Hi Chris,
We have a season subscription base of around 2000 patrons and they use their pre-purchased coupons to reserve tickets, which would be different from a cash sale or credit card payment at the box office window I would imagine. Are there plans to be able to categorise these kind of ticket “sales” as subscribers? I suppose what I’m trying to get at is, are there plans to store subscriber information, and then when that subscriber sees a show, can that visit be easily deducted from their allotted show coupons?
Our subscription packages range from 8 – 32 show coupons and are flexible in as much as they are not bought for a specific seat and performance in advance so in effect purchasing a ticket with a subscription coupon works like cash or credit card in terms of the reservation, but we would need a way of keeping track of how many performances each subscriber has seen.
My company, New Leaf, just went through a giant (for us) process of identifying what core Customer Management System features we’d need to have to create the long-term relationships we’d want to have with our clients, and I think this feature may be robust enough to cover 85% of it while still staying simple.
What’s critical is that we be able to SEGMENT patrons by multiple criteria – attendance history, subscriber status, demographics info that we’ve captured, or in our specific case, companies that industry artists also work with, etc – and then be able to have that segmentation and history data available to us in the box office reservation form.
We want to be able to say “Welcome Back!” instead of “Welcome!” and it’d be nice to be able to prepare ourselves to have a potential conversation with each patron that comes through the door based on what their history with us is.
Dur… forgot to conclude: because segmentation needs need to be so flexible, tagging is the perfect solution that works 85% of the time… trying to think of things that we capture that couldn’t be tags, and I can think of very few.
Things that could be tags:
DO NOT MAIL
DO NOT EMAIL
FACEBOOK FAN
TWITTER PAL
2008 SUBSCRIBER
2009 SUBSCRIBER
SAW “DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS”
One wish list thing – Patron history seems like a separate structure than tags, right? It seems like that from the screencast above.
Could I then somehow import / store OLD patron sales and interaction data that wasn’t part of Chroma tickets – i.e. import a csv? Having my entire history accessible within Chroma would make it just such a kick ass, lightweight CMS.
@Rory: The short answer is that we have some other ideas for dealing with various types of subscriptions and discounts. Specifically, we’re playing around with the idea of “passes” that can bundle the appropriate rules and discounts into a single purchasable, trackable item.
Rory and Nick (and Emery on the other thread): thanks so much for your feedback. This is extremely helpful.
Running with what you’ve said, and integrating our internal discussions, here’s how I’m seeing things so far:
The goal here is to segment patrons, to give you a handle for learning about the behavior of specific cross-sections of your audience. So far so good.
Tags provide one way to do that. As always, one nice thing about tags is that you define their semantics. Thus, they are highly flexible.
One downside to tags is that they must be assigned. One thing we’ve been worried about is: great, I can tag a few patrons, but I don’t want to be individually tagging, say, every single student that comes through the door as a student, right? On the other hand, maybe we can batch-tag, or “smart-tag”, using logic rules. Moreover, there can be other tools to segment your patron database that don’t rely on tags. Segmentation should be done on all the data you have available, and a lot of that data could be self-reported by the patron, so you’re not sitting there assigning it yourself.
Thus we seem to arrive at a scenario in which tags are one tool among several. They aren’t used to meet every analytical challenge, but they’re there if you want to use them. (And you can ignore them if you don’t.)
Cool. Seems like a fruitful direction to pursue. I certainly welcome more thoughts on the topic, if anyone has ‘em.
Yup. Would definitely want access to the granular control that company-assigned tags provide.
One possibility for patron self-segmentation is that you use a kind of genre-based system that Amazon or iTunes uses? Getting information on patron interests would be hot.
Also, super-useful would be the ability to see the last three Chroma purchases that the patron made, if that’s not too invasive – so we can see what other theaters we should be partnering with
> Also, super-useful would be the ability to see
> the last three Chroma purchases that the patron
> made, if that’s not too invasive – so we can see
> what other theaters we should be partnering with.
Very cool idea. I think that we can probably do something like this because another piece of Chroma (that we haven’t discussed on the sketchbook yet) is that we want to design privacy settings as if they are a feature.
In other words, we want to treat privacy settings the opposite of the way Facebook treats them. We want to run in exactly the other direction: view them as a selling point of Chroma, and a reason you will like using Chroma.
What that would translate into is giving the patron real power over their privacy, and doing it in a way that is super clear, relatively fine-grained, friendly, and transparent.
So in this case the patron’s privacy page could say something like: “Is it okay if we share with venues what shows you’ve recently seen? One way they use this information is to learn if there are other venues in town they should partner with to offer you package deals. But they might use it for other reasons, and sharing that information is up to you!”
Anyway, the point is: I think it’s good to be brainstorming these integrative ways that this information could be used, while keeping in mind that we’ll design it so that the patrons are ultimately in the driver seat about how we use their information.
It would be nice to have tags like del.icio.us where i can use tags i’ve created, tags others have created for this bookmark/person, and can batch edit.
So what do you think of ticket buyers using facebook connect to log in?
Rory Dale says at
February 10, 2010 at 10:36 amI like the idea of patron tagging. Would this be the primary way of identifying a subscriber, or are there greater plans for that?
Chris says at
February 10, 2010 at 11:04 amHi Rory!
It may depend on what you mean by “identifying a subscriber”–could you elucidate that some more?
