ticketing research report - after digitalsystem users from venues across the uk and ireland....

Ticketing Research Report2015

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1. Background 3 1.1 Research outline 4 1.2 Participants 5

2. Current venue websites 6 2.1 Current purchase path products 7 2.2 Web integrations 9 2.3 Updates to purchase paths 10 2.4 Events 10

3. Key features for a web ticketing product 11 3.1 Most important features 12 3.2 Ticketing functionality 13 3.3 Fundraising functionality 14 3.4 General functionality 15 3.5 Products 16 3.6 Best/worst features of existing products 16

4. Considerations for a new web ticketing product 17 4.1 General 18 4.2 Ticketing 19 4.3 Membership 22 4.4 Development 23

5. Summary of requirements 24

CONTENTS

© 2015 WE ARE AD LTD

All rights reserved, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of We are AD Ltd.

In accordance with our normal practice, we must state that this document is for the use only of the recipient. None of its content may be disclosed to parties other than the recipient without the prior written permission of We are AD Ltd. Such disclosure will only be made on the basis that the contents are not passed to persons other than those specified in the consent. In addition, neither the whole nor any part of this report, nor any reference thereto may be included in any document, circular or statement without our prior written approval of the form and context in which it will appear.

CONSULTATION In the event of the recipient of this document receiving a request under the Freedom of Information Act which encompasses any information held by them which was provided to them by We are AD Ltd. in connection with this confidential response, the recipient is expected forthwith to notify AD Ltd. of the request and allow AD Ltd. not less than ten working days in which to make representations.

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Ticketing Report 2015: We are AD

BACKGROUNDAD has worked in the arts and culture sector for over a decade, delivering streamlined online ticketing through a number of integrated solutions. In this time, we’ve committed time and resource into understanding sector challenges and developing a white-label web ticketing product for the arts and culture community. In 2015, we commissioned Silver Sea Consulting to conduct a piece of research to better understand how this product could be developed further with the user/administrator in mind from the outset.

This research will allow AD to build on its experience from the first phase of the AD Tessitura Bridge product with the collective knowledge and ideas of the ticketing and CRM community.

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The research consisted of two main phases:

Quantitative: An online questionnaire with 20 different online booking system users from venues across the UK and Ireland.

Qualitative: A workshop at the Young Vic in London with 10 participants from London-based venues, AD and other suppliers.

1.1 RESEARCH OUTLINE

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The following table summarises the participants of each research phase:

1.2 PARTICIPANTS

ORGANISATION JOB TITLE

Abbey Theatre Database Systems Manager

AD Web Developer

AD Account Director

Almeida Theatre Director of Marketing & Communications

Barbican Centre IT Business Systems Manager

Birmingham Hippodrome Database Manager

Birmingham Hippodrome Application Specialist

Kings Place Music Foundation Head of Visitor Services

London Philharmonic Orchestra Digital Projects Director

National Theatre Box Office & CRM Systems Manager

Nottingham Lakeside Arts Head of Audience Development & Marketing

Philharmonia Orchestra Developer

Realex Payments Corporate Sales Manager

Roundhouse Trust Business Systems Analyst

Royal Court Theatre Head of Marketing and Sales

Royal Northern College of Music Marketing and Customer Services Data Officer

Sage Gateshead Web Systems Co-ordinator

Southbank Centre Ticketing Operations Manager

Spektrix UX Designer

The Old Vic DBA

The Old Vic Senior Marketing Executive

Theatre Royal Newcastle Director of Operations

Theatre Royal Plymouth Systems Analyst

Ticketing Network East Midlands Project Manager

Wales Millennium Centre Database Manager

Young Vic Box Office and Sales Manager

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CURRENT VENUE WEBSITESThe venue survey contained a series of questions to provide context and to help us understand the existing web & ticketing products that were being used by our sample.

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Is your current purchase path an ‘out of the box’ solution or a custom product?

Custom 60%

Out of the box 40%

A small majority of respondents were using a tailor-made purchase path product, with the remainder using an ‘out of the box’ solution.

The two key ‘out of the box’ solutions being used were:

• BlocksOffice (used by 4 respondents)

• TNEW (used by 3 respondents)

However, almost all users of these products had to make customisations in order for them to serve their venue’s requirements.

2.1 CURRENT PURCHASE PATH PRODUCTS

60%

40%

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Did you have to customise the product at all?

No 13%

Yes 87%

EXAMPLE CUSTOMISATIONS INCLUDED:

“We have a lot of bespoke things that needed to be added to the product, like fee-free tickets.”

