Improvements Ticket Buyers Want with Box Office Ticketing Software

Improvements Ticket Buyers Want with Box Office Ticketing Software

As reported in previous posts, we recently surveyed 200 people and asked about a recent ticket buying experience.This post focuses on what people said they like to see improved with the event organizers’ box office ticketing software as it relates to online ticket purchases – i.e. situations where the customer is buying the tickets online.

Online Purchase Improvements Desired

Although the respondents answered in free text format, most of the answers fell into certain categories. The following chart shows the percentage of respondents whose top improvement desired fell into each of the summarized categories:

Improvements Online Ticket Buyers Want

Lower Service Fees Will Win the Day

The most requested improvement from customers buying online using the venue’s box office ticketing software is lower service fees. As described in a previous post, high service fees are a sore point for ticket buyers. The survey results did not show that customers will not tolerate ANY service fees; but they do abhor excessively high services fees.

What is “excessively high”?  Well, we did not ask that in the survey, but in my opinion, anything more than 4% of the ticket value will be enough to anger ticket buyers. Customers rightfully ask “If I am buying online, I am doing the work to process the transaction so why should there be a high service fee?

Representative comments include:

  • Lower service fees, no monopolies of ticket vendors.
  • Cut down the booking fees
  • Remove the bull**** service fees!
  • Extra charges should be reduced.

Customers Want a Better Way to Select Seats and Pay

18% of respondents said they would like to see improvements in the payment options when they use the venue’s box office ticketing software. Accepting only PayPal, but not credit cards or vice-versa, is restrictive for the customers.  Respondents also reported that sometimes, they were not sure if the payment actually went through.

Also, a portion of the respondents wanted to see better seating charts.  They appreciate the ability to select their own seats, but several found the seating chart layout confusing.

Some comments:

  • System was good but it needed a better payment processing system.
  • Accept more types of credit cards.
  • Improve the seating charts so I can tell which seats are better.
  • I could not tell how many seats were still available in each section.

More Technology and Better Pricing Information

The chart shows five additional improvements requested. People would like to see the ability to buy tickets from their smartphones, not just from their computers. Several people also said they would like to be informed of upcoming events through email or texts.  So don’t feel awkward sending emails to your customers (when you have their permission). They appreciate it.

Finally, several wanted to see improvements in the areas of ease of use, security and clearer pricing information.

Implications for You

If you are already using box office ticketing software for online ticket orders, it would be a good idea to ask your customers how it is performing in these areas. If you are in the market for box office ticketing software, carefully evaluate performance of the finalists in these areas because ticket buyers are telling us that some of the systems are weak on these points.

Download our White Paper on the steps to go through to select a ticketing system.

 

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