All the world’s a stage – just don’t try booking for it online

Consumer habits are changing; we now increasingly purchase our music, books, clothing, groceries and gadgets online. The days of shopping being confined to 9-5 are long gone, now turned into a 24/7 operation. This ability to shop around the clock has also influenced our customer service expectations. In an age of instant access we now have less tolerance for delay and problems; a trait brought home to many online retailers in the recent snowy conditions. With ticket sales also increasingly moving online, web sales are a potential double edged sword for venues.

Get the IT right and it can be a great boost to the service you offer customers. Should the IT fail, however – and with the growth of social media – negative feedback can soon spread. While resources are obviously needed to resolve the IT issues, what about the resource to manage customer expectation – the increased telephone calls and negative PR, for example?

Two examples this week show the potential for public dissatisfaction. As priority booking for the RSC’s 50th Anniversary season opened, Twitter and Facebook users began to post problems with online booking. The RSC did post updates, blaming website problems on volume of traffic and, by the afternoon, the RSC had posted a statement that ‘ensuring our Members, who are our closest supporters, get a proper level of service is important to us’, however, for many members reputational damage had already been done.

The following day actors David Tennant and Catherine Tate announcing their forthcoming Much Ado About Nothing seemed to catch the Wyndhams Theatre box office by surprise. Given the casting, this was always destined to attract huge box office interest; however, the box office website seemed to collapse under the sheer volume of traffic. As the website failed, word began to spread via Twitter of the online booking problems. Personal callers to the venue also tweeted problems as credit card authorisation systems crashed. With a limited run and casting, the show looks a sure-fire sell out, but how many patrons will be deterred from repeating the experience in the future?

Now these incidents are caused by intense demand but ones that, with hindsight, could have been foreseen. As competition for audience spend increases and budgets tighten, can venues risk the negative publicity that can now be spread via social media within seconds?

It may be an unreasonable expectation for any IT system to cope with such massive demand. But is it perhaps time for venues to determine how they can manage that expectation and how they can put processes in place when the IT falls down?