Done right, corporate ticketing and hospitality can spark new business, boost teamwork, keep employees engaged, and connect your most important stakeholders.
However, manually managing the tickets for those business-driving experiences could be sucking productivity out of your organization and wrecking your company’s culture.
The good news? Advanced ticket management systems can dramatically simplify ticket management, boost productivity, and wipe out the potential for costly mistakes. The bad news? Selecting the right ticket management system requires research, time, and expertise.
Ready to narrow down your ticket management system search and choose the best ticket management system for your company? We’re here to help. Consider the following five areas in order to ensure you’re acquiring the best ticket management system for your company.
1. User Experience
If your ticket management system isn’t easy to use, it can wreck productivity. Employees already waste massive chunks of time searching for information. In fact, surveys have found employees
waste 25 percent of their time looking for information they don’t have but that is necessary to do their jobs.
Managing thousands of tickets, distributing and allocating those tickets across the organization, ensuring there are efficient approval and request processes in place, and measuring ticket ROI are all critical tasks that employees need to master. Any friction they face while using a ticket management system adds to those already-hefty tasks.b
Wondering what intuitive ticketing looks like? An intuitive ticketing system will make it easy to accomplish the following:b
- Load ticket inventory
- Carve out clear paths for ticket approvals
- Simplify secondary market ticket purchases and reselling of unused tickets
- Shine a light on the return on investment (ROI) and other important metrics
- Be easy to use across the board
2. Innovation
Most business leaders know innovation is critical. In fact,
84 percent of executives say innovation is important to their organization’s growth strategy. If your ticketing software provider isn’t actively innovating, your company and employees could be quickly left with outdated technology. When it comes to ticketing software, there are a few specific functions the most innovative providers feature.
Allocation and Distribution Controls
Advanced ticket management systems will know when tickets are scheduled to arrive in the system. This allows the application to survey the organization's demand to understand how the tickets should be allocated, removing the need for a human monitor. A machine-learning system gives you full control over how tickets are distributed and makes it easy to track ticketing allocation.
Ticket Fulfillment Across Ticket Types
Even when COVID-19 recedes, the concern about germs will dominate the corporate landscape. The ability to handle mobile transfer and digital tickets will be a must-have feature going forward. As venues continue to adapt to change, your ticket management software needs to be looking ahead at future technologies.
Integrations
Can the ticket management system seamlessly push and pull information from your other business applications? If it doesn’t integrate with everything from financial programs to your customer relationship management (CRM) software, you’ll be left with disparate systems that leave your business without homogenous data. By connecting data to a single system, your business can streamline information, reduce human error, make it easier to generate accurate reports, and increase productivity.
Employee Purchasing Portals
With employee purchasing portals, team members from across the organization can quickly browse unused and discounted corporate inventory and pick up tickets in a few easy clicks. Purchasing portals simplify ticket ordering for employees and make it easier for managers to handle ticketing requests. Plus, nothing boosts morale more than getting access to great seats for a good deal—or for free.
3. Security
If a ticket management system’s security isn’t vigorously checked and improved, it could lead to exposed or stolen personal data. That doesn’t just put employees and businesses at risk, but it also can lead to compliance nightmares and tarnish your company’s reputation.
How serious is the threat of security breaches? The average cost of a cybersecurity breach in the U.S. is
$3.86 million, and it is a threat that will only grow with technology advancements. That’s why it is critical that the ticketing software you use includes unrelenting security checks, ethical hacks to pinpoint vulnerabilities, and consistent internal and external assessments.
4. Data and Insight
One of the top reasons to use a ticket management system is to understand how and why your tickets are used. In order to measure ROI and identify more efficient workflows, every part of the ticket life cycle needs to be tracked and reportable.
Equally as important, the data you capture in your ticket management system needs to be easy to retrieve. If employees are tasked with poring over spreadsheets, pulling ticketing data from multiple sources, or building reports on their own, they risk wasting massive chunks of time and introducing errors. That’s why it is important that ticket management software is self-administered and automatically generates key reports. Before you select software, make sure it includes these reporting features:
- You get full visibility of your ticket usage with utilization reports.
- The software records data from the ticket level or attendee level.
- Full ticket reports integrate with third-party accounting software.
- It includes ROI tracking that is easy to pull and pass on to stakeholders.
- Custom reporting can be shared across the company.
- Dynamic dashboards are fed by real-time reporting.
- Employees can access all data by API enabling feeds into other systems, such as data visualization, CRM, and financial systems.
5. Client Services
COVID-19 has drastically complicated ticket management and made it nearly impossible to independently navigate corporate ticketing. With the rules around live events and social measures varying in different regions, and venues opening in spurts, employees often don’t know what tickets are available where. Worse yet, as live events ramp back up and tickets start flooding in again, managers will be hit with communications and ticket allocating overload—adding to the need to sort through employee questions.
All the while, if your employees are stuck trying to figure out your ticketing management system on their own, productivity and money could be slipping down the drain. When it comes time to choose ticketing software, it is important that users have a web of support from software and ticketing experts.
Wondering what better support looks like? The best ticketing partner will include a client services team dedicated to handling all of the heavy lifting, including:
- Loading tickets
- Catering orders
- Conducting system training and support
- Building reports
- Ensuring your ticketing dashboards fit your corporation’s needs
- Monitoring all orders
- Dedicating a team to fulfill unique requests
- Becoming an extension of your internal ticketing team
See an Advanced Ticketing Platform in Action
Make no mistake: Not all ticket management systems drive the same positive results. TicketOS uses cutting-edge technology to give you full control over ticket management and a better ticketing experience—all within a single platform.
Want to see how an advanced ticketing platform looks in action? Schedule a
TicketOS demo today, and learn how our software can solve your ticket management concerns.
