3 Ways Events Can Reduce The Workload of Customer Support Staff

Event teams have always been lean and limber, usually made up of a few hardcore superhumans capable of spinning many, many plates. But now more than ever, event teams are shrinking and resources are tightening. To keep offering a stellar experience to every attendee, event organisers need to make sure they cut back work that is taking up time unnecessarily.

Customer support and ticketing enquiries is one area that takes up a large chunk of time. It’s important, but it’s also an area that event staff often don’t have time for — and one that can be reduced with a few simple measures in place. Tixel manages customer service on resale tickets for a huge range of event partners, so here are our support team’s top three tips for events looking to minimise their workload.

Our top 3 tips to Reduce Event Staff Workload:

Be proactive with your attendee communication

Our first tip for reducing the demands on your customer support staff is to be proactive with your communication to ticket holders. A well-informed attendee is less likely to need support because they have everything they need to know upfront.

Spending a little extra time on your attendee communication when you release tickets could save a huge amount of work on event day. Here are four areas where you can focus proactive communication:

Email: You have the contact information for all of your attendees when they buy a ticket — make sure you use it! After someone has bought a ticket, set up an auto-response that outlines everything attendees need to know about your event. Be sure to keep up regular contact in the lead up and send a reminder 1-2 days before the event for any must-know information such as what people can/can’t bring into the venue, security screening, contact tracing, set times, public transport and parking.
Website and social media: Not everyone gets their information in the same place. Some will check their emails religiously, others prefer to check their social feeds. Using consistent messaging across all of your platforms will help attendees stay informed.
On tickets: One thing every attendee will have is a ticket and a confirmation. Make sure at a minimum the ticket lists the event start time and address. You can also customise the confirmation email to fill people in on important extras such as your policies on refunds and name changes.
Event policies: Make sure your team is organised with policies in place on important queries like refunds, name changes or ticket transfers, security, alcohol and/or age restrictions, and capacity. If your team is armed with all the right information, it will be easier to communicate these policies to your attendees.

Offer safe resale and simple ticket transfers

One of the biggest queries ticket holders have is around refunds and ticket transfers. To best reduce these requests, you need to provide fans with a safe and supported way to transfer their tickets if they can no longer use them. Refusing ticket transfers can create a backlog of refund requests and doesn’t help fans who genuinely can’t make an event for no fault of their own.

When events partner with Tixel, we encourage them to communicate a policy that only primary tickets and tickets that have been transferred via Tixel will be accepted at the door/box office.

This reduces your event team’s workload by:

Giving you a place to direct all resale and name change enquiries — simply pass everything on to the team at Tixel
Removing the need to verify that tickets are real when purchased fan-to-fan
Ensuring you have the right details for every ticket holder, supporting your proactive communication plan and minimising the number of people that show up without any information after purchasing a ticket from an unauthorised seller
Significantly reducing the number of attendees that show up with fake tickets
Supporting compliance for contact tracing

Set up your safe resale in a few clicks today

When NYE music festival, Beyond The Valley, partnered with Tixel to manage their secondary ticket market, it had an “amazing impact” for their customer support staff and entry experience. By communicating to fans on their website, social media and eDMs that Tixel was the only resale ticket that would be accepted, they were able to speed up entry times by drastically reducing the time team members spent managing support enquiries at the gate. BTV Co-founder Tom Caw says “Previously we needed customer service members dealing specifically with fraudulent tickets, now we spend about a tenth of the time managing those enquiries.”

Perfect your FAQ page

When it comes to minimising support enquiries, nothing does more heavy lifting than a top-notch Frequently Asked Questions page. If your customer support staff keep getting the same queries from ticket holders, make sure you address these questions in a succinct FAQ page. The easier you make it for attendees to find information themselves, the less they need to contact you. Even if you already have an FAQ page, make sure you update it over time to reflect the real enquiries taking place with your staff.

Here’s some examples for inspiration:

Our favourite FAQ topics include:

Refund policy
How to sell/transfer tickets
Name on ticket policy (if you have one)
How to avoid ticket fraud
How to get there — including public transport and parking info
Any age restrictions
What to bring on the day
COVID policy including cancellations and any restrictions

A solid FAQ page is a great addition to your proactive communication plan, so don’t forget to include links to your FAQs across your website, social media, email confirmations and ticketing pages. This will make sure the information can be found wherever your fans are.

Resale that supports artists and the live events industry

Tixel is an honest ticket marketplace, designed to support the industry and make your job easier, not harder. Our custom-built event dashboard gives event organisers and promoters unique data insights, communication tools, and customer support for their resale market.
To learn more about how Tixel supports event partners, or to join the lineup of great events using Tixel, sign up for a free account here.

Sylvie