Tips: Cancellation Strategy (Exchange/Donation/Refund Processing and Messaging)

Just wanted to note that you can issue credit card refunds without a stored card using the Refund Prior Payments functionality. If you are using Worldpay, this will work for transactions up to 45 days old. There is no such limit for Windcave. 

If you're having trouble using Refund Prior Payments, please don't hesitate to reach out to support.

Thanks,

Patrick

Santa Barbara has announced that all events scheduled for the month of March should be cancelled/postponed. The Granada Theatre is using a Formstack form to collect refund/exchange requests, to help cut down ultra-long wait times for those calling in. If you'd like to peek, it's here: www.granadasb.org/covid-form (more options appear based on your selections.)

Great idea Jamie!

Thanks you for starting this thread.

Our cancellations have been increasing steadily this week due to COVID-19 concerns. I am stumped here:

• Is there a way to tag a refund--like a comp reason--that would allow me to create a report of only COVID-19 refunds?
• On orders that do not have a payment, but have been reserved, is there a report/Analytics to tally these cancellations? Would a field in the order custom tab be configurable for this purpose?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

We created an order category that we are adding to all refund or exchange orders related to COVID-19.

Brilliant! Thank you, Sara.

We're doing something involving custom source codes. I think involving the option of how we can now have multiple source codes if we need.

But I know this because I sit next to (or did before WFH) the person helping figure this out. Joseph Yoga, any details to add?

FYI, our context is that we started with a cancellation of one production. Now we've cancelled the New Victory season. There was initially a need to work only on one event in an order, now it's a lot broader.

Hi friends - 

How are you all addressing getting important information out to folks who might have unsubscribed in the past and now won't receive emails?  Are you temporarily overriding unsubscribes so that these people get necessary information, or are they just out of luck?  Thanks!!!

We are not here. Most of our unsubscribers are from out of the area. 

Yes, we've done three overrides now.

1) Everyone with an email and holding tickets to the initially cancelled production got that notification. In my book, transactional message because it's about fulfilling an order. 

2) Last night, re cancelled season: main list + add'l upload of future ticketholders without permission. Same logic--override when transactional, but otherwise going with permissions.

3) Today, resent message to about 100 unsubscribed donors who did not have the right criteria to get last night's message.

Note: This only applies to UNSUBSCRIBES, not spam complaints. At least with WordFly, there's no override option in this case. (We aren't set up to distinguish between these responses in Tess, so I can't build it into extraction.) If you want to find out who still isn't getting the message, go to the little right side menu when you're in the upload tab and you'll see an option to create a mini-report. For the first send, I transferred this handful of names into a Tessitura list so our Box Office manager would have them to prioritize calling.

Hi Jamie, What type of web form are you using? 

Google form the first time--we do have WordFly Pages and an integration (I like it), but we were looking at processing 700+ orders and Ticket Services felt far more comfortable using a Google Form - > Google Sheet option. Both because only the managers really use CSIs and because the spreadsheet offered an easy way to write really visible notes.

Next wave so far was just reply to this email if you'd be willing to donate your tickets back. We'll do a more direct something after we emerge from the first crush. I suspect we'll take a moment to re-confirm, but probably Google sheets again.

We're gathering ourselves for a similar (thankfully smaller) round for our School program and there was no hesitation about Google Form there. Staff are using personal devices for WFH and we're seeing a lot of trouble for folks who need to install Citrix on Macs with older operating systems. Can't download a compatible version.

That is helpful, thank you!

Hi Sara. We have done the same. Do you mind sharing which reports you find are best for gathering this data together?

Sara - this is a great idea. Are you changing the order category on the existing order, or are you using the category and doing the refund/exchange in a separate order?

We do refunds in the same order, so for those we are changing the category on the existing order, and then donated tickets or exchanging tickets are done in a new order. We don't really use categories for anything outside of helping organize our subscription ticket mailing, so for us changing the category doesn't effect anything else. Any existing order that we're changing the category on won't have had a category set to begin with. If you use categories more regularly than we do, it might be better to do everything in a separate order so as to not overwrite anything that you still might need later.