So here is a question which may seem obsolete in an age of internet and mobile apps: Who is more important, the customer at the window or the customer on the phone?

Even though you may not face this particular problem, the question is one about expectations.

The situation I recently faced arose because our local audiences tend to buy their tickets over the phone or in person from our ticket office rather than online, at outlets or the Ticketmaster 800 number.

A musical act has been doing their Christmas show here for a decade and generally packs the house. This year I had the bright idea to send out postcards to everyone who had ordered tickets in the past. The postcard told them to ignore all the public announcements of tickets going on sale Monday, they could order their tickets the Friday prior in recognition of their loyalty to the group.

That Friday we had a line out the door and the phone ringing off the hook. I had two people at the window and one in the backroom on the phones. So that people didn’t get frustrated by the lack of an answer, I was in another room answering the phone and taking number to call back since we only had so many terminals to sell tickets out of.

After a half hour, we cleared enough of the line at the window to move another person to phone orders and returned calls to everyone on the list within an hour.

The issue is that people on the phone generally had an expectation of parity with the people at the window. If someone left their number with me at 10:15, they expected to get their ticket order in before the person who got online at the window at 10:30 and certainly before the person who happened to get through to the person handling the phones.

The truth is, it is pretty difficult to treat everyone in a completely egalitarian manner. It is difficult to ask the next person in line at the window to wait while you call someone back who called 5 minutes before they got there.

At the same time, you don’t want to give precedence to everyone at the window just because they made the effort to drive in. Many people only have one car or can only make a call during their 15 minute break at work.

Back in the day when the Internet was new and landlines walked the earth, you could put people on hold, attend to the person at the window and then go to the phone and back to the window. I am not sure the people on the phone especially would have the patience for that these days.

I would like to hear about policies and practices people have implemented that made this process seem fairer to both staff and patrons.

But I also wanted to note that Seth Godin actually recently addressed this issue on his blog. (my emphasis)

It seems egalitarian, but it’s actually regressive, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that different people value their time differently. People with time to spare are far more likely to be rewarded.

Another example: Call the company that sells your favorite tech brand and ask for customer service. You’ll be on hold for one to sixty minutes. Why do they do this? They can obviously afford to answer the phone right away, can’t they?

Like the mom who waits for the sixth whine before responding to her kid, these companies are making sure that only people who really and truly need/want to talk to them actually get talked to. Everyone else hangs up long before that.

You can hear the CFO, “well, if we answered on the first ring, more people would call!”

Again, at first glance, this seems like a smart way to triage with limited resources. But once again, it misses the opportunity to treat different people differently. Shouldn’t the really great customer, or the person about to buy a ton of items get their call answered right away? The time tax is a bludgeon, a blunt instrument that can’t discriminate.

Godin straight out acknowledges that people with more free time will get advantages. I quoted some additional text from him to raise the point that most arts organizations aren’t in a position of having the resources to answer calls immediately, but can genuinely be struggling to cover the phones.

I wonder if his suggestion about treating different people differently might be even more valid for those who have fewer resources. It could allow them to prioritize and focus on who is served.

Instead of the preferential donor/subscriber hotline which reinforces the social stratification the arts are trying so hard to distance themselves from, the preference could be predicated, as Godin suggests, on providing service to society.

Putting literacy volunteers and Habitat for Humanity volunteers at the front of the line could certainly show an organizations commitment to serving and improving the community.