Event Marketing & Planning

The Online Ticket Store’s Guide to Basic Customer Self-Service

by
The Eventcube Team
With extensive experience in events and technology, our platform, Eventcube, has powered over 100,000 events across the globe, attended by more than 15 million people. Our expertise ensures every event, whether in-person or virtual, is a standout success. Our goal is simple: to help our clients create and host extraordinary events.

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Eighty-eight percent of customers expect businesses to respond to customer support emails in under an hour. When you're running an event and selling tens of thousands of tickets, one hour is not enough time. What if you can rely on customers to find solutions to their event and ticketing inquiries? Let's talk about customer self-service.

No one likes waiting, not especially when it comes to urgent questions. The event industry bears the burden of answering to thousands of customers. When they slam the inbox all at once, it’s impossible to write back in time. 

This doesn’t have to be the case.

In fact, research shows that customers prefer to solve their own questions than wait for customer support. Your website, FAQ page, and social media come most handy in this scenario.

What if we take that a step higher? Empower customers with personal tools to solve ticketing problems in minutes. Cut resolution time in half. And leave a good lasting impression.

That’s customer self-service.

Benefits of Customer Self-Service

Customer self-service doesn’t serve ticket buyers alone. It delivers a massive win to ticketing businesses and event agencies, too, through the following benefits.

Frees up time for more valuable tasks

There would be less need to hire a support rep solely to answer basic queries.

If you’re one of those businesses who does customer support as an extension of your major role, self-service order management will secure a couple hours for other more important tasks. 

Improves customer satisfaction

It is the goal of many organisations to win the hearts of customers at every touch point. Lucky for you, self-service resources are proven to satisfy.

With 88% of customers expecting businesses to respond in under an hour, there is nothing more ideal than an order portal that empowers them to manage their own tickets in minutes.

There are multiple ways to automate customer support and turn it into a more hands-free process. Let’s count down five of the most common ones..

Types of Self-Service Order Management Tools

FAQ page

Anticipate a series of questions from event attendees. From “what time do gates close?” to “will there be parking spots at the venue?”, leave no stone unturned.

You can group FAQs into categories or in an order of importance for easier browsing. When messages come through, you can simply send customers to this page on your ticket store.

Pro: One-off, quick to produce

Con: Often not an exhaustive

Difficulty Level: Easy

Time Required: 15-20 minutes

Level of Involvement: Low

Knowledge base

Many businesses and event promoters turn to Zendesk and Intercom for help. Part of what makes these support integrations effective is the plethora of articles (also known as knowledge base) that are automatically pulled at the mention of certain keywords.

These articles serve as how-to guides for ticket, registration and other concerns. However, some effort is needed at the outset to create the knowledge base.

An advantage to it is that it’s recyclable for future events.

Pro: In-depth, sustainable

Con: Time consuming

Difficulty Level: Moderate-Difficult

Time Required: 2-5 hours

Level of Involvement: High

Social media

The good thing about social media support resources is that it’s already in the platforms where your customers hang out. Sharing them is a piece of cake. They also have more reach than any other self-service tool. Thus, less time is invested in redirecting people to the right pages.

Like content, event and ticketing FAQs are shared as posts, stories, and even video walkthroughs. What’s more is that if any delays in service are experienced, you can address it en masse through a single post. No more getting back to complaints one by one.

Pro: Meets target market exactly where they’re at

Con: Requires frequent updates

Difficulty Level: Moderate-Difficult

Time Required: 5-10 hours

Level of Involvement: High

A dedicated order management portal for each customer

The first in its league to create an order management portal for ticket holders, Eventcube clearly does customer self-service differently.

Each ticket store is embedded with an order management system. Upon receiving their order confirmation, customers can log in to their own ticket portal using just their order reference and email.

Inside, they will see all their tickets and therefore have the power to do the following:

  • Upgrade their tickets
  • Change tickets to another date
  • Put their tickets for up resale (if they can’t make it to their booked event)
  • Change ticket holder names (to pass the ticket forward to a friend)

There is no other ticketing platform where ticket holders are empowered to manage their own tickets.

Typically, they will have to contact support. A ticket will be created and the request is resolved in a matter of hours. Depending on the queue, wait time could be days.

It doesn’t have to take that long.

Thus, it makes sense to equip customers with tools to find solutions at their own accord.

Pro: Requires zero effort, efficient

Con: Order management features are still growing

Difficulty Level: Easy

Time Required: None

Level of Involvement: Very Low

Takeaway

It’s reassuring to have a live customer support rep available on demand. Some queries are simply too complex for a machine.

However, in Eventcube’s 9 years in the ticketing business, we’ve learned that leaving the basic requests to customer self-service tools clears 80% of the work.

Not only will you have more time on your hands, you can also pay more attention to addressing the more complicated 20%.

How’s that for time management?