•Getting Ready for Rule Based Exchanges
•Understanding & Tracking Your Goals
•Creating a Communication Plan
Getting Ready for Rule Based Exchanges
You probably offer exchanges as a benefit for subscribers. It shows you’re committed to your most dedicated customers. You likely have policies and rules in place to make it clear to your staff and customers when and how tickets can be exchanged. With rule based exchanges, you’ll improve the self-serve options available to your customers for straight forward exchanges. Both your customers and your staff will follow your policies and your rules. You’ll free up time for your front line staff to assist those customers who can't self-serve, and they’ll spend more time with new sales, rather than spending time moving existing sales around.
Planning for Exchanges
The successful activation of rule based exchanges takes a little bit of planning. We recommend the following:
1.Get buy-in within your organization - from your senior leadership, from your marketing, subscription and fundraising departments amongst others. Don’t forget to discuss it with your front line staff or unions as they’ll be an integral part of communicating the feature to your customers.
2.Understand your goals. Decide which metrics you’ll use to determine the success of the program. Perhaps you’ll compare the number of phone exchanges this year to last, or how many more new sales you are able to process as a result of deflecting exchanges to a self-serve process.
3.Choose your schedule. Decide when you want to implement rule based exchanges. You know your customers and business best. You can add the feature at any time in your season.
4.Communicate the change to your customers. Create a communication plan. Let them know what is happening. Use newsletter, emails, online ‘Spotlight’ messages. Video can bring the process to life from beginning to end.
5.Where does the money go? Decide where you’ll want the incremental revenue from downgrades to go. Will it go to the same place as the event revenue; a different account; one account or one per event/series? If you’re using new accounts, you may need new general ledger accounts from your finance department.
6.Do you need to configure exchange fees? Does everyone pay fees or are there some groups who do not? Do you have the right price types or promotion codes in place to let some groups - donor, board members, staff - skip the fees?
7.Make special people feel special. Are there different rules for different kinds of subscribers? Do donors get more time or different fees? Do some groups have more flexible exchange rules?
8.Keep your charges in sync. How do you want existing charges on the admissions and the orders behave? Stay the same or recalculate? We’ll help you make the right decision.
9.Putting it all together. Configure your balancing charge, exchange fee, price charts and exchange rules.
10.Testing and troubleshooting. As always, we recommend you proof and test, test and proof.
11.Launch rule based exchanges.
Getting buy-in, setting goals, choosing your timing and creating a communication plan are all things that happen outside the system and within your organization. Your Customer Success Manager can support you in creating a solid plan. We’ve included some tips in this guide.
Getting Buy-In
You may need to discuss it with other departments or management before you implement rule based exchanges. Here are some key points to keep in mind when discussing with your internal stakeholders.
•You set the rules:
•You’re in control of which events can be exchanged out of and in to.
•You determine when your exchange window opens and closes.
•You determine which price chart is used for the new tickets.
•You can automatically charge exchange fees to everyone, or change or waive fees by promotion code
•We exchange like price type to like. The price types must exist on both charts for an exchange to be available.
•You keep any money from downgrades and charge for higher priced seats.
•Bundle exchanges won’t trigger a refund. Only the same price or increases will be available.
•You can’t exchange a ticket that is no longer in a bundle.
•When you exchange tickets, they stay in the bundle.
•Your customer's payment plans won’t be impacted. They will however pay for any increase in pricing at the time of the exchange.
•You can see exchanges in Reporting and Business Intelligence. We’ve added three new business intelligence queries and an update to both the Ticket Sales Report and Ticket Sales by Performance Report so you can track exchanges.
•Anything in Customer Services that looks like an exchange will be tracked like an exchange. While rules aren’t yet supported in the Desktop, the concept of an exchange exists, so you can keep track.