Rory Dale says at
February 10, 2010 at 11:17 amHi Chris,
We have a season subscription base of around 2000 patrons and they use their pre-purchased coupons to reserve tickets, which would be different from a cash sale or credit card payment at the box office window I would imagine. Are there plans to be able to categorise these kind of ticket “sales” as subscribers? I suppose what I’m trying to get at is, are there plans to store subscriber information, and then when that subscriber sees a show, can that visit be easily deducted from their allotted show coupons?
Our subscription packages range from 8 – 32 show coupons and are flexible in as much as they are not bought for a specific seat and performance in advance so in effect purchasing a ticket with a subscription coupon works like cash or credit card in terms of the reservation, but we would need a way of keeping track of how many performances each subscriber has seen.
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 11:59 amMy company, New Leaf, just went through a giant (for us) process of identifying what core Customer Management System features we’d need to have to create the long-term relationships we’d want to have with our clients, and I think this feature may be robust enough to cover 85% of it while still staying simple.
What’s critical is that we be able to SEGMENT patrons by multiple criteria – attendance history, subscriber status, demographics info that we’ve captured, or in our specific case, companies that industry artists also work with, etc – and then be able to have that segmentation and history data available to us in the box office reservation form.
We want to be able to say “Welcome Back!” instead of “Welcome!” and it’d be nice to be able to prepare ourselves to have a potential conversation with each patron that comes through the door based on what their history with us is.
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 12:26 pmDur… forgot to conclude: because segmentation needs need to be so flexible, tagging is the perfect solution that works 85% of the time… trying to think of things that we capture that couldn’t be tags, and I can think of very few.
Things that could be tags:
DO NOT MAIL
DO NOT EMAIL
FACEBOOK FAN
TWITTER PAL
2008 SUBSCRIBER
2009 SUBSCRIBER
SAW “DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS”
One wish list thing – Patron history seems like a separate structure than tags, right? It seems like that from the screencast above.
Could I then somehow import / store OLD patron sales and interaction data that wasn’t part of Chroma tickets – i.e. import a csv? Having my entire history accessible within Chroma would make it just such a kick ass, lightweight CMS.
Jesse says at
February 10, 2010 at 3:08 pm@Rory: The short answer is that we have some other ideas for dealing with various types of subscriptions and discounts. Specifically, we’re playing around with the idea of “passes” that can bundle the appropriate rules and discounts into a single purchasable, trackable item.
Rory Dale says at
February 10, 2010 at 3:11 pmSounds good Jesse, I’m excited to see more!
Chris says at
February 10, 2010 at 4:33 pmRory and Nick (and Emery on the other thread): thanks so much for your feedback. This is extremely helpful.
Running with what you’ve said, and integrating our internal discussions, here’s how I’m seeing things so far:
The goal here is to segment patrons, to give you a handle for learning about the behavior of specific cross-sections of your audience. So far so good.
Tags provide one way to do that. As always, one nice thing about tags is that you define their semantics. Thus, they are highly flexible.
One downside to tags is that they must be assigned. One thing we’ve been worried about is: great, I can tag a few patrons, but I don’t want to be individually tagging, say, every single student that comes through the door as a student, right? On the other hand, maybe we can batch-tag, or “smart-tag”, using logic rules. Moreover, there can be other tools to segment your patron database that don’t rely on tags. Segmentation should be done on all the data you have available, and a lot of that data could be self-reported by the patron, so you’re not sitting there assigning it yourself.
Thus we seem to arrive at a scenario in which tags are one tool among several. They aren’t used to meet every analytical challenge, but they’re there if you want to use them. (And you can ignore them if you don’t.)
Cool. Seems like a fruitful direction to pursue. I certainly welcome more thoughts on the topic, if anyone has ‘em.
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 5:00 pmYup. Would definitely want access to the granular control that company-assigned tags provide.
One possibility for patron self-segmentation is that you use a kind of genre-based system that Amazon or iTunes uses? Getting information on patron interests would be hot.
Also, super-useful would be the ability to see the last three Chroma purchases that the patron made, if that’s not too invasive – so we can see what other theaters we should be partnering with
Chris says at
February 10, 2010 at 5:13 pm> Also, super-useful would be the ability to see
> the last three Chroma purchases that the patron
> made, if that’s not too invasive – so we can see
> what other theaters we should be partnering with.
Very cool idea. I think that we can probably do something like this because another piece of Chroma (that we haven’t discussed on the sketchbook yet) is that we want to design privacy settings as if they are a feature.
In other words, we want to treat privacy settings the opposite of the way Facebook treats them. We want to run in exactly the other direction: view them as a selling point of Chroma, and a reason you will like using Chroma.
What that would translate into is giving the patron real power over their privacy, and doing it in a way that is super clear, relatively fine-grained, friendly, and transparent.
So in this case the patron’s privacy page could say something like: “Is it okay if we share with venues what shows you’ve recently seen? One way they use this information is to learn if there are other venues in town they should partner with to offer you package deals. But they might use it for other reasons, and sharing that information is up to you!”
Anyway, the point is: I think it’s good to be brainstorming these integrative ways that this information could be used, while keeping in mind that we’ll design it so that the patrons are ultimately in the driver seat about how we use their information.
Devon Smith says at
February 11, 2010 at 7:22 pmIt would be nice to have tags like del.icio.us where i can use tags i’ve created, tags others have created for this bookmark/person, and can batch edit.
So what do you think of ticket buyers using facebook connect to log in?