Celebratio launches in style
1 March, 2007 at 10:11 pm fullhouses Leave a comment
A large crowd gathered at the Cafe Royal, London on 12 February for the secureTicket launch of their new ticketing system – Celebratio – new to the arts and entertainment industry, but quickly learning theatrical flair.
The name of this new system is Latin for ‘audience’, as revealed in a humorous video of Leonardo da Vinci meeting the manager of the Roman Coliseum. It is hard to be innovative in ticketing systems these days, and sometimes just a fresh approach makes a difference. Tessitura achieved that with its joined-up thinking and not-for-profit network model. secureTicket is a subsidiary of Telsecure who bring a fresh perspective, largely from the world of banking, but with a huge input from frustrated venue managers, producers and promoters in Canada as well as the UK, which has led to Celebratio.
That industry input has largely focused on a system which gives even more reasons for wresting ticketing from the ticket agents and handling it in partnership with a new kind of supplier. For secureTicket, as the name suggests, security is writ large in their thinking, so Celebratio has multiple protections for touting and credit card fraud, offers print-at-home and mobile phone tickets with easy access control, and guaranteed instant real time authorisation of all transactions.
One benefit of this secure approach is an equally robust focus on customer relationship management (CRM), since the system needs to recognise every customer and track all their contacts and behaviours, so it enables ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing using both old and new technologies. And secureTicket guarantees that all customer data belongs to and is in the control of the venue.
The latest technologies means that this is a hosted ASP model of system, with secureTicket handling all the stress of the back-end, and geared up to sales and transaction volumes in the millions.
Fresh thinking brings a new style front end. Something looking remarkably like those ‘chip and PIN’ handhelds comes with a bigger screen, more keys, and can be used to sell tickets, accept and authorise card payments, print tickets, scan bar-codes, and fully inter-face with the ticketing system. This has been developed with Ingenico and is a GPRS, GSM and landline compatible device which can be truly mobile and always authorise card purchases live online in real time. The implications of this are considerable in terms of distributing access to ticket purchase, and, potentially, the demise of the formal box office and counter/window.
The back end also innovatively offers a whole Money Management set of tools and reports so that venues, producers and promoters can automatically obtain settlement with multi-party splits and all income is immediately available for distribution straight after redemption.
The new company is based in a rural business campus near Stockbridge in Hampshire where it has set up a 24/7 call centre, though the development team is based in Colchester. The call centre means that it can either handle all the telephone traffic for a box office or provide an appropriately answered overflow. secureTicket come to the market offering Everything – and then some. Of course we need to see it installed somewhere and working to evaluate just what it is offering.
Contact Sally Oakley, Sales and Marketing Director: sally.oakley@secureticket.biz Phone 01794302111 www.secureticket.biz
Entry filed under: Bulletin. Tags: .
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed