39 steps to relationship management

After a two-year review of ticketing solutions, ATG (Ambassadors Theatre Group) decided to select a single system – AudienceView – to provide ticketing across the entire chain of 39 UK theatres. Moving from the three different ticketing systems that currently support our operation to a single platform will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our ticketing services operation across the organisation, and help drive our customer-centric and relationship-building marketing activity.

Achieving consistent user experience across a stable platform was one of the primary aims of this project. This offers a number of benefits to ATG, the obvious one being a single customer record giving a focused view of our customers, from all touch-points and contacts. Having recently launched a nationwide membership scheme, the ATG Theatre Card, a centralised customer database will mean we can fully understand our customers, not only through marketing activity, but also when they touch the other parts of ATG.

Further opportunities exist around offering benefits to our customers which can be applied based on their purchases, membership level, frequency of attendance or any other flag that we choose to assign to a customer. This will enable us to develop our loyalty programme and reward our loyal customers with targeted benefits, deepening our engagement with them.

We are also integrating our ticketing with other systems. These include Purple Seven’s Vital Statistics, a key tool in our marketing analysis and communications; our web Content Management System to drive an enhanced web experience; and the finance system, for us a crucial tool in managing income. We will be driving the invoicing of agency ticket sales out of our finance system using data extracted from AudienceView.

Our next step is to go further with the integration of systems across the entire group, enabling the redemption of drinks and merchandise vouchers purchased online through our front-of-house food and beverage systems in all the theatres, including the West End. This will help us join-up the whole customer experience, wherever people attend, and makes it easy to create packages and special offers (‘bundles’, as the Canadians call them).

Revenue management is key to continued growth at ATG. Lots of arts organisations offer a form of yield management already, through pricing and discount management (though we need to do this carefully, to maintain the perceived value of the theatre-going experience). Through AudienceView’s analysis and reporting capability we can continuously manage our yields more effectively. As we roll out AudienceView across the group – a long process for 39 theatres – new functionality being delivered that will allow us to manage the availability of prices and discounts for any performance more effectively.

Having acquired the ‘platform’ we wanted, our plan is to work with AudienceView to enhance all the services for our customers to improve their experience, getting the best from new technology including kiosks and solutions for mobile phones and tablet computing.