I had all the right tickets and had paid all the right money, it felt pretty clear it was a date mix up rather than an attempt to scam anyone out of anything.

Cut to two days later when I’m about to do my return trip. I approached the ticket barriers at Leeds with a similar sense of confidence, presented my tickets to the staff member at the gate and explained the situation. He looked at the tickets, frowned, and told me I’d have to speak to the ticket office. Uh oh. I made my way over to the ticket office and explained the situation once again. The person behind the desk shook her head. “That ticket’s expired,” she said. “I can’t do anything with that.” I explain that I have a perfectly valid ticket for the correct date but just going in the wrong direction. She looked at me and began to shake her head. I checked my watch and realised I was only minutes away from the departure time of the train I was aiming to catch. “I’ll just buy a new ticket,” I said, and watched her face relax as she realised she wasn’t going to have to have an awkward argument with a customer.

This situation was fairly low stakes for me - the ticket from Leeds to Wakefield is hardly expensive, especially with the aforementioned discount, so buying a new ticket rather than missing the train made sense. But I still felt a certain irritation that Tuesday’s staff couldn’t see what was perfectly obvious to Sunday’s staff - that this was a simple admin error, that I was not someone who was attempting to play fast and loose with the rules and, given this, the sensible thing to do would be to use their judgement and let me through the gates rather than wasting everybody’s time.

Photo by chris robert on Unsplash

I remember once interviewing someone who’d worked on the front desk of a fancy London hotel; he told me how each staff member had a budget (which, given the level of fancyness involved, was four figures) to solve any issue that came up for any of their guests. No checking with the manager, no ‘I’ll see what I can do’ - the ability to fix it on the spot. The feeling of this as a customer - that you are talking to someone who both has the ability to solve your problem but also seems to actively want to - is so satisfying, and so different to the defensive crouch that many of us take when fighting our way through customer service systems that seem to delight in making everything as difficult as humanly possible.

In the arts sector, our customers - our audiences - are everything. They keep our buildings open and pay our wages with the money that they spend in our establishments. Without audiences, there would be no arts sector. I sometimes think we can lose sight of this, and perhaps we have something to learn (albeit on our own scale and budgets) from the fancy London hotels of this world, who make an active choice to invest in customer satisfaction, rather than engaging in a he said/she said battle if a problem arises.

The technique is simple: empower the staff members that deal with customers every day. The person that I interviewed didn’t have to ask to move a guest to a new room, or send up a bottle of champagne to apologise for something that might have gone wrong during their stay - they used their own initiative and judgement to decide what was appropriate. If the staff of LNER had been given a similar mandate - to trust that, unless there’s evidence to the contrary, most customers are honest and part of their job is to help them get to their destination easily and without additional expense - perhaps they would have been consistent in their approach and let me through the barriers on both occasions.

Our job, as leaders, is to decide what we want our relationship with our customers to be, and then give the staff that deal with customers day in day out the power and authority to realise this in whatever way they see fit. Maybe the harried latecomer who’s had a nightmare day is slipped into a free seat in a box rather than forced to shuffle past multiple people in the top row of the balcony at latecomers point. Maybe the person that shows up at the ticket desk and tells the box office assistant that it’s their birthday today gets an upgrade to the stalls, or a voucher for a free drink at the bar. Precisely because there is so much terrible customer service in the world, you can guarantee that experiences that surprise and delight have the capacity to turn a casual audience member into a loyal advocate - they’ll come again, they’ll tell their friends, and they might even make a donation.

But none of this will happen if we do not empower our teams to take this approach. The people that deal with customers all the time know the difference between a chancer and someone whose day would be made by a relatively small gesture that’s in their power to give. Set your approach and then trust your team - both your audiences and your staff will thank you for it.