Arts Audiences’ Customer Service Project is now half-way through its work programme for 2009. The teams from Temple Bar Cultural Trust (TBCT) and Project Arts Centre (PAC) have completed the first two phases of their work:

Phase 1 involved mapping out ‘customer journeys’ for every part of their business where staff interacted with audiences. These journeys were agreed with key members of staff in each organisations, and then plotted out on simple diagrams created using MS Excel. (This phase lasted c.3 weeks in June)

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‘Culture Night ‘ – photo courtesy of Ros Kavanagh

Phase 2 involved an external consultant, Knowledgeworks, using these customer journeys as a road map on which to base a series of mystery shopping exercises.
Mystery shopping took place in July for both organisations. Staff in both organisations knew this was happening, but didn’t know when they would be ‘mystery shopped’. Both organisations chose a particularly busy business time in July for this exercise.

Mystery shopping involved the consultant posing as a range of customers who wanted to either FIND information, ASK questions, SURF websites about the organisation, or GO to an event hosted or organised by TBCT or PAC. Each interaction was then graded from 1-7 according to agreed parameters for assessing quality customer experiences.

The results the Mystery Shopping conducted on both organisations was presented to both teams at PAC and TBCT in September.

The next phase, currently underway, involves staff of both organisations absorbing the results from the Mystery Shopping reports, and deciding what steps to take next to improve the customer experience of their organisation.