Offering a self-service solution, meaning that your organisers and internal staff can manage the whole ticketing sales process from A till Z in an intuitive and self-explanable tool, is the only way to go forward. Not convinced? Check the 5 reasons why self-service is the future of (online) ticketing. But wait, there is one major advantage we should explain some more: A self-service solution can seriously reduce your costs!
Like in many other things, there are various flavours of self-service ticketing, depending on the completeness, UX/UI design and strategy. It's important to point out that, to make a decent calculation, we've started from a complete and natively designed self-service solution like our eTaaS platform.
We have taken the time and have done the investment, together with a specialised UX/UI designer, to do this entire exercise.
This has resulted in our new back-office. Take a look to discover it yourself.
Here is an overview of the cost reduction advantages of a self-service tool:
A 40% reduction of your support tickets/tasks The number of support ticket from organizers is reduced drastically because the organiser does most things himself when using the self-service ticketing platform. Your staff only needs to assist in complex cases or when that specific organiser has paid for a full-service treatment. You can reduce 40% of your support tickets/interaction (based internal cost calculations).
A 10% efficiency improvement of your internal staff Since your internal staff uses the same self-service platform for a part of their work, their tasks are also more efficiently executed. You can reduce 10% of the time spent on internal ticket sales management tasks (based internal cost calculations).No more expensive mistakes.
No more expensive mistakes With a self-service platform, there is less need for communication between the organiser and your staff. Instead of explaining (and in the best case documenting) every aspect of the upcoming shows and events, the organizer can now spend the same energy/time entering the information themselves in the self-service platform. Due to the skipping of this communication between organiser and ticketing company, the chance of making mistakes is also reduced. As we all know, these mistakes can be turn out to be very expensive.
Cheaper employee training Your new staff is faster up to speed when trained on the self-service platform. Everything is more intuitive and the time needed to learn the whole platform is much shorter. Not only training them is cheaper, but the productivity of your employees increases faster and less overhead is needed.
How to calculate the cost reduction due to the use of a self-service platform:
To calculate the cost reduction, you start with the total cost of the operational staff:
Remaining cost = "The cost of your operational staff in your activation and support department" * ( 1 - 40% reduction due to self-service) * ( 1 - 10% reduction due to improved efficiency)
Cost reduction = "The cost of operational staff in your activation and support department" - "Remaining cost"
An example:
The total cost of 4 full time equivalent staff members = 150.000 euro
Remaining cost = 150.000 euro * (1 - 40%) * (1 - 10%) = 81.000 euro
Cost reduction = 69.000 euro
How to realise this cost reduction?
To realise this cost reduction, you'll need to keep a few extra conditions in mind:
The change management of the staff will take some time
A targeted marketing campaign is needed to let your customers adapt to the new self-service platform
You'll need an advanced support tool where customers can automatically search for answers and instructions on how they can use the self-service platform.
Having an excellent tool, designed with a lot of attention to usability and self-explanatory aspects (no need for training) is key.
If you're interested in the UX/UI aspects of a self-service tool, read the 5 steps to reach self-service UX heaven.
Want to see such a self-service tool in action? Check out our new back-office.
Are you still unsure what you should do? You can now also order our webinar on demand and find out what's the best approach for your specific business model.
This blogpost is written by our CEO, Hans Nissens.
Photo: unsplash
