'Definitely maybe' Ticketmaster needs an experience strategy

When your job is experience strategy it’s hard to switch it off, given the number of interactions (let’s call them experiences) we have with businesses all the time. 

About four hours into the wasted half day I spent on Saturday trying to buy Oasis tickets for my sister-in-law–yes, not even for myself–and watching news stories about the process unrolling online, a few things struck me about the abject lack of a strategy behind what I was experiencing.

First, this kind of thing, by which I mean time-specific availability windows for major event tickets, keeps happening, and yet infrastructure keeps falling over. Which means the brands that operate these things (hello, Ticketmaster in particular) keep being lambasted in the press and by their customers for not having a robust enough system. It’s a terrible experience, but also a terrible bit of brand work.

Then, when things do go wrong–fall over or otherwise drive those customers mad, even though you can be fairly sure it’s going to happen–why are your brand responses so universally terrible?

I don’t care how many times you say your system is working and people are getting tickets, when I’ve spent hours in a queue, only to get to position number one and then receive the 'your session has been suspended' error like so many other people, I knew for a fact it wasn’t. Following every single tip to make sure things would run smoothly still didn’t work. It’s bad business to deny that people are experiencing what’s happening to them. 

What the business needs is an experience strategy. One that’s rooted in data (it will have done this lots of times before–don’t tell me it couldn’t model better) to help balance the experience and predict the spikes. Maybe offer some live data visualisations to show exactly what’s still available and put consumers in control of whether they want to keep waiting in the hours-long queues.

Maybe be more transparent about what’s happening with pricing for the same reason. Customers (and the performers’ fans) want to be excited about securing tickets, and even with everything crashing around them they could still be made to feel valuable, and keep valuing you. This can be achieved by recognising what value looks like to them and using all that data to let them feel they’re making informed decisions. Because at the moment we all operate in the dark when it comes to big ticket events like this.

But when hundreds of thousands of people are trying to buy tens of thousands of tickets, and the system is busily 'dynamically pricing' them to extract the maximum possible revenue–and when all those tickets are being sold at substantially higher than face value–it’s tempting to assume the vendor companies will just be laughing all the way to the bank as they capitalise on people’s passions.

There’s something fundamentally broken about the system. One of the things that allows the demand-driven dynamic pricing model to 'work' is the way the Ticketmaster purchase process flow works. Job one is that you must select the date of the event you want and then you’re put in the queue for that date and that date only. Ticketmaster explicitly says don’t have multiple browser tabs open.

So unless you’re working on multiple browsers or devices you’re immediately locked into that date. The popular dates are immediately obvious to the system, and off it dynamically goes. Compare this with the ticket-buying process for the Eurovision Song Contest this year, where buyers joined a queue for tickets, and as they got to the front could select from the dates and shows which had availability. Every seat is therefore theoretically as in demand as any other. On top of which the actual customer experience is smoother, more transparent and just feels fairer.

As the government has announced folding an inspection of dynamic pricing into the upcoming review of ticket sales and consumer protection to protect consumers from prices inflating to more than twice face value, I’ve been considering the other industries using it and why it’s not such a contentious topic there. 

Take the airline industry, where the price for the same seat can vary dramatically based on how far in advance it’s bought, what flexibility the customer wants, and–the main driver in gig ticket dynamic pricing–demand. What’s different is that thousands of people don’t all go online the moment a particular flight goes on sale and try to buy the same few seats. 

The mad pressure for once-in-a-lifetime experiences makes gig ticket-buying uniquely stressful, confusing and infuriating, even if you succeed. The most annoying thing is that it’s the ticket sites’ own decisions and processes that create the situation in the first place. The cynic in me might suspect that’s the point.

Jon Pollard is head of strategy at Rapp UK.