Roundhouse (BlocksOffice)

60%

40%

87%

13%

“We had to configure our Tessitura installation to work inside this boxed product.”

Birmingham Hippodrome (TNEW)

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Is your ticketing system fully integrated with your web presence?

Yes 90%

No 5%

Don’t know 5%

Almost all of our sample’s ticketing systems were fully integrated with their websites.

These integrations are almost exclusively via APIs, with the exception of the Royal Court’s website; as a Spektrix user, they instead use Spektrix’s standard web service.

2.2 WEB INTEGRATIONS

90%

5%5%

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Everyone surveyed was either selling, or wanted to sell, tickets for performances via their website. There was also a very strong interest in selling tickets for free events or private events.

What type of events do you sell tickets for, or would like to sell tickets for, via your website?

2.4 EVENTS

Other

Exhibitions

Private Events

Free events

Performances

During which year did you last update your purchase path?

2.3 UPDATES TO PURCHASE PATHS

100%

84%

42%

21%

16%

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010 or earlier

Don't know 5%

10%

10%

15%

40%

20%

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KEY FEATURES FOR A WEB TICKETING PRODUCT

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We asked our sample to list the three most important features of a web ticketing product; below is a word cloud illustrating their responses. The larger the word, the more frequently it was mentioned.

Simplicity and ease of use were particularly likely to be mentioned as the most important features for an effective ticketing solution, both from the perspective of the administrator and the customer.

3. 1 MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES

navigation

payment

cust

omer

info

rmat

ion

sele

ctab

ility

mul

tibu

ys

inte

grit

y

upse

lling

upse

t

page la

rge

show

scl

eans

ofic

ew

rong

rule

s

actu

ally on

s etc

phon

e

syos

cont

ent/

text

perf

orm

ance

relia

bilit

y

cros

s

sale

sw

ork

onlin

evi

alo

g

flex

ibili

tyef

fici

ency

expe

rien

cein

tegr

atio

nsinte

grat

ions

valu

e

easy responsivepurchase

interfacequicklyseat

intuitivedesign

ease

use

user

next pages

logicalchannels

proofing makeadd

sorryproduct

providerssomethingmessages

unified

price

selling

pricing

update

changeparty

controldata

gethouseaccountthird

wentunderstand box set

sale securepublished

changesfriendlyevent

pathoffers button

clear

tickets

presentedselection

customization

gettingcostsrelevant

including

simple

development

flexibility/editable

future

next

moneyvolumes

search

simplicitynavigatecheckout

speedsell

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RATED SELECT YOUR OWN SEAT AS

THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE95%3.2 TICKETING FUNCTIONALITY

In addition to the unprompted, open-ended responses above, we asked our respondents to rate how important a series of different pieces of functionality were to them, from essential to not important.

Based on their responses, ‘select your own seat’ was cited as the most important feature, with 95% of our sample rating this as ‘essential’. Dynamic discounting, the opportunity to cross-sell similar events and functionality for packages or series discounts were also considered important to our group.

NeutralImportant Not ImportantEssential

Please rate how important each of the following peices of ticketing functionality is to you:

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3.3 FUNDRAISING FUNCTIONALITY

From a fundraising perspective, the most important features are the ability to make donations as well as purchase new memberships and gift memberships.


Please rate how important each of the following pieces of fundraising functionality is to you:

Booking for private Development events

Ability to set up direct debits

Membership renewals

Gift membership purchases

Membership Sign-Up Purchases

Donations 90%

80%

75%

65%

30% 40% 25% 5%

10% 65% 25%

15%

30%

5%

5%

5%

15% 5%

10%

STATED THAT DONATIONS WERE AN

ESSENTIAL PIECE OF FUNCTIONALITY90%

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3.4 GENERAL FUNCTIONALITY

Whilst not seen to be as essential as functionality as select your own seat (SYOS) or donations, other general functionality that was important to our respondents included 3D secure, QAS/postcode lookup and priority booking.


Please rate how important each of the following pieces of general functionality is to you:

RATED 3D SECURE AS AN

ESSENTIAL FEATURE70%

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3.5 PRODUCTS

3.6 BEST/WORST FEATURESOF EXISTING WEB PRODUCTS

There was also an appetite to cross-sell merchandise during the purchase path.

When asked for their favourite features of their existing web products, the group were particularly likely to mention select your own seat functionality across multiple platforms and flexible seat maps.

The least performant/worst features mentioned were a general lack of flexibility/control and the absence of responsive design for those who don’t currently have this functionality.


