Ticketek.com Fit for E-Commerce in 2003?

by: Marc Dominick

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Objective 1
1.2 Outline 1

2 Company profile 2

3 Current strategy, goals and associated business processes 3

3.1 Business strategy 3
3.2 Current goals and associated processes 4

4 Business model and business process overview 5

4.1 Business model 5
4.2 Business process overview and eCommerce implementation 6

5 Customer and business activities supported by the Internet 7

5.1 Need recognition and identification (stimulation) 7
5.2 Information search 9
5.3 Evaluation and selection 10
5.4 Purchase payment and delivery 11

5.4.1 Payment 11
5.4.2 Ticket delivery 11

5.5 Customer service and support 12

6 Strengths, weaknesses and critical success factors 13

6.1 Ticketek’s eCommerce strengths and weaknesses 13
6.2 Critical success factor matrix 14

7 eCommerce IT infrastructure 16

8 Conclusion 17

9 Appendix 18

9.1 Customer relationship management (CRM) 18

9.1.1 Collecting customer data 18
9.1.2 Analysing and reacting on customer data 19

9.2 Email from 29.4.2003 20
9.3 Confirmation emails 21

9.3.1 email 1 21
9.3.2 email 2 22
9.3.3 email 3 – friendly reminder 23
9.3.4 Email 4 – automated response 23

9.4 Result of the ‘event selector’ (extract) 24
9.5 Possibilities for customer loyalty - What is a ticket? 24
9.6 SWOT 25
9.7 Revenue opportunities 26

10 References 27

1 Introduction

Ticketek was the lucky first mover to establish the in the ticketing industry tre-mendously important contracts with venues and event promoters. As a conse-quence Ticketek has been able to keep competitors well at arm’s length. Custom-ers comfort and habit contributed to a market with monopolistic character, too. In 2003, however, where people have more leisure time and more money in their pockets than ever before, the next ticket agency is not located at the other end of the town but exactly one mouse click away! And if the customer experiences more fun and an equal level of payment security and reliability at ticket company X’s Web page, he will ditch Ticketek. In 2008, when there are no paper tickets but only digital tickets around, Ticketek can close down its 200 points of sale in New Zealand (About Ticketek) which will have become more of a handicap than a competitive advantage.

1.1 Objective

The objective of this report is to analyze Ticketek’s current eCommerce strategy and to give recommendations for improvements such as how to shift more cus-tomers form conventional channels to the online channel. But it will also show that cost reduction and a better range to reach customers can’t be the only reasons for selling ticket’s online. This report’s second main goal is to make sensitive to the enormous possibilities the Internet offers to support customer relationship management, because market leaders of the future do cus-tomize each interaction with each customer. (Newell, 2000, p.262)

1.2 Outline

Before in the main chapter (5) the customer and business activities supported by the Internet are analysed in detail, a brief company profile is given (2), the current strategy and business goals (3), and the business model as well as processes are examined (4). Chapter six presents on overview over strength and weaknesses and closes with a critical success factor matrix. After a brief look at the eCommerce infrastructure in chapter seven, a conclusion is given in chapter eight.

2 Company profile

Ticketek sell tickets for a wide range of events including sports, concerts, musical and theatre. Ticketek is Australasia’s leading sports and entertainment ticketing service company. In New Zealand alone, yearly more than two million tickets have been sold. (About Ticketek) Ticketek was founded in 1979 and in May 1999 acquired and since then wholly owned by ecorp Ltd. Ticketek. (About Ticketek) Ticketek’s subsidiary Softix “develops, installs and supports entertainment ticket-ing software worldwide” (Softix).

3 Current strategy, goals and associated business processes

3.1 Business strategy

A concrete reason for existence or vision is not stated in the publicly available in-formation. However, Ticketek’s main focus is to consolidate its operations as Aus-tralia’s and New Zealand′s leading ticketing company and to invest in developing its online capability to make the most of its eCommerce opportunities. (ecorp Ticketek) This simply means Ticketek strives to widen the customer base in order to in-crease revenues and to diminish costs which finally results in maximized profits. The Internet presence is both part and main supporter of this strategy. First of all, it widens the potential customer base because it expands the market place from the physical agencies to every single person with access to the Internet. And secondly, it decreases costs because the physical selling points with its sales agents as well as call centres can be reduced to a great extent. (Turban, King, Lee, Warkentin & Chung, 2002, pp.25-27) The following figure gives an overview of the sales channels used to sell tickets to consumers.

Taking the cost efficiency aspect into account it is obvious that Ticketek wants to shift as much ticket sales transactions as possible to the Internet. Hence, funda-mental to Ticketek’s success is their website’s ability to attract and convince cus-tomers to buy tickets online instead of doing it with cost intensive agencies or call centres. That is to say, Ticketek’s website must offer distinctive added values, conventional methods just cannot.

3.2 Current goals and associated processes

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