1. Managed Services Case Study
The Woodville, Gravesend, Kent.
A 750 seat multi-purpose theatre &
cinema owned and operated by
Gravesham Borough Council.
In approaching SeatLive, The Woodville found an experienced and
focussed team using one of the most feature rich, robust ticketing
systems by AudienceView. The company was able to fully satisfy
the council’s stringent demands on payment and data security
and to provide a full suite of supporting services to complement
The Woodville’s small in-house team and box office.
SeatLive’s contact centre now facilitates all of The Woodville’s
phone bookings providing an enhanced service, offering longer
operating hours and a structured response mechanism together
with a reduction in costs.
As AudienceView is built from the ground up as a multi-venue cus-
tomer relationship management (CRM) and ticketing solution, with
a very powerful content management system (CMS). Building a
new online presence for the Woodville was very straightforward as
Evan Thompson, SeatLive’s Ticketing Director explains. “The system
allows full partitioning of data and access only to the relevant parts
of the system that relate to the Woodville such that each user can
have their own set of permissions and login restrictions as required.”
SeatLive originally built the entire website to integrate with the
current website, retaining all the branding and look and feel with
the Woodville’s designers, The Big Idea. Six months through the
project the website was fully brought under the control of
AudienceView’s CMS greatly improving the
accuracy and simplification using SeatLive’s
web designers.
With the old system creaking and
failing to deliver the aggressive
online sales targets, speed of
deployment was a major
Together with a full branding
and re-vamp of the facilities
the Woodville set about
improving its online
presence and analysis of its
ticket booking process.
It knew that its current
Ticketing system was both
failing to deliver a high level
of sales due to its poor online
functionality and weak user
interface and also its inability
to analyse customer spend
and use profiles making it
difficult to develop robust
marketing campaigns and
gain true customer insights.
Together with limited
budgets and a desire to
deliver a superb customer
experience, General
Manager Neil Chandler set
about identifying a partner
and a technology solution to
deliver the Woodville’s
aggressive marketing and
sales programmes.
Background
“...we really needed
to update our Box Office
system, but didn’t have
access to additional budget...”
Neil Chandler
General Manager

2. consideration as well as delivering the stringent data and payment
security requirements of the local authority. The AudienceView system
and SeatLive’s contact centre are fully PCI/DSS compliant. The council’s
requirements in the overall evaluation of the solution were such, that
security of data was paramount as was the ability to pay funds directly
into the council’s merchant accounts.
A full project plan was developed and a progressive migration of data
and events undertaken within 7 days using the migration tools built into
AudienceView, with a full switch over from system to system over one
Sunday evening following an intensive testing programme.
SeatLive adapted and tailored its training and documentation for the
Woodville team delivering training within its own facilities and on-site.
Celia Lilley, SeatLive’s Customer Services Manager delivered the training
and on-site support during the first couple of days to iron out any issues,
and to ensure the box office staff were fully trained and capable of
using the system. As Shelley Brown, the Woodville’s Box
Office & Groups Coordinator says, “the system is actually very simple to
use and offers huge potential for us to understand our customers better,
knowing that the SeatLive team are behind us allows us to focus on our
face to face customers and the overall running of our venue”.
“As AudienceView is a web based, cloud solution, installing the system
is a breeze” remarks Ross Evans, The Woodville’s IT Manager. “We have
only to set up the network security policy to grant access for the
appropriate users and use exactly all the same hardware and systems
we already use with the real benefit that we’re no longer
maintaining our own ticketing system servers which saves us a fortune.
SeatLive installed our new networked BOCA printers and had the system
up in a couple of hours, we’re also using integrated chip & pin terminals
which saves us enormously on manual reconciliation of our transactions.”
An integral part of the SeatLive package, includes a full set of email and
social media marketing capabilities and membership and promotional
schemes to help drive additional sales and awareness of the Woodville’s
events to the local community and patrons.
The Woodville’s General Manager Neil Chandler explains “We really
needed to update our box office system, but didn’t have access to
additional budget for a massive re-engineering of our business processes
nor an investment in new systems and technology and most certainly
didn’t want to end up with a small scale system that wouldn’t grow with
our needs. SeatLive’s proposition comes with no up-front costs, training
or ongoing support costs and effectively we’ve managed to fund the
entire service from booking and transaction fees. We’ve saved
considerably on staff and improved our online and telephone service,
SeatLive understand our venue and have an excellent rapport with my
team. I am very comfortable with them providing our first point of
contact with our customers. This is surely the model many venues of our
type will adopt in future and I am delighted to be leading the pack”.
Within a few short weeks we were in service with confident and trained
staff using a fantastic new system, we’re now working on developing our
upsale propositions and membership schemes.
We’re also introducing online drinks, food and merchandise ordering
through www.intervalorders.com to enhance our patrons
experience and our revenues.
See the booking
service in action at
www.woodville.co.uk
Contact
Alastair Ingram
(Manging Director) at
SeatLive on
020 7631 5571 or
alastair@seatlive.com
Intervalorders at
www.intervalorders.
com/venues
See the full range
of B2B services from
SeatLive at
www.seatlive.com
More Info
“...As AudienceView is a
web based, cloud solution,
installing the system is a
breeze...”
Ross Evans
IT Manager
230715