The SmartSeat Community
The SmartSeat community of 20 performing arts organizations are instrumental partners in the evolution of Adage’s select-your-own-seat (SYOS) product, SmartSeat. Our licensees provide invaluable feedback, insight and guidance into how they need to use the mobile seat selection tool.
We get to work with the top performing arts organizations in the world and love to pick their brains on where the product can innovate even further. So in 2018 we decided to create an end-of-year release called The Community Release.
This special release is a set of features suggested by our licensees.
A SmartSeat Release for Clients, by Clients
Throughout the year SmartSeat licensees submit suggestions for new features, product updates and user experience tweaks. In November, we provided a list of all of the requests from the year and allowed our community to select what we add to the product next.
We sent out a link to a website where each organization could cast one ballot, selecting their highest priorities from a list of eligible features. The features with the highest votes made up our Community Release.
On November 6, voting day in America, the SmartSeat community cast their votes for Community Release selections. Each organization had 100 points to use for votes. Every feature was assigned 5, 10, 15 or 20 points, so they could spend their 100 points on a variety of features. There was a leader-board with live voting results so voters could be as effective with their picks as possible.
14 product changes were selected and will be included in the next product release.
A Selection of What Made it Into the Community Release
These features are currently in development and will be released after the holidays. Here’s a few of the stand-out features proposed by and selected by our community:
Create an SYOS-only Configuration setting.
For organizations that would like customers to skip SmartSeat’s Filters page completely and proceed directly to viewing/selecting available inventory on the seat map, they will be able to create SYOS Only Configurations in our admin tool, Venue Builder. Currently, SmartSeat allows Best Available-only Configurations so this addition offers new flexibility and rounds out the full list of options an organization would need: SYOS + Best Available, Best Available-only, SYOS-only.
Add a notes section for customers to add any additional details.
Multiple clients have asked for the ability to include a notes section that allows customers to fill in additional information if needed when purchasing a seat. Adage is adding a text field where customers can enter text. This information will be attached to the special seating CSI and sent with any other CSI information.
Show the Tessitura cart timer in SmartSeat.
The Tessitura cart timer counts down during seat selection and if the timer expires, customers will get an error and need to restart their purchase. Adage is adding a section in SmartSeat to display the Tessitura cart timer on both pages to alert customers of when their purchase will time out.
Add Mode-of-Sale as option for Configuration Filter.
SmartSeat uses Configurations to deliver specific messaging and seat maps during seat selection. Current Configuration filter options include venue, production, performance and season ID. The addition of MOS empowers organizations to attach specific Cultures, Seat Maps and/or Brands to a MOS. Examples of why this would be useful include: text can be changed to reflect rush ticket messaging, seat maps can ignore sections that should not be on sale for a particular performance, seat icons/colors/messaging can be changed for subscribers.
It’s been a busy year, and we’ve added lots of major features to SmartSeat –things like Subscriptions, Upsells and an overhaul of our Price Types. So stay tuned for the next installation of our New Feature Spotlight.
Have questions about your seat selection tools? Contact us, we’re happy to help.
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