Flywheel worked with the Prince of Wales Theatre in London’s West End, part of the Delfont Mackintosh Theatre group, to identify improvements in their customer experience that would also increase spend per head in the theatre.

The Challenge

Delfont Mackintosh, owner of seven West End theatres, own the Prince of Wales Theatre, which has been showing Mamma Mia for over a decade. The audience profile has changed significantly over that time: so has their expectations, needs and spending habits.

Delfont Mackintosh wanted to understand the current experience customers were having in their theatre, and identify ways of improving that experience and increasing spend per head.

The Solution

Flywheel analysed the audience make-up and revenue data to identify four key customer types and two key nights that were used to audit the current customer experience.

We used a mixture of observations and interviews to analyse the key moments and decisions these different customer types were making, and with a workshop of front line, back office and managerial staff, identified ways of improving experiences (concepts which change the overarching customer experience), services (concepts which change interaction between staff and customers), and products (concepts which introduce new product lines or change existing ones), in order to either increase revenue or improve the overall experience.

The Impact

Some of these solutions are immediately implementable at no cost, although the theatre will be embarking on a rigorous implementation and evaluation process to learn lessons for other theatres in the group. These solutions are anticipated to have an immediate impact on spend and experience.

Other solutions require a further development phase, the majority of which is being handled by operational staff at the theatre. These are expected to have a longer term impact.

We will be evaluating the impact on spend per head at regular intervals, but we estimate that the work done could improve revenues by more than £300K PA.