Softjourn Attends the Ticketing Professionals Conference

We've just returned from Ticketing Professionals Conference that was held on the 20–22 March in Birmingham, UK and while we're still excited from everything that we learned.

We've just returned from Ticketing Professionals Conference that was held on the 20–22 March in Birmingham, UK and while we're still excited from everything that we learned. From our perspective the hottest topics discussed are:

• Opening Key Note – The Box Office is Dead – What are YOU going to do about it? (Jill Robinson, President & CEO, TRG Arts). The conclusion to the presentation was about loyalty and keeping the box office alive. The speaker shared her own explanation of loyalty: When your clients feel you've done something to make their life better then they will go and share that with friends. The idea of loyalty is the desire to enrich more lives and diminish fewer, and to strive to have more loyal patrons.
• Why you can't sell out in two minutes (Niels Henrik Sodemann, CEO, Queueit). Recommendations for handling successful online sales, and smoothing the process for business and end-users were provided, such as being transparent, implementing bot protection tools, only entering the number of users in the ticketing path that could possibly reach the end of their journey and reducing shopping cart timeout or splitting the time for different steps (i.e., 3 minutes for deciding if to proceed to checkout, 3 minutes to fill in some information, etc.).
• Data-driven decision making (Erin Koppel Vice President of Enterprise Consulting, Tessitura Network). The audience had to answer these questions: Are we able to articulate the questions we need to answer to guide our decisions?
• Is our data trusted and valued as a core corporate asset?
• Do we have timely access to key data?
• Do we adjust our actions based on what data is telling us?

by putting them to different categories on a chart (never, seldom, mostly, almost always) and then calculating how many points they received, where they found gaps and what area they needed to focus deeper—Decide, Do, Data.

• NO! We need to be MORE like Airlines! (Andrew Thomas, Director, Ynys Consulting Ltd). The main conclusion is that if you don't know your customer, you can't grow your business. The key takeaways out of that: being customer-centric always needs to be the priority
• check-in creates a timely engagement for the attendees that can increase revenue and provide an improved fan experience
• your customer should always remain your customer and check-in ensures that

This is a brief overview for those who missed an event or didn't get to attend these specific topics. In a few weeks we'll be traveling to Ticketing Business Forum, so find us to speak while you are there or stay in touch because we'll be sharing some more takeaways soon!