Hi all, we are looking into bringing back a voucher-style product where a customer would pay an up-front price and receive a certain amount of redeemable vouchers that are good for one ticket to any performance in our season. Before we were on TNEW, we simply had these booked as a package with tickets into a dummy house that would then be exchanged into an actual performance. Does TNEW have any good ways to allow customers to redeem this sort of product online? Thanks for any and all advice!
No but there is a standard customization which might.
Oy... We actually have that exact setup for our subscription packages, and are on TNEW. We are required to go on-sale with blind renewals prior to receiving a confirmed production calendar, or even an (internally) announced season. We build packages with dummy performances and then subs exchange out of those packages into the actual houses once they're built and on-sale. Unfortunately, TNEW has no out-of-the-box way to to support this exchange, but we've paid a substantial amount of $$ for a customization that does this exact process. Perhaps you can get a discount on the code because it's already written...? :) Otherwise, I would try to ping the Network to see what may be coming out with v16 and the integration of Entitlements (benefit tracking) in future releases... perhaps this will be standard functionality sooner than we think?
Sorry I'm a little confused here. How is it that TNEW v7 doesn't work for this? I would think building a dummy package with a performance group of X # of vouchers seated into a GA house or something like that would work...Would then just exchange the folks when they call to redeem. This doesn't work?
I was asking specifically about online redemption of the vouchers. I've little doubt the sale of the product would be pretty simple.
Ah ok that makes more sense! Thanks and sorry for confusion.
I think what they're looking for is online redemption as well, which is the sticky part.
That said, on v7 we ran into a problem in that we sold the voucher books as Non-flex NFS packages, but v7 does not support those. I believe some people set them up as Fixed-Seat packages, but we have no experience with those, and setting them up as Flex packages was just too silly, so currently we're selling a performance that matches a voucher book in price, then exchanging that into a Non-flex NFS package to facilitate reporting and the exchanges. All exchanges we currently do manually at the window.
We do have the standard entitlements plugin already installed, though I'm hesitant to use it since our existing ticketing membership has created enough issues as it is and I'm hesitant to add a second one. It may be the simplest way to handle this, though.
I do believe that there is now a standard exchanges "component". I think it allows you to control what exchanges are allowed by price type, but this is just from a brief conversation at TLCC 2019.