Chelsea Football Club: English Premiership Champions
"We reviewed the market and looked specifically for a stable ticketing system for our Ticket Office coupled with fast and efficient sales for our customers buying online. Tickets.com were by far the best option and fit for the clubs vision moving forward ”
- Peter Kenyon, CEO Chelsea Football Club
Background
Chelsea Football Club celebrated their centenary in 2005, and their form on the pitch over the last few years has been remarkable. The Premiership Champions start their defence on the 20th August against Manchester City FC. With a capacity of over 42,000 the stadium regularly entertains a capacity crowd and has grown its membership base to over 80000 individuals. Stamford Bridge contains two 4 star hotels, five restaurants, conference and banqueting facilities, a health club, business centre and two retail stores.
Key Benefits
Since Tickets.com installed its ProVenueMax™ system Chelsea has seen great improvement in all areas of ticketing and CRM. The most noted benefit was the increase in the ease of their online sales including season tickets and memberships. This year the system surpassed all online records due to its simplicity and ability to handle large volumes of traffic. Over 44% of season tickets and over 63% of memberships have been processed online which equated for approximately 40,000 transactions. This is still along way off The Chicago Cubs Baseball Club record of 597,000 tickets in 24hrs but Chelsea has the reassurance that the system can cope with substantial demand.
Chelsea also required better security functionality for the ticket office and fans, in order to reduce the possibility of ticket touting and to make sure the fans get the correct amount of tickets according to their membership category. One of ProVenueMax™ features is to restrict ticket sales to the appropriate purchaser (Season Ticket Holder, Member and General Sales) at the appropriate time.
ProVenueMax™ is interfaced with Chelsea’s loyalty point scheme provider, ScotComms (TeamCard™) which allows fans to earn points if they are a dedicated supporter. These points are included in the customer’s record in ProVenueMax™ and can be redeemed at the club for a variety of products including tickets.
Tickets.com has also implemented the Friends and Family Scheme which allows Season Ticket Holders to purchase additional tickets on behalf of their friends and family so that all seats will be allocated together. It also allows members or season tickets holders to have seats allocated together while a match is on a one ticket per member status.
A key issue for any major football club is fraud prevention and using ProVenueMax™ Chelsea FC can monitor fans purchasing behaviour and ensure the loyal fan is purchasing the correct ticket. The system will not allow adult members to purchase junior tickets either at the box office or online unless they are included in the customer’s friends and family list. Another tool to ensure accuracy is the linking of a season ticket holder or members date of birth to any age restriction on the type of ticket they buy. This means that not only are full price purchasers automatically restricted from purchasing reduced tickets, but also as soon as children turn 17 they are forced to relinquish the concessionary rate.
Support is also a key factor to Chelsea FC and Tickets.com are the only ticketing company to offer 24/7 Help Desk Institute Accredited support.
In partnership with Chelsea FC, Tickets.com is proud to help provide an excellent ticketing service to staff, members, season ticket holders, ticket buyers and participants in community schemes alike.
“I ordered Chelsea/Man City tickets on Monday morning and was amazed at how quick it was - especially at 9:15am which I thought would be peak time... great stuff. So much better than the previous systems.”
“At last, a system that was quick and easy to use !!!” ( un-named fan posted this message on the fans website )
“The new system doesn't suffer from the 7am 'crash' and can cope with much higher volumes. This was a very important change which Chelsea deserve credit for implementing.“
“Vast improvement on last year. Getting tickets was easy and quick. The system was user friendly and no bother. I would recommend using the online system to anyone.”
