Ticketing nightmares

Let there be no misunderstanding: selling tickets is ‘mission critical’. Traditionally, the box office is the funnel through which all purchasers must pass. It is now assumed that tickets can be sold reliably through a whole series of separate channels, including websites, phone rooms, outlets, agents, etc. This is a tangled web, dependent not just on software but server capacity, bandwidth and telecommunications, plus third party card authorisation systems and over-stretched, under-skilled staff. There are many points of potential failure.

So the twenty-first century is seeing both increasing risk, and a rash of new suppliers entering the market, usually offering low cost as their selling point. These new companies, without ticketing experience and often from a web development background, don’t seem to recognise how critical this function is. Sales teams can over-promise and under-deliver, and may not have the back-up support available. This is never easy, and even industry giants can find themselves delivering later than planned on new systems to ensure they truly work and are state-of-the-art. But there is a crisis in 2008: many venues simply cannot afford the prices charged by the established suppliers, when the web sales, customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing demands are ever more sophisticated. This means greater demands for integration between websites, ticketing systems and e-marketing tools, to enable venues to offer online log-ins and start personalising what they serve up to customers.

What’s on offer?
There are good new affordable systems on the market in the UK, bringing a reassuring track record from other countries, such as PatronBase from New Zealand and Australia, already serving the Bluecoat in Liverpool, Llangollen International Eisteddfod and the new Derby QUAD. This system set out to supersede Databox, offering live seat selection off the plan online, together with a clutch of cutting edge functionality (and it runs on Macs as well as PCs). To boost marketing effectiveness, Purple Seven’s Vital Statistics Essentials and their new communications module add extra tools to ticketing systems, helping to deliver that CRM. This sophistication exposes the challenges to box office staff posed by the need for technological, data processing and customer care skills in every organisation. Many suppliers quietly lament the lack of knowledgeable staff to handle today’s technology and telecommunications. When replacing longestablished systems such as Databox and Venuemaster, venues have to be careful that solutions are fit for purpose, or they could find themselves stepping backwards. The danger now is that suppliers, anxious to close a sale, promise what they may not yet understand or cannot deliver in the shortterm, at an unsustainable price, with the potential for mission critical threats.

Gory details
The worst ticketing nightmares are when the system crashes just as sales open, an all-too-common occurrence. These days, this is as likely to be a telecommunications or bandwidth problem as anything else, though that is of little comfort. So when the 62nd Edinburgh Fringe Festival opened its ticket sales this June to queues round the block and crashing systems, at first it sounded like one of those “don’t worry, we’ll fix it in 24 hours” IT glitches. Except it wasn’t. There is going to be an independent inquiry into just what happened and why, so we should leave most of the gory details until then. All the statistics would suggest that the Edinburgh Fringe is unique: even in this drowned summer they sold over 1.5 million tickets for 31,320 performances of 2,088 shows in 247 venues. Its record-breaking year was 2007 with 1,697,293 tickets sold. Compare that with London’s West End Theatre with over 13.6 million tickets sold in 2007, with 243 new productions and 17,455 performances, spread across 44 venues. The point is the sheer volume of transactions. In both London and Edinburgh there is a need to join up the ticketing inventory to make it easily accessible to visitors and residents alike. There is also a reliance on Internet ticketing for a large proportion of these sales. In London this has been achieved by joining up inventory with systems such as ENTA and tools such as TicketSwitch, serving up the tickets world-wide.

The genesis of the Fringe’s nightmare was the decision to create a new system to join up its inventory, building both a new ticketing system and a new interface between different ticketing systems (the Federated Box Office), and using a supplier new to ticketing: Pivotal Integration in Glasgow, now in administration (though, surprisingly, a ‘phoenix’ company called Resolution has already stepped forward to offer Pivotal’s system). Pivotal had teething problems at the smaller Brighton Festival Fringe in May this year, before slowing to a virtual halt when the Edinburgh Fringe tickets went on sale in June: there had not been time to fully test the system before implementation. This was then a nightmare for the producers and promoters, having bet their shirts on ticket sales.

Shining armour
The good news is that everyone who could, stepped in to help. The Fringe’s web provider, Kraya, offered an emergency e-commerce solution to enable sales, but this led to further problems with printing tickets and accounting for sales. Fortunately five of the major Fringe venues in Edinburgh were already using the VIA ticketing system from Red61, developed by ticketing industry insider Tony Davey. They took on first nine and then 23 venues, and ended up processing over 75% of the Fringe office sales per day, achieving 872,484 tickets sold for 1,034 events and 22,539 performances. Tickets were collected from all the venues across the VIA network and they successfully launched an automatic ticket collection service at the Pleasance Theatre. VIA looks like a promising solution to other festivals with a network of venues. In fact the Fringe says it achieved most of the functionality it needed for the rest of the sales in the box office by the time the Festival was actually under way.

Amongst the lessons to be learned must be: to think carefully about using new suppliers doing things new to them; to see user acceptance testing as a crucial required step towards ‘go-live’; and always to have a back-up plan. Perhaps venues also have to ask much harder, more detailed questions about exactly what suppliers and their systems can deliver, and learn to value their box offices more.