Ticketing User Group
Wednesday 19th October 2020 – Young Vic Theatre
Attendees
James Broderick – Sadler Wells
Sophie Beckwith – Round House
Martin Perks – Cheltenham Festivals
Justin Giles – Shakespeares Globe
Zoe Fitzpatrick – Young Vic
Andy Kitching – Leeds City Council
Maria O’Meara – Wales Millennium Centre
Mark O’Leary – Sage Gateshead
Paola Rossi – Orchestra of the age of enlightenment (OAE)
Joy Flatt – Round House
David Knight – Sadlers Wells
Samuel Bourne – Mayflower Theatre
James McKillop – Mayflower Theatre
Paula Patritti – Royal Opera House
Lloyd Stringer – Tessitura
Massive Thank you to Zoe and The Young Vic for hosting and supplying hot drink and treats!
Current Priorities/Projects
Sadlers Wells – Continual Authority - DD Replacement – New Venue (Budgeting/Staffing) – Education on tessitura
OAE – Direct Debits – E-Tickets – New Membership scheme
Sage Gateshead – Segmentation project for audience – Data dive Frequency of attendance – Date of Birth/Year of Birth
Wales Millennium Centre – Digitalisation Practices (E-Tickets, Exchanges online, Group bookings online allowing groups to book and edit) – Access and Community improving access for everyone – FOH redesign streamlining processes/Ticket desk
Leeds City Council - Card Payment issues Windcave/World pay 60% of online bookings being declined – Onboarding a new venue.
Young Vic – Merchandise - looking at option to increase sales now cashless – Access booking online – Seating plans (change with every production, looking to create a set of plans that work for everything)
ROH – Overflow call centre – Tessitura extended services Database work – Self service exchanges
Mayflower – Ticket Insurance – Analytics – Onboarding other departments – Edgebase Schools
Cheltenham Festival – TNEW review – End of season housekeeping – Change of Membership scheme
Sadlers Wells – School Project (tidying constituent records, import of DFE database) – Launch Spring Season – Gift Certificates online
Roundhouse - New Digital Tickets via True Tickets – Launch New Website – Data Project (Profusion Company)
Shakespeare’s Globe – Version 16 upgrade – Higher Education move onto Tessitura – Recruitment new Duty Managers and Assistants
Version 16 update
It was a 50/50 spilt in the room with organisations looking to upgrade in either Q1 or Q2 of 2023.
Currently 11 early adopters in UK – Scottish Ballet is ahead of everyone
Chris at the Mayflower has V16 set up on an old PC so staff can see the new version before going live.
TLCC Highlights
Pricing rules for Members – extremely exciting.
Session on driving sales with Chris from Mayflower and Gary from Roundhouse. Really interesting way to manipulate the seating plan to increase sales and fill the house. Mayflower hold a ‘PIMMS’ meeting to discuss sales and holds and look at performances to decide when to release holds or adjust price banding. Present at the meeting is representatives from producing, programming and sales teams
Sam – Mayflower Roadmap session at TLCC in DENVER!! *CLANG*
Roadmap Session – Exchanges online looking at options issue credit voucher or swap to another performance.
Welsh Millennium Centre is already doing exchanges online – via their website developer MADE. This has hugely reduced the number of emails and calls coming to the box office.
Exchange process is very efficient. Only had issues with older audience members who struggled but were walked through the process over the phone, so they still did the exchange themselves online with guidance.
Analytics session - particularly good. This is being repeated online on 2nd November worth attending.
Onboarding Session – Really good session and particularly useful slides – should be uploaded on tessitura website shortly. An onboarding group has also been set up and had there first meeting on Wednesday 19th October
Access Sessions – 3 different access sessions all that attended found them extremely useful and have picked up information that is quite easy to implement.
Education and Schools
Sadler’s Wells and Mayflower Theatre looking to improve and develop their education data on tessitura and how they use this information for booking.
Sadler’s had a meeting at the Globe where they presented how they process schools in tessitura. We will look to get the Globe to present this at one of our next sessions.
Tidying up data and talk to the people who exist at these organisations. Adding in school data any problems with formatting CofE or Church of England has anyone experienced any issues? Please let James at the Mayflower know.
Current Sales/Trends
Still seeing last minute sales and having to hold nerve rather than put out loads of offers or papering.
A slow start but starting to see a return to more advance sales.
COVID is still affecting sales and audience behaviour.
Seeing slower sales for shows that have previously done well an example The Snowman However, plush snowman teddy’s can be purchased in the booking journey!
Energy pricing and cost of living having an impact.
Star casting and feel-good shows are performing well. Operas/Dramas not selling well.
Continuous Payment
Sadler’s put in their first claim. Had not factored the membership price increase and manually had to adjust the pledges to rerun the claim. Tessitura has created a new script which will manually update any future increase. Still getting some rejections and having to manually call those customers. Overall, a Success.
Measuring Customer Service
How are we reporting on customer service? Get info and create KPI’s.
Young Vic - Sending out post show emails. Breaking down questions
Roundhouse – Freshdesk Automated customer service – mostly positive.
Carlos from the RA has made some good dashboards on customer service.
Senior Management and Dashboard
How are senior managers accessing dashboards/data
Still some senior team wanting to use spreadsheet rather than engage with dashboards. Very time consuming when you need to transfer the data into a spreadsheet.
Training the senior teams to engage with dashboards and deep dive into them. Worth their time to invest. Dashboards are made to be interactive so better to log in than receive a PDF.
WMC – Head of Finance has stopped sending reports and people need to log in to analytics to get the information.
Merchandise
Programmes – Discussion around creating a single performance or a performance every day. Quite mixed with the best method. Everyday give you a better idea of what programmes you need. Once performance cleaner on the product catalogue.
Gift Certificates – Physical certificates rather than digital certificates.
Segmentation
Sage – How are we segmenting our audience? Keywords.
Sadlers – 8 segmentations how every 88% of audience are under one segment. Doing a review with Baker Richards to produce some new segmentation/genre.
Mayflower – Use list criteria to segment audience and create keywords to tag. They work with TRG, and they want specific keywords.
Next Meeting
End of February beginning of March
Venues that would be happy to host future meet ups
Sage Gateshead
Mayflower Theatre
Leeds Townhall
Young Vic
We will send around a poll to decide on the next venue.