So I’m mostly recovered from my second trip to the Ticketing Professionals Conference in Birmingham, UK last week and I have a few ideas and observations that I can share with you about the global ticket market and where we can all create more value in tickets.
Let’s do it:
Customer Experience and Customer Service Should Be Priorities:
A key theme throughout the program was on customer service and customer experience. Two sides of the same coin, if you ask me, though they typically refer to two different parts of the sales and service process for most organizations.
On the customer experience side, this typically comes to mean the buying journey as in the app or website.
On the service side, well we all know bad service and we all know good service, but I think Bill Hogg would say that the worst service is indifferent service and that far too many people are checked out.
This means that we really have to focus our efforts not just on the customer, but on the people that serve the customers as well.
People need to be a priority in our decision-making process, no matter where we are and what we do in the organization.
Pricing is an Art, Not a Science:
Every spreadsheet jockey going thinks they have an algorithm or the mythical magic potion that will deliver the ultimate pricing money shot.
The reality is that pricing is an inexact science that will always have a little lag in it.
The thing is that we have to balance our desire to maximize revenue with the risk that if people don’t buy when the idea is hot that we leave a lot of money on the table and risk not selling tickets at all.
The European market is still ahead of the US in the technology front:
Part of it is in the execution and part of it is in the development, but the conversations that were going on around technology and data at TPC 2018 show that the international markets are doing much cooler things with technology than the US technology platforms are doing.
From the use of APIs to geo-fencing, the US ticket market has some serious catching up to do.
Blockchain has Potential, but there is still a long way to go:
Blockchain was on people’s minds and no one has still come up with an absolute way of using it in tickets.
What I do think it does is that it has the chance to eliminate any fraud from the system, but I also don’t know that it is a system that everyone is going to want to embrace.
The real magic at conferences happens in the conversations:
As always, Andrew Thomas and his team put on a program that had more options than I had time for.
The best thing about TPC is the amount of time that is given to networking, chatting, and mingling.
The truth is that is where the magic happens.
Here are some highlights from the conversations I had:
- Talking with Richard Howle about change in organizations.
- Chatting with Tim Chambers about the secondary market, the European ticket market, and how to establish and keep a brand as a consultant.
- Visiting with the Booking Protect team about promotions, marketing, and building a brand.
- Learning about turning data into real action and money with Martin Gammeltoft from Activity Stream.
- Meeting new friends over shared interests like Nick and Kara from AudienceView.
- Seeing the difference in sales models and sales roles across the globe talking was pretty interesting and showed that American type sales is unusual across the world.
- Seeing old friends like Jaime Snelgrove, Derek Palmer, Cat Spencer, Simon Mabb, Eddie Robb, and so many more.
Really the chance to have a global network of colleagues and friends is truly amazing:
Finally, being able to count Andrew and Carol Thomas as friends is really amazing. They put on one of the great conferences in the world.
I don’t know too many people that would be able to grow a conference annually while still managing to keep such a personal soul and touch to everything.
If you have the chance to attend next year, you most definitely should.