Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Voice of Customer efforts give us the opportunity to get closer to how our customers experience our product or service, but only if we are listening to understand rather than listening to talk. There's a big difference. You can turn a complainer into a promoter by demonstrating that their feedback has the power to inform organizational policies and processes. But you can just as quickly turn an engaged customer into a detractor by asking for their thoughts and then paying them lip service or, worse, ignoring them entirely.

At NJPAC we are proud of the customer surveying we do throughout the year and the wealth of verbatim data we collect. In our CCO, we are lucky to have a customer champion who regularly hits us with a healthy dose of outside-in reality. But it's not always an easy road to travel.

Soon after we began to collect customer feedback, we noticed a recurring comment from our online customers. They loved the ability to choose their own seats online, but couldn't understand why they were prevented from selecting the exact two seats they wanted whenever doing so would leave a single seat in the row. In box office lingo, it's called a widow, and the website was programmed to prevent them. In customer lingo it's called "not my problem." While there were any number of good business reasons to prevent "widows" (some of which involve potential lost revenue), in the final analysis we decided to change the programming to meet the needs (aka reality) of the customer. Whew! That was easy - a problem we had not anticipated, a solution we could feel good about.

Not so easy were the comments we were receiving about parking. Simply put, patrons thought it was too expensive. The story we told ourselves was that our performance parking rates were a bargain -- after all, they were less than half what customers would pay just across the river at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. Add to that the fact that we had a healthy percentage of our customers consistently parking in our lots, our prices had been flat for several years, and we'd recently introduced a discount for advance payment. The problem? Our version of reality was not consistent with our customers'. They weren't comparing our parking prices to Lincoln Center. They were comparing them to the local movie theater or the mall or the restaurant around the corner. Something compared to nothing does not feel like a bargain.

Although managed by a third-party vendor, parking revenues play an important role in NJPAC's overall budget equation. We couldn't afford to roll back prices and, in fact, we were looking at ways to selectively increase revenues from parking in a tough budget year. We decided that we would live with the complaints, try to improve other pain points in the parking experience and keep a close eye on usage rates to see if we had overshot. The good news is that the conversation happened, facilitated by real customer feedback, but at the end of the day, balancing the needs of the business and the needs of the customer makes for some tough decisions.

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Catrina Logan Boisson is Vice President of Marketing for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and a member of 1to1 Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board.