Please rate how important it is to you to be able to sell each of the following products:

Web product research report for We are AD

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CONSIDERATIONS FOR A NEW WEB TICKETING PRODUCTDuring the workshop we explored some of the key issues that arose from responses to our survey in more depth with the participants.

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4.1 GENERAL

At present, our group felt they spent too much time duplicating information across multiple systems.

Unanimously, the group stated that they currently spend far too much time constantly checking and matching multiple systems; one example was having to enter things like ticket prices into a text field for the website, when this information is already held in Tessitura.

As with the survey results, it was reiterated that an easy customer journey and simple administration were key.

Another central requirement highlighted was flexibility; this is mentioned below in relation to production pages, but in a more general sense people wanted the opportunity to make tweaks and changes without being beholden to a web development company.

“Our website is so shit, that you have so many clicks just to see anything or do anything… we just think we should keep it as simple as possible.”

Anonymous 1

“You need to determine the parent place for information… Artifax, Tessitura or straight onto your CMS.”

Anonymous 2

“I ideally would like to put everything in Tessitura once, teach the website where to pull it from, and then it goes into the various places on the website it needs to go to.”

Anonymous 3

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4.2 TICKETING

PRODUCTION PAGES

During the workshop we conducted an exercise to create an ‘ideal world’ production page; the images below illustrate firstly a list of what information these pages should contain, and then an example of how this could be laid out.

The most important feature for these production pages was flexibility; our participants wanted the freedom to prioritise different elements based on their importance (e.g. sometimes the cast for a production is a key selling point and sometimes it’s not, therefore this should appear above the image). This was particularly important for multi-art-form venues, where you might require several different production page templates per art-form.

Other features that were suggested included:

• Dynamic confirmation pages so that relevant information such as consent forms could be shown on completion of a booking, or on dynamic confirmation emails.

• Availability indicators, e.g. number of tickets remaining when below a specified threshold.

• For those entering via the homepage, there was also an interest in skipping directly to the purchase path, bypassing the production page entirely (for people who already know they wanted to attend).

As an aside, a few organisations have been discussing developing a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages for the arts sector, to improve SEO for these pages.

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UPSELLING/CROSS-SELLING

There are various add-ons that our group would like to be able to sell once tickets to an event have been added to their basket:

• Carparks

• Merchandise

• Programmes

• Restaurant bookings

• Interval drinks

• Related talks

• iTunes/digital downloads

They were also interested in the potential to cross-sell other events based on the customer’s previous purchase history, website behaviour or what’s in their basket.

Finally, the new rules allowing a user to amend an order with extra purchases up to 15% of the original order value without the need to complete the checkout process again sparked a lot of interest, and was discussed as an extra opportunity to sell add-ons, such as programmes or merchandise without disrupting the ticket purchase journey.

DYNAMIC DISCOUNTING

As the bulk of our group were Tessitura users, there was an assumption that the pricing rules engine in v12.5 would be expected to carry out most of their dynamic pricing activity or pricing-based messaging, rather than relying on their web product. However, this was based

on the assumption that the new engine delivered everything that it promised, and those building new websites at the moment wanted a ‘back-up’ solution should it not meet their requirements once released. In the interim, there was some frustration from those relying on their web product to automatically calculate discounts such as multi-buys.

“The pricing rules are quite restrictive in BlocksOffice, just because it’s not that dynamic and there aren’t that many options. For me, the important thing is making sure that the messaging is correct and that you can enter the messaging at whichever point you wish.” SOUTHBANK CENTRE

“It’s a balance between making them very aware of (the potential discount), and not forcing it.” PHILHARMONIA

There was also an interest in seat based messaging, which can be

challenging to do in Tessitura.

“We have it, but it’s something we struggle with because of seat types not changing from performance to performance… [we want] to be able to control seat attributes or seat information more fluidly.” NATIONAL THEATRE

When working with offers/promos, the sample participants also stated that they wanted the opportunity to very specifically offer a discount on a restricted range of seats, so that they could strategically dress the house without relying on external partners, such as Time Out.

“To be able to go ‘you can have this seat for that much’... to be quite specific, so that you can properly dress a house” SOUTHBANK CENTRE

At the more advanced end of the spectrum, there was a suggestion that there could be very sophisticated segment-based pricing which changed dynamically based on email campaigns or cookies.

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TICKET AGENTS

There was a great deal of frustration amongst all of our participants that they were having to manage their agents’ ticket allocations in a very manual way. Ideally they wanted the agents to be able to sell directly from the same ticketing system, thus reducing labour and increasing efficiencies.

