N-Scan has been fantastic."

Excerpts from a conversation with Kristina Miller, Senior Manager, Audience Services, Children's Theatre Company, St. Paul, Minnesota 

Our building was built in the 1960s, and the entrance to the ticket office and the lower lobby is on the first floor, and the entrance to our main hall is up on the second floor. So anytime that we had a ticket issue, we’d either have to telephone down to the ticket office, or you’d have to send a patron back down two flights of stairs to have any issue resolved. So that was terrible. And it was horrible customer service. Patrons, especially when it’s three minutes before the show, just want to go in and sit down.

So N-Scan has allowed our front of house staff to change seats immediately if we have unexpected wheelchairs (our balcony is not wheelchair-accessible). We’ve had multiple reports of kids scared of heights, people that come with vertigo, and they get up there and they’re just terrified. Our house management team can solve that problem within about two minutes versus the seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen minutes that it would previously take to get the patron downstairs, have the box office fix the tickets, and get them back upstairs.

We had zero problems when we started scanning this year. We have a very young staff, so they took to the new technology very well. I think that, with being able to see those seating charts, our front-of-house staff has a bigger appreciation of what the ticket office actually does. And so it’s not this ‘us against them’ mentality when you’re dealing with problems; it’s, ‘Oh, I understand now how that could have happened.’ It’s more a feeling of, ‘We’re all in this together now.’ We’re getting more and more technology into their hands, and they understand the other side of things.

It’s great for us because we do have some benefits that we offer to some subscribers as far as the ticket office goes. If they miss their show, they can come see a different show. And now we have ways to prove that they missed their show. Before, we had to just take them at their word.