This quarter not only rings in Ticketer’s 15th birthday, but also Kelly Hanna, our CEO’s, 1st anniversary.
To mark the occasion, Kelly brought us up to speed on some of the key changes at Ticketer during her time as CEO, as well as covering what we’ll be prioritising for our customers moving forward…
Introducing the Customer Success Directors
When I first started the role of CEO, one of the things I immediately set out to do was find out how our customers were feeling. Following lots of productive in-person meetings, I learned that some didn’t know about the innovations we were delivering for them or even the actions we were taking away to support their challenges and needs. I realised that the only way to bridge that gap was to create clearer lines of communication, and so our new Customer Success Director (CSD) roles were created.
We’ve now set-up a team of dedicated CSDs and made the decision to only appoint colleagues from different Ticketer departments into these roles, and only from departments where they would have gained prior extensive hands-on experience of our solutions.
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We’ve appointed familiar Ticketer faces Hannah Clarke, Amanda Keen, and Kirsty Darby to the roles and they all either bring a ton of implementation or customer support knowledge into the positions, meaning they know our solutions and most importantly they know our customers. They can therefore better support on a day-to-day basis than if we were hiring someone new into the business and it also means that when the CSDs are asked something more technical, they have that hands-on experience and can support there and then rather than having to take things away to investigate.
And that’s really important to me because just being a messenger from Ticketer isn’t effective. Our customers want to know answers promptly and although the CSDs might not be able to answer absolutely everything there’s a lot that they can help with, and if not they’re committed to quick follow up actions.
Creating Dedicated Points of Contact
We want our customers to get the best possible value from our solutions and whilst a key part of us supporting that was creating the CSD roles, we also understood the need for our customers to have a strong working relationship with someone who knows the nuances of their business. We therefore also made the decision to appoint all our customers with a dedicated CSD that can be their go-to person for any solution or product queries.
The CSDs are already out and about a lot, regularly meeting face-to-face rather than chatting from behind a computer. Having experienced support that can frequently travel to meet each customer at their depots or headquarters in-person is a fabulous thing and something I’m really pleased we’re now facilitating by creating these new points of contact.
Ticketer System Health Checks
Since the CSD roles were created, we’ve gone a step further in supporting each of our customers and that’s through the creation of our ‘Ticketer System Health Checks’. These are twofold – one for software and one for hardware.
We’re proud to have created long-lasting partnerships that span years, but it means in some instances our customers might have an aged estate or be running on an old software version as we’re continuously enhancing and innovating our solutions. We want them to get the most out of the Ticketer system which is something this new process will support with. We’ve therefore made this a really pivotal part of the CSD role and something they’re doing in-person, because if our customers aren’t getting the maximum benefit from our products, well that’s on us.
As part of the health check process, from a software perspective we review what’s in place, e.g. what software version each customer is on, what new functionality needs switching on, and if further training is needed. The idea being there are tangible benefits from these recurring meetings with each customer incrementally gaining a better understanding of what more they can do within the Ticketer Portal to improve their operations.
Now, the hardware health check is as important as the software health check because of the age of the estate in some instances. There’s a misconception that if our machines are creaking then there’s nothing we can do and customers have to upgrade but that’s simply not the case. We don’t want our customers to upgrade if they don’t need to.
So, one of the things that we’re doing remotely is a hardware health check followed by a physical hardware health check if there are some machines that are in particular need of attention. We can then best support either by repairing the machines or investigating component upgrades if applicable, rather than customers having to replace the entire machine unnecessarily.
Launching the Ticketer Repair Centre
Another completely new team we’ve recently established is our new in-house Ticketer Repair Centre, based in our Hungerford head office.
It’s our 15-year anniversary in September and some of our customers have had kit in excess of 10 years which is starting to creak a little bit, or at least needs tweaking to allow it to continue to perform. We had a third party repair centre that we used since the start of the Ticketer journey but as part of our objective to continually review and improve processes for our customers, we realised we needed more control of the end-to-end repairs process. We fully appreciate that for every hour one of our machines isn’t on a bus it’s not earning revenue, and so the Ticketer Repair Centre was born.
By taking control of the vast majority of those repairs, we’re no longer subject to another provider’s priorities. We can more effectively push things through, oversee customer requests, offer more transparency regarding the status of kit, and ensure the quality of each repair. It’s a big step change to the process before as by physically having kit with us for repair, we can be more agile, a lot more flexible, and more responsive.
It’s been a big task as we had to first get the stock in to do the repairs, set up the facility, grow the team from the ground-up, and then get the right security and safety standards in place. A lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into it, but we’ve been driven by knowing it was the right thing to do for our customers.
The great news is we’re now fully staffed and the team are being constantly trained and upskilled by our Field Service Engineers, most of whom have been with us for years resolving technical challenges so the repair guys are in good hands! Given it’s a new team, they’re only going to grow in experience and tenure, in turn getting faster at repairs and turning the kit around. Our aim with this is to eventually be turning repairs around more quickly than industry standard SLAs once we’ve had the time to bed the team in properly. Watch this space!
On the Road with our Customer Events
Last but by certainly no means least, we also kicked off our new series of Customer Roadshows this August in Bristol, where we had a number of our Southwest region operators and authorities along to hear about how to get the best possible value out of the Ticketer system and to give their feedback on how we could be better support them with our innovations.
Not only were the CSDs there, but a whole host of us from Ticketer were in attendance so that our customers could ask any specific technical questions they might have had and get an answer right there from the relevant colleague.
We’ll be planning our next roadshow soon and will be holding these regularly around different regions for our customers to come along to, so keep an eye out for news about our next ones!
For more information on anything Kelly has discussed above, either reach out to us at info@ticketer.co.uk or if you’re an existing customer get in touch with your Customer Success Director to discuss this further.
