I started here at The Wheeler Centre last month and we’re close to having our first in person event for the year. However, prior to 2020 and before everything went online, all events were free and box office staff weren’t needed.
But jump to today and we’re now charging for tickets and trying to figure out how service our customers and potential walk up sales when we have no printed tickets (we’re currently sending etickets and use N-Scan, we also don’t own a physical ticket printer though) and with currently only myself in the ticketing team. I am wanting to move to mobile tickets at some point which will help somewhat. But I’m hoping someone might have some advice or words of wisdom from those who might be in a similar position? How do you process in person sales, handle ticket reprints, comp tickets etc? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Courtney
Hi Courtney, I ran a ticket-printer-less setup for a few shows in 2021. We use mobile tickets, but they are far from perfect and we ended up needing a backup for every ticketholder because a number of them couldn't access tickets on the day of the show, or they tried printing and the mobile ticket QR code wouldn't print without digging into print settings (which most of our patrons couldn't or wouldn't figure out before coming to the venue).
I ended up using the order export utility to create a barcode manifest for each performance. It served as will call and a backup for mobile ticket issues. We would check folks off the list and scan the barcodes after the performance started for GA events. They would get a colored sticker on their program to indicate they could enter the event. For reserved seat events, I print the barcodes on address labels with name and seat info to be stuck on programs, as a mini-ticket of sorts.
For walkup sales, we hand wrote the seat location on a blank address label sticker and put it on the program. Attendance for these had to be manually marked, but it was the best option we had at the time. We've moved back to printing physical tickets for walkup sales, but use the barcode/seat info labels for will call and "reprints."
If you're interested in checking this option out, I'm happy to send you the documentation on the process that I put together for my team and our template for Will Call labels. There is still a cost and touchpoint element with the labels, but the cost has worked out lower for us than buying ticket stock for all of our tickets and paying for mailing costs.
Codashti, The Order Export Utility being used like this is quite clever. Would you mind sending me the documentation so that I might test a few things out? I would love to get printed barcodes. They would be a tremendous help. Cheers.
Just jumping in here to say those are some great ideas!
Thanks Jen! Through lots of trial and error, and lots of help from our system admin, my team and I have refined the process and feel pretty confident in it. Lots of our patrons think it's pretty clever too