“I’d love to be able to say: ‘here’s your allocation See Tickets’ and then as they sell through their website it sells the seats that they’ve sold onto our system… (via a) gateway where their system talks directly to ours.” SOUTHBANK CENTRE

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4.3 MEMBERSHIP

The group were interested in expanding the current functionality beyond simply selling and renewing memberships.

One area of particular interest was selling and renewing memberships via direct debit in a way that would meet industry compliance and standards. Ideally this would integrate directly with account checking software and record the bank details directly into the CRM system.

Another area that the participants flagged surrounded the use of promotions and memberships. Currently there is no function in any of the users’ CRM systems that could accommodate this, which limits their ability to entice new members using discounts. They would

be interested in a new web product helping them to deliver upon this.

The last task for the group was to define a process in which a customer could purchase a gift membership on a website.

There was a lot of discussion regarding how the gift membership fulfilment would work, with the general consensus being that an option to email the voucher to its intended recipient would be preferred. Additionally a customisable image for the email would be necessary in order to add seasonal information.

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4.4 DEVELOPMENT

All of groups wanted the ability to issue tickets to private Development events via their websites, as well as more general private events (e.g. ‘think-ins’ at Southbank Centre) where an event needs to be book-able by anyone (i.e. not restricted to Members or Donors) but the event can’t appear publicly on the venue website.

At present, the only workaround is for people to create a Tessitura event but skip the publishing phase of getting this online; alternatively, some people resort to using Eventbrite. This is far from ideal.

Beyond the standard fundraising pages the group found it difficult to come up with additional examples. Development campaigns tend to be very bespoke, for example ‘name a pipe’, so it needs to be considered on a case by case basis. That

being said, it would be preferable to have flexible, customisable donation pages where a simple donation box could be displayed alongside custom content. This flexibility would allow them to scale solutions for themselves and deliver customer-centric online experiences.

There was a discussion about private events for corporate sponsors and supporters, however the only example of this working well at present was a completely customised approach by the Old Vic, relying on custom tables with sponsors’ allocations that could be called on over the course of a year. This area would benefit from further exploration with fundraising experts during the design phase.

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SUMMARY OF REQUIREMENTS

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Below is a summary of the requirements being considered in AD’s new web ticketing product, based on the feedback collected during the survey and the workshop:

PRODUCTION PAGE

• Flexibility on the order and appearance of sections, by production

• Dynamic and customisable ‘Book Now’ button

• Priority booking and relevant messaging

• Related packages

• Productions which can be configured to only be seen with a specific URL and do not appear in the calendar

• Configurable performance layout to cover exhibitions and conferences

SELECT YOUR OWN SEAT (SYOS)

• Sections with image overlay

• Sections should also display availability e.g. ‘Good Availability’, ‘Sold Out’

• SYOS designer to alter the appearance of rows and seats

• View from seat

• Seat messaging which can be customised by performance to cover access and restricted view

• Best available seat selection

CUSTOMER SPECIFIC SEATING

• Access booking

• Seats in allocations available to certain groups

• Automatic discounts on seats where applicable

• Members

• Priority booking

• Seats in allocations available to certain groups

ADDITIONAL ITEMS

• Restaurant bookings

• Related merchandise

• Interval drinks

BASKET FUNCTIONALITY

• Dynamic discounting e.g. buy three events and save 20%

• Donations

PAYMENTS

• 3D secure with no supplier restriction

• Tokenisation

CONFIRMATIONS

• Editable email confirmations

• Dynamic confirmations based on basket contents

MEMBERSHIPS

• Configurable membership levels with custom messaging

• Direct Debit integration with a 3rd party authorisation service, ideally integrated back into the CRM system

• Gift memberships

CUSTOMER ACCOUNT AND REGISTRATION

• Address lookup which is not restricted to a specific supplier

• Option to register without an address

• Gift aid sign up with configurable messaging

• Interest codes

• Data protection

DONATIONS

• Donation slider

• Donation box

• Customisable donation pages for specific campaigns

OTHER FEATURES

• Built-in waiting room as standard

• Connection thresholds which can be set by the user

• Responsive design

• Delivery methods which can be restricted by performance

INTEGRATIONS

• EPOS systems

• Artifax

• Finance systems

• Additional databases, e.g. image databases.

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www.we-are-AD.com

[email protected]

Please do get in touch with any questions, we’d love to hear from you!

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ticketing research report - after digitalsystem users from venues across the uk and ireland....

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