Summer of SmartSeat
The SmartSeat team had a busy summer, taking seven SmartSeat clients to live with Adage’s reserved seating tool. It was the perfect time for our performing arts organizations to make the change, because, although no arts organizations ever really slow down, summers are traditionally quiet periods for ticket sales and performances.
And our clients took advantage of this time. They created their new venues and seat maps, added new branding and messaging, and tested all aspects of their new reserved seating tool. They were able to roll out their updated SYOS ahead of their fall on sales.
From June through August, while the weather was hot, the SmartSeat activity was hotter. We were preparing a SmartSeat to go live every week and our total number of live SmartSeat clients climbed to 13 out of 19 licensees.
It’s sad to say summer is over, but we look back fondly at our summer of SmartSeat. Here’s a recap of our wonderful clients and our favorite features, facts, and lessons learned from each launch (in order of release).
1. Huntington Theatre
Boston | Adage ACE client
The Huntington team found creative ways to make SmartSeat work for them, while also offering valuable suggestions on how to make it work for other licensees.
In the screenshot above, you can see how they made SmartSeat work for their patrons, by showing Price Zones on the Seat Map. Huntington was one of the first clients to complete this setup, using Venue Builder Seat Styles and attaching them to the Tessitura conditions for Price Zone.
Their feedback also led to product updates including unavailable price types appearing greyed out in the right-hand sidebar.
2. Royal Danish Theater
Copenhagen | Adage ACE Commerce client | First use of SmartSeat’s multilingual capabilities
RDT provided a fantastic litmus test for the capabilities of SmartSeat as they are our physically largest organization. Peter Schaufuss and his team at the Royal Danish Theater created:
- 2 fully translated languages
- 7 Venues
- 10 different brands for specific productions and venues
- 25 seat maps
- 50 price types
- 180 different seat styles
- 1,300 seats in their largest seating section
- Over 11,000 seats saved, processed and accessed through SmartSeat
Through their testing, feedback, and partnership, we were able to make major updates to strengthen our SYOS tool including performance and user experience updates in Venue Builder. We also rooted out every text field to offer the full multilingual capability.
3. Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Chicago | Adage ACE client| First use of Mixed Venue
Chicago Symphony Orchestra has a box level which offers general admission, first-come-first-served seating, inside their otherwise reserved seating house. We worked together on this use case to build out SmartSeat’s handling of Mixed Venue seating and are so pleased with the results. All SmartSeat licensees can now offer similar ticketing for their specific scenarios.
CSO was also able to rely on SmartSeat’s messaging offerings to add an attestation tied to this seat type to alert patrons that they are required to switch seats with their box neighbors at intermission. No longer will patrons be able to claim ignorance of this interesting rule.
4. The Music Center
Los Angeles | Adage ACE client
The Music Center purchased SmartSeat with a tight timeline planned for launch and through their team’s diligent work, they managed the shortest timeline to live in the SmartSeat community.
Just seven weeks after our initial kickoff meeting (and five weeks after their installation), they went live with SmartSeat.
Janelle Torres also made our day when she arrived at TLCC 2018 with a printed version of the SmartSeat Companion Guide. Her notes in the margins were perfect validation that the hours poured into writing our product documentation were actually helpful to someone. That’s why we wrote it after all!
5. Portland Center Stage
Portland | First SmartSeat-only licensee
Working with suggestions from the Portland Center Stage team, Adage expanded SmartSeat functionality specific to our TNEW clients. They brought creative solutions like the creation of a TNEW Production Title override.
As Portland Center Stage Webmaster Chris Bisgard describes, “We noticed that the Production Title seems to be pulling from the Title field in Tessitura production elements. However, for some shows, we use the TNEW content field ‘TN_Express_Title’ to override the production title due to its character length limitation.” So we added a TNEW Production Title override field into Venue Builder.
6. Houston Ballet
Houston | Adage ACE client
We are always happy to work with our friends at Houston Ballet, but are honored to work with a group that has had to rebuild professionally and personally from the damage of Hurricane Harvey. Houston Ballet was one of the first clients to purchase Adage’s SYOS product but had to cease operations entirely when their facility was submerged in 15 feet of floodwaters. The violent surge closed their theater, The Wortham, entirely for a year. In addition to the loss of revenue, Houston Ballet lost more than 50 one-act ballets and over 40 years of ballet history.
To learn more about this story, or to donate to Houston Ballet’s recovery, visit their website.
Over months of dedication from their tireless staff, they have rebuilt. Tickets for the first show that returns Houston Ballet to The Wortham since the hurricane are being sold on SmartSeat.
Have questions or want to discuss your eCommerce or select-your-own-seat technology? Contact us.
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