New features, improvements and fixes across the Back Office, WordPress, Salesforce and more.
135 updates in Improvement. Clear
When customers get reserved seating, we're showing the row & seat assignments in more places, including:
On the Order Complete screen when using embedded widgets:
In their email order confirmation:
These changes are part of the preamble to our new v2 Reserved Seating system. More on that anon.
We've been hard at work making Entry and Elevent At the Door even faster--over the past couple of months, you might notice it's decidedly speedier, especially when you have larger schedules and longer lists of patrons to admit.
Sometimes it's just too handy to be able to print a stack of vouchers. You might have a sponsor who demands something to hold on to or want to drop off a sleeve to a radio station as a giveaway.
When we transitioned ticket printing at the box office to speedier, more reliable local printing we hadn't transitioned the printing of vouchers (e.g. Extras). Now voucher printing takes advantage of your locally-connected printers.
In the Box Office, this means you can pull up any old customer with some unused vouchers.
And push the Print button.
Vouchers will print on your ticket printer.
You can also print vouchers from the Extra Customer Search Tool.
Note: Extras and vouchers are available on the Premiere and Enterprise plans only.
Learn more about printing vouchers here.
Or get to know the Extra Customer Search Tool here.
Ushers and gatekeepers are under a lot of pressure to let everyone in--even those who shouldn't be admitted. We're always looking for ways to help them confidently and effectively greet your audience on the day of the show--because it matters big time.
But, yes, sometimes they need the nerve to turn people away. To help them enforce the rules, we've added clarity when rejecting a ticket at the door, letting ushers know exactly when any tickets have been previously scanned. This works on every device on both of our gatekeeping apps, Entry and Elevent at the Door (on iOS).
There's nothing you need to do to enable it--it's happening already.
A year where we embrace the new normal (and sprinkled in some extraordinary)
2023 was the most "normal" year our clients have had in a while--with an underlying desperation about how much of normal we could really recapture. So we embraced that alongside you--and rolled out a suite of improvements and new features that built on top of the basics of ticketing and membership.
We focused on ways to help you scale up - from diversifying your programming through multi-branded accounts, creating tools to make it easier to revolve from one season or festival into the next, and maximize your sales and contributions.
We also re-imagined the future of how other systems integrate with Elevent, introducing a handful more integrations with more to come. And we reworked credentials, badges and printed items with an eye towards a paperless future. And we advanced the art of our state of the art white-label web integration and WordPress plugin to make your online web sales experience even more distinctive--again, with an eye towards our roadmap for next year.
Next year really started halfway into last year. We've been working on some big, big things.
Our theme for next year is about 'putting it all together'--where we take the large suite of products you can sell and service through Elevent and evolve it into the nexus for your whole org. Integrations and features are great, but we can turbocharge your ops with more pre-built, seamless tools in your Elevent toolbox.
The "all" in putting it all together is going to reach all the way into the customer's first interactions - with even more customizable, modular embedded touchpoints. We will introduce a slick new, 2D and 3D reserved seating system that elevates the assigned seating experience in ways you don't typically see. We're going to re-invent delivery to the customer--where we go paperless, cardless, email-free, and e-Walletable in future-forward ways. And we will make it easy to evolve into a true event organizer CRM platform that opens the door to a myriad of opportunities in our increasingly automated, data, and AI-driven future. The whole shebang.
We know you, as the event organizing machine you are, are competing with more customer experience options than ever. Just getting people out the door is still a challenge. All the data confirms that, with each person that gets back into getting out, once they start they don't stop. We know you aren't just selling tickets, you aren't even just building an audience--you are imprinting valuable experiences into actual, real people lives. AI and machine learning are cool and all, but the value of collective human experience ain't going anywhere.
You make that value. Out of practically nothing. Go you.
We're introducing a small set of usability improvements to help users browse and discover events.
We've been making a number of speed and efficiency optimizations over the past 6 weeks, but today we released a huge one that re-imagines the entire performance concept of the box office--especially for those of you who have a large number of future showtimes with tickets on sale.
There's nothing you need to do, but you might need to do a 'hard refresh' of your web browser to get caught up with this new change in the box office (Ctrl-Shift-r in Chrome).
While browsing some larger event schedules, we're seeing as much as a 90% (!) speed improvement. And the more you use it, the faster it gets.
For those of you in the movie-showing business, you're likely using our Comscore & Swift auto-submission tool. It's a pretty useful display of data in its own right--a great way to see and predict your box office grosses.
And anything, anything beats staying up late at night to manually send nightly reports to Comscore, right?
We've added some future-looking date ranges to the tool. So you can easily flip forward beyond today, into the weekend or full week ahead.
For instance, if you want a free and clear headspace, you can enter overrides and exclusions on future events on a Friday and go water skiing with a clear conscience all weekend.
Learn more about automated Comscore and SWIFT reporting here.
In an effort to streamline the checkout process, we've removed one small confirmation screen when using Elevent widgets. We're always looking for ways to maximize the balance between converting sales online and maximizing the amount of engagement of each visitor.
This change only applies to embedded widgets.
Heretofore (Fancy way of saying "before now"), when someone added anything to their cart, they'd see an explicit confirmation that the item was added to their cart. There's a reason for this:
However, when you start to add on other steps like a donation upsell, add-ons, or requesting info to print on a credential or badge, it can get a bit chatty.
Where you used to see an explicit confirmation that items were added to a cart, like this:
Now customers will land directly on the cart, with an option to dismiss the cart and keep shopping, like this:
This is a change we've been testing and the preliminary data indicates a slight improvement--we'll keep this change at full scale and collect gobs of data to ensure that keeping the change is a net positive for all.
The Staff Shift Report gets used a lot. This is where you can reconcile and audit cash, checks, and other non-card payments by each agent's working shift.
We've added some additional filters to give this report more utility--now you can filter this report by:
Because you can run this report for all staff activity, it's a handy way to reconcile non-card payment activity by your whole organization or one location at a time. It'll also help you pool tips.
Learn more about the Staff Shift report in this deep dive.
Note: Stay tuned for some new, more purpose-built reports & functionality for managaging day-to-day venue operations. We have a lot in the works.
