Hello friends!
My theatre is looking at implementing rankings for our subscribers, memberships, artists, board members, etc. This is a whole new world for us! And while I think I understand the technical fundamentals of rankings, I was hoping some folks would be willing to share their experiences, processes or policies around how they build their ranking structure and perhaps what you use your rankings for.
Many thanks in advance!
Hi Kristine,
We only use rankings for Web Rankings (i.e. changing customers MOS online).
We actually have a fairly complicated system for this, with rankings selecting one of eleven of what I call "Web Benefit" modes of sale (as opposed to the default Web and Web Subscription Order Modes of Sale). Web Rankings are their own whole subject, really, outside of other rankings (i.e. traditional subscriber rankings and research-oriented rankings). For us a lot of the complexity arises out of the fact that we assign benefits online for a variety of different possible customer (small a) attributes, such as subscriber status, memberships, and email list enrollment.
There are two big jobs when you have requirements this complicated. The first is to organize and plan out your modes of sale to cover every different permutation of what a customer should be given access to. For us this is access to (multiple) timed on-sales, special performances tied to entitlements, and specific price types. We were able to reduce some (but not all) of the complexity featuring price types when pricing rules became available.
The second big job is figuring out how to compute and maintain rank, and deliver its benefits in a timely manner. For the first I created a "binary switch" scheme for assigning numbers based on each different customer attribute that would grant a benefit. These numbers, added together, would then provide a unique number associated with a unique set of attributes, and I could figure out ranges of these numbers that would connect different groups of customers into a single MOS, which TR_WEB_RANKING allows you set. Note: in some cases the ranges conforming to a specific benefit would be split, but you can have multiple rows with separate ranges pointing to the same MOS, as long as the ranges don't overlap.
--Gawain