This is not very Tessitura related, more general ticketing for the performing arts.
When we launch sales for our upcoming Festival we have an issue with long call times. A lot of our audience members buy early and buy a lot. Some of these buyers are also a little bit older, don't use our website, and demand call time (sometimes our box office associates are on the phone with one customer for over an hour on the 1st day of sales, which cripples us when trying to get through 100 voicemails). We have a really small staff at onsale (5-6 call agents tops on the phones at one time). We are a multi-venue (12-13 venues), multi-genre performing arts Festival.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to move a call along? Any specific tactics when recommending seats, reviewing pricing, recommending performances, etc.? I'm not talking about shortcuts within Tessitura, we already try to train in that. Mostly just how to move a customer along to complete a sale faster without the customer feeling rushed?
We have witnessed, especially with older patrons, that sometimes it seems like they just want or need someone to talk to. Now, that is fine to a point, but not when you are getting backed up with calls. Generally speaking, I would recommend that you remind your team to “lead the call.” Of course when we are talking to guests we ALWAYS want to lead the call, but reminding about this can be helpful. You can politely do this with some strategy and practice. When I think about what this means in terms of training this and applying it, there is no secret sauce…but maybe it’s just keeping away from tangents and steering things back to the necessary parts of the process. I think at times it helps to say things like “Ok, so all I need now to complete your order is…” or something to that effect. And of course if your staff are quick while navigating between screens in the process, that helps too. There are some keyboard shortcuts that have helped us to be more speedy…those are great.
Oh, and with suggesting seats, we try to only offer a few choices…don’t give the guests too much to think about.
Maybe that helps, if even just a little bit.
Brian
From: Tessitura Ticketing Forum [mailto:forums-ticketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Michele Keutsch Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2017 10:58 AM To: Brian Seitz <bseitz@thecenterpresents.org> Subject: Re: [Tessitura Ticketing Forum] How to Move a Slow Phone Sale
Hi Katie,
I don't have any specific ideas on how to move them along on the call, but we've really pushed our patrons to our website by offering incentives for them to purchase there, ie: lower handling fees, web only discounts on certain performances, that type of thing.
We also allow our patrons to mail/fax/email in their orders (archaic, I know!) but this also cuts down on calls to our call centre as those patrons know that their orders will be filled before the actual on-sale, so again incentivizing them to not call in.
Michele
From: Katie Hetrick <bounce-katiehetrick6175@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 8/31/2017 9:46:40 AM
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