Innovation to deliver a better visitor experience in a museum checkroom.
“One month into implementation, [we] set a new attendance record. We had no checkroom lines and not one issue was reported. It was an extraordinary turnaround.” - Director of Security
Before
In the checkroom, the museum’s 3 million annual visitors were waiting in lines, staff was expensive, and managers were frustrated. They were:
1. Running out of storage space in critical moments
2. Managing lines over an hour-long on busy days
3. Paying staff for 24k hours a year
After
Even with increasing attendance to nearly 4 million, the museum’s updates provided them the ability to:
1. Store 3x as many winter items within the same space
2. Provide checkroom services with no lines and delighting customers
3. Reduce staff hours by 10k hours annually
THE OUTCOMES
1. Optimize Usage of Space
Increased storage 3x for as many items within the same space.
PROBLEM: The museum’s previous layout was cumbersome for staff to navigate and items were often stored incorrectly, if at all, on the conveyors. Space was not utilized well as the top level storage was rarely used with bags on the floor instead. And lost tags reduced the number of open slots available to use. Many times, during the winter, the checkroom simply ran out of capacity to hold any more items.
SOLUTION: The museum worked with Chexology experts to design their checkroom process and floor plans to maximize the use of their conveyors. This resulted in better use of the space and the conveyors, increasing the amount of storage space for a variety of seasonal items from heavy coats in the winter to tourist bags and personal items in the summer.
2. Improve Speed to Avoid Lines
PROBLEM: Previously, museum visitors could wait as long as an hour to store or retrieve their items. Staff were not using the conveyors correctly and frequently needed to run down aisles instead of letting the conveyors do the work. Ultimately, it just took too much time for conveyors to deliver items one tag request at a time.
SOLUTION: Through an improved process flow, Chexology helped the museum shave 25 seconds off the average time spent at the counter. Alongside a conveyor queue integration, that additionally speeds up retrieval times by 25%, museum visitors no longer need to experience checkroom lines on their busiest days.
3. Forecasting & Savings
PROBLEM: Without insights into hourly, or even daily, checkroom demand, the museum would staff on intuition, past scheduling, and costly adjustments from last minute weather forecasts.
SOLUTION: Chexology advised the museum to replace plastic tags with tracking tags that capture checkroom demand in real-time. Now, data-driven metrics are collected and correlated with performance to forecast results. This provides the museum leadership with the insights to maintain control over wait times and reduce staffing costs by up to 34%.
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