When we update and plan our solutions roadmap, we ask ourselves: How do we allow our customers – theatres, Performing Arts organisations and cultural institutions – to use our system along with their many other systems contemporaneously to make their processes more efficient and improve their data consistency?
The Live Events industry comprises a complex network of specialized talent and services, from creative and choreography, to stage and lighting, to logistics, catering and ticketing, and everything in between. All of these departments come together to ensure successful events. Ironically, the technical systems and services that support them, often, lack comprehensive and cross-platform integration.
As the Performing Arts sector digitally transforms, leveraging new opportunities from VR to producing hybrid and online events to capture more audiences without geographic restrictions, it also must transform and modernise its support systems.
We recently gave a talk at Ticketing Professionals Conference on how we are helping ticketing, fundraising and venue professionals digitally transform their operations, with a specific focus on technical integrations.
Human innovation integrations– Our team
Integration is core to our company’s ethos. We know from a technological perspective that enabling the use of diverse services makes our customers' lives easier and helps them stay focused on what matters most to them: successful events, outstanding customer journey and smooth ticketing operations. On the product level, we get out of the way, while providing a platform and engine for success, enabling our customers to use the systems and services– alongside and integrated with Tixly– that are best for their ticketing management while de-siloing ticketing operations to provide a more transparent, and automated, picture of their event calendars.
We apply this same principle in every area of our business, from product to our team operations, across all 8 international offices. For our team, we have implemented a process around project management where we enable our country leads across our company to bring their team’s ideas and needs to one place. This enables us to leverage our team’s remarkable talent, diverse perspectives and industry experience, as well as enable knowledge sharing and encourage collaboration. It’s our “human data.” Our team then uses the systems and services best suited for the customer relationship management, teams and promotions in each territory.
Technical Integrations
As with our integrated approach to collaboration on our teams, cooperation across systems can help our customers’ teams make better, more precise and informed decisions, by automatically sharing important financial, promotional and ticketing data across systems. This enables each event or organisational stakeholder to track, capture and report according to their needs and their roles.
There are several different ways to integrate disparate systems: Light, Full and/or embedded.
Different types of integrations
Light integrations are common and fairly simple. Popular tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Product Catalog (Commerce Manager) and Pixel, or live chat tools used for support and sales generally fall under this category, where a simple code snippet is added into the templates or added through tools such as Google Tag Manager.
These low development integrations in Tixly help us help our customers in their sales processes and analyze data that can potentially help our customers better target new and existing customers with relevant events and promotions. But a few key things to keep in mind before filling up your website with various pixels and snippets, is whether adding them adds more load to your website that can cause delay in load times (Google does not like slow loading websites). You also have to ask, how do they treat your customer data - and what data are you sending to them? Are they GDPR compliant?
Full and embedded integrations are more developer-intensive for both software partners and are generally unknown or undetectable to the end user. Their purpose is usually to support a product feature and to either be pulling data or pushing data between two solutions.
The benefit to full integration is that when a solution is embedded it removes the extra steps of logging in to each separate service and interface, directly accessing key functionality and components at will (or with established parameters), either fully syncing features between systems or augmenting functionality and information flow through simple add-ons.
An example of a simple add-on integration could be syncing mailing list sign ups between a ticketing platform and a newsletter platform, like Sendgrid, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor, so that data is up to date in both places at all times, and subscribes and unsubscribes are trackable.
More complex integrations may come in the form of a venue management system, like YesPlan, and a ticketing system like ours.
Ticketing APIs
APIs, from our perspective, provide the most flexibility in creating adaptive systems, which is why they are so crucial to our product development. We’ve learned through our many years of working across ticketing, venue management and production in the Performing Arts and at cultural institutions, the technological gaps that inhibit event efficiencies. Our mission is to eliminate as many of these hurdles and inefficiencies as possible. As such, we have developed 4 primary APIs:
Event API - provides information about Events across websites, social media and CRMs Pertinent event information from price ranges, promotional and descriptive text to genre groupings, sale status (onsale, sold out, cancelled, etc.), availability and capacity are made readily available for each event.
POS API - allows orgs to reserve and sell tickets with POS terminals, self-service kiosks or their own designed and developed online purchase flows.
Admin API - Allows orgs to create and make changes to events including changes to event layouts, bulk promotional editing, refunds through payment gateways and place income and payments on different ledger codes, such as cost center and project codes automatically.
CRM API - allows orgs to get/receive information about their customers and sales from services like PowerBI or Mosaic.
Tixly Software Integration Partners
Tixly loves to partner with contemporary solutions providers who can enrich our ticketing technologies and make our customers’ lives easier. We work with a whole host of financial, promotional, HR, production and venue management software services. A few recent and notable ones include:
Ingresso
Ingresso is a global distribution platform that connects customers with the world's best entertainment content. With a simple connection into a venue's ticketing system, like ours, we can seamlessly connect real-time ticket inventory with their ever-growing, global list of eCommerce retailers, ticket agents, travel agents and tour operators - helping everyone to sell more tickets.
Vipps Norway
Vipps is the one and only mobile payment app in Norway. It’s one of the integrations our customers’ ticket buyers truly appreciate, as 1/3 of them choose mobile payment for their ticket purchases and at one of our customer venues, 50% of their ticket buyers use Vipps.
YesPlan Venue Management
Tixly and YesPlan share a remarkable customer in Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, who leverages the easy integration between our services.
YesPlan is a Venue management software is a system specifically for cultural organizations including Theaters, Arts centres, Concert Halls and some producing companies to schedule their tours.
Yesplan sends event data over to our platform to automatically create and prepare for ticket on-sales. In our system, events are finalised for sale by augmenting this data with ticket system-specific information such as event hall info, allocations, ticket layouts and prices.
The integration also gives customers the option to send back key figures and data on events, such as box office sales figures, so that users of Yesplan can monitor attendance and ticket sales numbers between systems.
Soon, we’ll announce another knockout event partnership in the UK. But let us know how we can help you in your digital transformation journey, beginning with your ticketing operations.
