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Background:
The Chesaning Showboat Festival is a week long event held
annually the second full week of July, in the town of
Chesaning, Michigan. The Shiawassee Queen riverboat has been
bringing national acts to the Chesaning Amphitheatre since
1937. The amphitheatre seats approximately 6100, and is sold
in price tiered sections, as well as in discounted,
multi-event “packages”. In addition to the concerts and
shows at the amphitheatre, the surrounding park provides
concession and beer tents, and is host to a variety of
vendor stands and local merchants offering items for retail
sale.
Challenge:
The Chesaning Showboat Festival runs just one week of the
year, with an all volunteer staff. A cost effective, easy to
use system was needed to make staff training manageable,
while providing the advanced POS sales and ticketing
features required by the event. Additionally, the compressed
nature of the “season” results in a tremendous “spike” in
ticketing sales, so the system needed to be robust enough to
handle temporary surges in demand. Also required was a means
to keep on-line sales fees well below that of their previous
ticketing provider, TicketMaster.
Solution:
The Chesaning Showboat committee turned to New Concepts
Software, Inc. for a ticketing and point of sale solution
based on their popular Tick-It! Trak Pro technology. Working
closely with their volunteer staff and local IT service
providers, NCS deployed the Trak Pro system including the
web based ticketing ASP pages on the Chesaning Server. Since
Trak Pro uses Microsoft SQL Server as the database back end,
the Showboat was assured of being able to handle the number
of anticipated transactions. To “jump start” the volunteers,
NCS staff members pre-configured the POS and ticketing
season for the Showboat, so that training could focus on the
day to day sales operations, rather than tedious system
administration.
Since the Showboat was now running their own web server
selling tickets, as well as running their own independent
box office, “middleman” fees could be greatly reduced. This
meant that venue development fees and maintenance fees could
be “rolled in” to the price of the tickets, so that tickets
purchased on-line would be the same price as those purchased
at the box office, and the cost to the customer would still
be lower than if the Showboat had continued with the
TicketMaster service. A “win-win” for everyone involved.
The Trak Pro system with the web based server application
enabled remote management and reporting, using virtually any
web browser. This meant that the various committee members
could access the reports they needed right from their homes
or offices, whenever they needed them, not just when the
committee was scheduled to meet.
The simplicity and visual nature of the ticketing sales
function made training the volunteer staff quick and easy.
Unlike the text and command line based TicketMaster system,
Tick-It! Trak Pro employs a graphical user interface, from
which seat assignments are done from diagrams that
accurately reflect the physical seating positions of the
venue.
The Trak Pro Inventory Module made it possible to configure
merchant rental fees for booth space, and to configure other
sales items not possible with a “tickets only” system.
Future possible improvements are wireless barcode ticket
validation using PDA’s and the Trak Pro Validation Module.
Customer
Testimonial from the Chesaning Showboat Festival
The following is an un-edited customer testimonial from
Angie Meder, box office manager for the 2006 season, and
current Ticket Committee member.
The
Chesaning Showboat sails during the second full week of July
every summer. Volunteers work hard to bring wonderful
entertainment to town and people come from miles around to
enjoy the small town hospitality and see the show. You can
find out more at our website:
www.chesaningshowboat.org .
We used the New Concepts Trak Pro ticketing software for the
first time this year. When we decided we needed computerized
ticketing we went with Ticketmaster for two years. Our staff
consists of volunteers who are not very computer savvy and
Ticketmaster’s program was difficult for us to learn and
complicated to use. The New Concepts program is amazing. You
only have to be able to read the screen to sell tickets. We
were all impressed with how easy it was to use. Our
customers were also able to access our website and buy
tickets online easily. If a customer lost their tickets we
could replace them by checking the customer’s record and
printing duplicates. At the end of the day we printed
reports for balancing and closing out. We were also able to
access and print sales reports that gave us details we
needed just by going to any computer with internet access.
We were able to see what percentage of our customers were
buying online and what percentage were buying in person. We
could track which acts were selling better and adjust our
advertising accordingly. We can also print address labels to
keep our customers informed about future events. This
program is a perfect fit for our venue.
Monty Boleyn and his staff went the extra mile helping us to
set up and learn the system. They never made us feel we were
asking silly questions and always took the time to make sure
we understood their answers. When we had some special
requests for things we would like to see in our reports,
Monty made adjustments to give us what we needed.
We are so happy we found New Concepts and look forward to
working with them for many years to come.
Angie Meder
Chesaning Showboat
Ticket Committee
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