Seems the movie theatres have decided that it's best to have the foxes watching the hen house. In an interesting move, Regal Cinemas has decided to build customer loyalty by giving their best customers devices to tattle on fellow movie patrons!


Here we see the idea in all its glory. It seems someone has come up with the idea to make this tattling behavior be part of the loyalty program for Regal Cinemas. Along with extra points for being a loyal patron, it seems that someone has figured out that pushing the equivalent of a movie ejector seat is good for business.
The way it works is that Regal Cinema loyalists are given a hand-held device with four buttons they can push to send a signal to the staff of ushers and managers. These are the buttons: there's one each for sound, picture, piracy or other disturbance.
Sound and picture I get. This is an early warning device.
Other disturbances I think will be the funniest one to be enacted -- because now not only do we have two talkative teenage girls (for example), but also an usher coming in, finding the tattler and then "shushing" the disturbance. Not sure how this will work, but I'd give five bucks to see it.
The button for piracy is interesting. I've never seen anyone in a theatre trying to make copies, but this obviously is prevalent otherwise there wouldn't be a button for it.
Now, personally, I think this will run its course in a few months. I give Regal Cinema props for trying something new...but beyond the novelty period of carrying one of these things in and the few people who will push the buttons to see what happens, I just have a hard time figuring the "loyalty" pay off in this. And I'm just not sure that turning your best customers into cops is exactly a move to improve the movie-going experience for them.
Guess we'll all have to go to the movies to see. Race you to the popcorn stand!


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Tattletale Customers 'Shushing' for Loyalty Points

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jeanne Bliss
Jeanne Bliss began her career at Lands’ End where she reported to founder Gary Comer and the company’s executive committee, ensuring that in the formative years of the organization, the company stayed focused on its core principles of customer and employee focus. She was the first leader of the Lands’ End Customer Experience. In addition to Lands’ End, she has served Allstate, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker Corporation and Mazda Corporations as its executive leading customer focus and customer experience. Jeanne has helped achieve 95% retention rates across 50,000 person organizations, harnessing businesses to work across their silos to deliver a united and deliberate experience customers (and employees) want to repeat. Jeanne now runs CustomerBliss (https://www.customerbliss.com), an international consulting business where she coaches executive leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Her clients include Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others. Her two best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. Her blog is https://www.ccocoach.com She is Co-founder of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. www.cxpa.org