In one recent week – and it was far from unusual – Floral Pavilion played host to twelve performances of a touring production of a major West End musical, two sell out music events, a stand-up comedy and food evening and an Antiques Fair. Selling over 9,000 tickets for just these events alone means that the ticketing and back office system has to provide speed, flexibility and accuracy and SRO4 enables all of this with ease. As Alistair Armit, outgoing Communications Manager notes, “We rely totally on SRO4 to provide us with up to the minute financial and attendance figures, to enable our sales staff to handle widely differing types of ticket options and to give our front of house teams all that they need to provide our customers with an efficiently managed and enjoyable experience at the venue.”
“Previously we would have to rely on our sales teams to remember every possible variant of ticket type, discount and member’s benefit, but now the system will automatically prompt them with what is available for that particular performance,” Alistair comments. This means greater efficiency at the point of sale but it also means that ever more sophisticated (and income generating) strategies can be easily applied. Time or availability sensitive discount offers, package deals for multiple selected performances, automatic up-selling prompts based on the current transaction, and even performance specific additional printed materials (such as an extra ticket offering a discount on pre-performance meals, a sponsor specific advert or reminder of an upcoming show similar to the one currently being purchased) can all be pre-programmed and implemented automatically. All of this leaves sales staff with more time to efficiently and accurately record details for each customer – a contacts database which only a few years ago stood at just over 10,000 has now reached in excess of 100,000 which as well as enabling frequent general email campaigns, is also allowing full use of SRO’s CRM and campaign features to generate highly targeted mailings and marketing activities.
As well as in-house ticketing for their own performance spaces Floral Pavilion also act as an agent – branded Tickets Wirral – for outside events and promotions, and maintain three separate web sites, one for their own events, one for Tickets Wirral, and one for the International Guitar Festival of Great Britain which takes place at the Pavilion and at other surrounding venues. On-line sales have long been an important part of the venue’s offering but with SRO4 the set-up of ticketing across all web sites is much simplified. As Alistair says, “The specifics of the tickets available on the web sites – and which of the three sites they are to appear on – is simply part of our overall event set up so it is very quick and easy to maintain. All of the standard setups for a particular event, whether they apply in-house or online, can be applied from just the one set up screen, and we are also easily able to define offers, packages and up-selling opportunities to appear only on-line and specific to an individual site if we wish. We can even make available special early-bird offers which means that the performance is on the site and ready to go but tickets can only be bought by logged in members – at a pre-defined date the restriction is automatically removed and general ticket sales become enabled without us having to do anything more.” The web sites accounted for an average of 31% of ticket sales per performance (and as high as 50% for some performance types such as comedy events) for the financial year ending 2012 and these levels are set to steadily increase.