Q&A: Should a Guest Services Team and Usher Team Co-Exist?
Q:
After reading through several of your posts, I noticed that your Guest Services team is responsible for greeting in the auditorium and even seating guests. Is there any overlap with your ushers, or do you not have ushers seat guests at all?
We’re in the process of implementing a First Impressions team and also trying to increase our ushers’ level of involvement, but I’m curious how you separate the duties of the two in that area.
[Name withheld, St. Clair, Missouri]
A:
The short answer: we’d consider any usher-type role to be a part of our Guest Services team. There is no distinction.
The longer answer: just after Noah landed on Mt. Ararat, and I added this role to my job description after being on staff for a couple of years, I knew I’d have to convince our long-serving ushers that their role would also be fundamentally changing. Their job wasn’t to simply hand out bulletins and give a greeting; it was to help create the overall guest services experience we were going for. That meant that they might be walking a guest to another building, or occasionally helping with parking, or being a part of the “attend one, serve one” culture, rather than serving for the first seven minutes of the service and then joining their family in the auditorium.
In my opinion, having two separate teams that perform the same function will always cause a vision & mission problem. There’s zero gap and a lot of overlap. If the ushers aren’t accountable to the Guest Services team leader, then they can fill in their own blanks and create whatever kind of environment they want. From an outside perspective, it makes no sense that an usher wouldn’t be a part of the Guest Services team. And from an outsider’s perspective, they’re one and the same.
So my suggestion would be this: have a meeting with your ushers (or at least the leader that you’re close to). Cast some deep and wide vision. Help them to see what you’re trying to do. Give them a chance to buy in to the “new normal.” And then move forward as one unified team.
Now the obvious: their name may change. Instead of “usher,” they might now be known as the Auditorium Entry team or the Auditorium Seaters team or whatever other nomenclature you want to use. But even in this, I would suggest being very strategic. Common language brings common purpose. Make the call together, and then move forward in agreement.
When every volunteer is working out of the same playbook, that makes it much easier to accomplish some big things.
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