We know that having a connected EPOS and Ticketing solution is so important for every visitor attraction, that’s why we do what we do! To help you understand some of the benefits better, we’ve popped together 5 reasons on why your visitor attraction should be using a connected EPOS and ticketing solution.
Improved Visitor Experience
Ask most attractions what their number 1 objective or mission statement is, you’ll likely hear a response that focuses on providing an amazing day out full of memories for their visitors. Most visitor attractions focus their efforts on ensuring their rating and feedback are as highly rated as possible. But to improve visitor experience you must first understand it. With a connected EPOS and Ticketing solution you can begin to understand how and where your customers engage with you. If the online ticket buying journey is smooth, when they arrive at the attraction there is no queue and simple barcode scan on entry, then you’re off to a good start. If your visitors have ticket-related discounts on food and drink outlets you can track that ticket’s spend. Learn what times of the day they are most likely to transact at kiosks and ensure that you have the right staff and stock levels to serve them. Following up on visitors after their day out and offering them vouchers or promotions based on their buying habits, could also increase their likelihood to revisit and provide positive reviews.
Membership and Loyalty Management
Members are your most important customer, they come back year after year, month after month, maybe even week after week. They have an investment in your attraction, by making their online ticketing journey simple and easy to use you can encourage them to visit you more often. Online booking can be made for events or even help manage capacity, with members able to login and manage each booking your staff don’t even have to man the phones and worry about changing booked time slots around. By connecting ticketing and EPOS, membership can be updated and renewed both online at your attraction, catering to the needs of different visitor types. If you offer member pricing in your outlets, you can begin to build a picture of that members buying habit to send them personalised/special offers to help build loyalty. Notice that they always book their membership slots and update to add x2 child day passes on? Your team could contact them with a special offer to add those child passes to their membership account. Having the information at your fingertips allows you to offer a fully integrated service and day out for that member.
Smooth Operations
Smooth out operations across your attraction and get your heads of departments talking. Connecting your ticketing and admissions team with your retail and catering team in one solution allows every action and decision become accounted for. Managing stock levels across your entire attraction makes the job of stock takes and sales reporting easier. You have one clear holistic view of the business to help you make informed decisions. Connecting your ticketing into your EPOS means you can track no shows, memberships, and day visitor levels against other operations such as sales in your gift shop. Knowing the amount of visitor to expect for an event or exhibition, allows your team to order correct stock levels and appoint the right number of staff to run said event. Connecting online sales of gift shop items and online ticket sales directly into your accounts software saves time and the margin for human error. Meaning your management team not only have a full view of your day-to-day operations but they have accurate information to make key business decisions on too.
Easier Staff Training
We know that every attraction has different types of staff, whether that’s long term staff, seasonal staff or even volunteers. We also understand that training staff can be a nightmare if you have difficult to use systems that aren’t connected. By choosing an integrated EPOS and ticketing solution the tills at your admissions desk and around your attraction all look and function the same. Simple menu set ups, easy to search for products, barcoding stock and even GiftAid capture that guides you through each step, every till can just about function in the same way. This means your staff only need to be trained once and can pretty much work at any till point across your visitor attraction. Plus, our tills have a training mode, meaning your staff can practicing processing admissions and other EPOS transactions safely to ensure they get to grips with the technology. It really couldn’t be easier!
Connected Reporting
We’ve saved the best until last. As we have alluded to throughout this article reporting really does sit at the heart of what we do. Connecting your reports of online ticket sales through to all EPOS related sales on site gives you a clear picture of how your entire attraction is performing rather than a siloed view. With our intelligent dashboards and reports you can track and monitor visitor engagement , spend and behaviour in any area of the attraction. Some popular dashboard widgets include:
- Total booked visitors today / week
- Total redeemed / non-redeemed today
- Total revenue this week with +/- of this week last year
- Tickets sold vs capacity
Popular on demand reports for your attraction include:
- Total visitors – today, this week, this month, this year
- Total daily visitors – last X number of days grid view, broken down by day
- Total daily capacity vs booked – allow for dates in the future to see future bookings
- Sales by stock category, drill down into stock records
- Member event bookings vs non members
- Membership spends – including ability to breakdown by stock category and detail – by membership types
- Sales value by day – today, this week, this month, this year
Safe to say there’s loads of options and those ticketing and EPOS reports are set up to compliment each other and provide a holistic view of every area in your business.
There is power in knowledge and by connecting your systems together you can gain important information about your attraction for growth and success tracking. If you’d like to see how VisiSoft can help your attraction transform its current online ticketing and EPOS solution then get in touch. Our team are here to help and answer any questions you might have. Don’t worry if you’re not quite ready to get in touch, we have lots of resources on our website to help convince you! Check out our demo videos, other blogs and articles or choose your industry to hear how we can help your type of attraction.