Online exchanges can free up your front line staff to service those customers who aren't comfortable doing an exchange online, have complex needs or have already exchanged their tickets once. Additionally, by enabling online exchanges, your staff will be able to focus on new income rather than moving old income around; new ticket buyers and donors will get the service they need faster since they won’t have to queue up behind all those exchanges.
In the desktop, exchange rules will make it easier for staff to complete an exchange in fewer steps, following whichever rules you have set.
Understanding & Tracking Your Goals
Are you looking to reduce phone exchanges? Increase exchange revenue? Improve exchange rule compliance? Understanding your goals for implementing rule based exchanges will help you show the value of the program to your leadership.
Tracking the program allows you to understand whether your communication and marketing plans are having the desired impact and make adjustments.
You can’t track data that doesn’t exist. To track the impact of rule based exchanges on your call center or ticket office you would need:
•A role that identifies either call center or ticket office users and transactions
•A release reason for tickets that indicates an exchange took place.
If you have these already then you can compare this year to previous years.
Once you enable the Exchange mode in the Registry, you can report on new exchanges. Reports and Business Intelligence comes pre-loaded with some options that you can use to track new exchanges:
•Admission Release Summary (if you are tracking release reasons related to exchanges)
•Ticket Sales and Ticket Sales by Performance both have options for output including Exchange detail
•We have three pre-loaded New Business Intelligence Order Admission queries:
oExchange In Summary
oExchange Out Summary
oExchange Transaction Detail
Google Analytics will tell you how many people use each of the pages. Using Google Analytics you can determine where your customers may be dropping out of the process. We provide Info articles that can appear on the pages so adding in some additional information on any pages that seem to be an issue might help.
•customerTickets.asp is where you both view and exchange tickets.
•After deciding to make an exchange they land on exchangeEvents.asp where your customers select their exchange events
•The exchangeOverview.asp page presents customers with their selected exchange out and in choices.
•Their delivery options on loginDelivery.asp?exchangeMode=1 is presented before they land on the payment page, orderContact.asp?exchangeMode=1.
•Once their exchange is complete, they land on the exchangeSummary.asp page.
Creating a Communication Plan
Great change needs great communication. Communicating this exciting new feature to your subscribers, season ticket holders and your staff will give them confidence in the process and reduce stress on and in your call center. Here are some things we suggest:
•Email your subscribers or season ticket holders letting them know about the feature.
•Create a video or capture some images to share with staff and customers about the feature, in an email, online or through social media.
•Add a 'Spotlight' message from our Correspondence Message feature for customers. This will appear when a subscriber or season ticket holder logs in online. You can add any video or how-to guides you’ve created to the article.
•Create a one page outline for staff on the new feature and how it will work.
•Update the Desktop article with information about the new exchange feature so your front line staff can support your customers if necessary
Part of your communication plan should be how you communicate to customers during an exchange.
The following Articles are available to support that communication
•Events and Tickets - Exchange - this appears on the Exchange main page and is a great place to explain your policy, indicate your exchange rules, as well as system limitations.
•The help files should be updated to ensure your rules and business processes are well represented
ohelp - Exchange Events
ohelp - Exchange Overview
ohelp - exchangesLoginDelivery
ohelp - exchangesMapSelect
ohelp - exchangesOrderContact
ohelp - exchangesSeatSelect
ohelp - exchangeSummary
•Info - Exchange Summary allows you to present customers with some “What’s Next” type information once their exchange is complete.
Choosing Your Schedule
You can enable rule based exchanges at any time. The sooner you implement online exchanges, the faster you can move your call center and front line staff to focus on new income through ticket sales or donations. Implementing rule based exchanges in the desktop ensure your bundle admissions stay in the bundles.
You may choose to wait until the exchange window opens for your next season. If this is the case, we recommend turning on the exchange logic in the Registry so that you can track anything that looks like an exchange as an exchange and benchmark the remainder of your season.
In all cases, we always recommend that you test thoroughly, ensuring the best experience for your staff and your customers.
