Self-service in ticketing: What is it and how can it benefit your events?

Most of us will be familiar with self-serve returns portals online. In fact, for any major retailer, it’s likely we’ve come to expect to be able to sort returns out ourselves, without the need to contact a customer advisor.

If you’re an event creator, you may not realise that it’s possible to create the same experience for your ticket buyers. And not only for returns, but for other aspects of managing tickets, too. Like transferring tickets to another date and getting tickets resent (we all know that dreaded feeling when you can't find your ticket in your inbox!). 

In this guide, we’ll walk through the benefits of offering self-service to your ticket buyers (there are tons of interesting stats that make the case, here). But first – we wanted you to know that:

📣Ticket Tailor now offers self-serve! 

Ticket Tailor now has a seamless, in-built self-serve feature that can be customised to your own preferences. It means you can let your buyers cancel, transfer and/or resend their orders. And it’s super easy to get set up with 🙌.

Learn more about how Ticket Tailor self-serve works >

What is self-service in online sales? 

In online sales, self-service simply refers to anything where a customer is able to manage their order without speaking to a real-human customer advisor. It includes things like online return portals, FAQ and help centres, and chat-bots. 

How can self-serve apply to ticketing?

As an event creator, managing ticket resends, cancellations, transfers and refunds can eat into your time – and potentially even profits. Having people on-hand to deal with ticketing queries like these costs money, or at least takes up a lot of your own time which could be better spent elsewhere. 

In a nutshell: offering your ticket buyers the ability to be able to manage aspects of their own order is a type of self-service, and can be a real game-changer for busy event planners. For example, with Ticket Tailor, you can make it so that your customers can carry out the following actions through self-serve:

• Cancel their order and get a refund for their tickets
• Transfer their ticket to another date if you have recurring events
• View, download and resend their tickets.
• And iOS users can add tickets to Apple Wallet (As long as you've connected it!)

This 👆can save you a whole lot of admin time – but there are lots of even more valuable benefits to be aware of too…

What are the benefits of offering customers self-service?

Read on to learn about each of these key self-serve benefits:

1. It saves you time and money
2. It’s what your customers want
3. It improves brand image
4. It can help you make more sales in the future
5. It provides a more seamless customer experience

It saves you time and money

We touch on this point above – and it’s an important one. Offering self-serve to your ticket buyers means you potentially need less actual staff working as customer representatives for your event. Or, if you normally handle ticket queries alone, it’ll save you tons of time (music to most event planners’ ears, we reckon!). That time can then be channelled elsewhere – like marketing your event to improve ticket sales, or even expanding your business. Nice 🙌. 

It’s what your customers want

Lots of surveys have been carried out on the topic customer self-service in recent years – and the results point to one overwhelmingly obvious truth: customers want self-service, and much prefer it to more laborious methods of managing their orders.

• 81% of customers try to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a customer advisor.
• 88% of U.S. customers prefer a self-service portal for troubleshooting their issues.
• 67% of customers prefer self-service to speaking to a customer advisor. 

It improves brand image

Offering self-serve to your ticket buyers is likely to mean they have a positive association with your brand. In other words, it’s a great way to promote your brand as one that cares about its customers’ experience. This, in turn, helps to instil a greater sense of goodwill among your customer base. Think about it – if ticket buyers have to spend ages on the phone trying to get a refund or transfer tickets, they’re going to be a lot more frustrated than if they could sort things of their own accord in a few clicks. 

• 77% of customers say they view brands more positively if they provide self-service options for customers looking for support.

It can help you make more sales in the future

Improving your ticket buyers’ experience of interacting with your event sends them the message that you’re easy to deal with. Say, for example, a customer realised they’d double booked and wanted to transfer their ticket to another date. Being able to do this themselves in just a few clicks is likely to leave them with a good impression of your event. It means they’ll feel reassured that, if they were ever to need to transfer a ticket again in the future, it wouldn’t be a problem. The same applies if you have a cancellation policy and enable customers to get their refunds via self-serve.

• 92% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases if returns are made easy. 

It provides a more seamless customer experience

All of us know what it’s like to be a customer that just wants to get things done. And things don’t have to be any different when it comes to managing a ticket order. Ultimately, we all prefer to spend as little time as possible dealing with purchase admin – and being able to sort things out of office hours helps massively too. With customer self-serve, you allow your ticket buyers to manage their order at any time of day or night, with minimal effort. Nice.

• 90% of customers prioritise having an "immediate" response when it comes to customer service queries.
• 63% of customers under the age of 35 go online to look for customer service rather than calling the company on the phone.

😌 Set up self-serve ticketing with Ticket Tailor in minutes 

When considering the stats in this article – it really does feel like a no-brainer to offer your ticket buyers self-serve. Not only can this save you time and money, it can help improve your relationship with your customers, and increase attendee loyalty, too.

Thankfully, with Ticket Tailor, you can get set up with self-serve at no extra cost. Plus, the feature is customisable so you can choose which self-serve options you want, or don’t want to offer to your ticket buyers.

⚡Get set up with Ticket Tailor self-serve in minutes >

Prefer to see it in action?

Skip to 2 minutes 20 in our latest webinar, and Therese will walk you through setting up Self-serve step-by-step.

💸 New to Ticket Tailor? Find out how our platform works, and see how much money you could save by switching over from Eventbrite (hint: it’s a lot 🤓).

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