Customer Story - Ticketmaster

Telephone sales still add up to a substantial proportion of Ticketmaster’s business. Their offices often have thousands of fans trying to get through at the same time, when tickets for a popular event go on sale.

It’s not difficult to imagine the scenario on a day when ticket sales for Adele, Justin Bieber or U2 are due to start at 10 am. Reinout Al, Manager of Ticketmaster’s Contact Center, explains: “In the hour before the sale begins, the number of callers starts to ramp up. But around 10 o’clock it really kicks off. If we’re dealing with a very popular concert or event, hundreds or even thousands of people call at the same time trying to get tickets. But we don’t have enough agents and lines available to deal with everybody at once.”

These spikes only account for a relatively small time proportion of Ticketmaster’s typical working week. Installing more lines and hiring more agents is not a cost-efficient way of managing the situation. This would result in an enormous amount of redundant capacity and overstaffing for most of the time.

Sound of Data’s Overload Solutions service has proved to be the perfect answer to Ticketmaster’s challenge. When all lines are busy, calls that can’t be answered are queued on our platform. Waiting callers hear messages informing them about the current situation. Like if tickets to a particular event are already sold out or if they are better off ordering via the website.

Ticketmaster can now keep all callers in the loop about the current situation, instead of returning a busy tone when all lines are engaged. This improves the customer experience and perception of Ticketmaster. It also prevents a more serious technical issue caused when ‘busy tone’ callers keep redialing. Such an epidemic inflow of calls could bring the local infrastructure (e.g. PABX) down. And cause a complete halt to telephone sales.