By: Mike Evenson, CMO at AudienceView
I often get asked, “What is customer success?” My answer is usually, “It depends.” This may seem like a total cop out, but allow me to explain.
Over my 10 years at AudienceView, I’ve participated in endless debates around what should seemingly be an obvious answer – who is our customer? Given that we sell software to live events organizations, one could easily surmise that our customer is the live events organization itself. Peeling back the layers, however, raises questions about making that declaration. It also provides people with a window inside the amazingly complex and beautiful business of live events, which we live and breathe each day at AudienceView.
From the outside looking in, ticketing and live events might seem relatively basic. Someone puts on a show and people buy tickets to attend. When we hire new employees who aren’t familiar with the inner workings of the live events space, within a few weeks they usually say they didn’t realize ticketing was so complex. I feel that’s a credit to companies like AudienceView that work so hard to make something complex seem simple to the ticket holder. From the products we build to our amazing clients that use our products and services to create unforgettable experiences for their customers, we understand that our role is to help facilitate success throughout the entire live event journey.
So are ticketing professionals that make the complex seem simple our customers? Yes.
The fundraiser who is cultivating relationships and finding that next donor? Absolutely.
Or the marketer charged with creating and promoting these unforgettable experiences? 100%.
What about the producers and promoters that fund these events across theatre, music, sports and more? Of course.
And what about the patrons, fans, donors and live event attendees who are buying tickets and attending events every day? Bingo.
The reality is we support a myriad of customers that all play significant roles in our industry. We build products and offer services that help everyone listed above, along with plenty of others, get the most out of their part in the live event experience.
It’s a lot to keep track of – but this is why our customer success team jumps out of bed each morning.
We are lucky to have a team that loves the complexity and the challenge that comes with working in our industry. They bring everyone’s voices back into AudienceView to drive our strategy, focus and innovation.
We also work hard to present ideas, opportunities and insights to the clients through our customer success methodology. AudienceView has grown significantly over the past few years and we now support over 4,200 clients across 8,000 venues. Over the past 12 months, we’ve helped organizations around the world put on too many live event experiences to count. That makes us one of the biggest live event companies in the world.
With so many clients, events and experiences, our success model simply can’t be generic. Rather, it is designed to adapt to the individual missions that our clients are driving to accomplish. Whether the mission is a capital campaign to refurbish a theater, endowments to drive student-athlete scholarships or simply increasing revenue to reinvest in building greater event experiences (or buy that new stage light), our team is charged with getting to the root of why our clients exist and their core purpose. We then recommend a mix of our products and services along with our ideas and methodologies. Finally, we create unique success plans to support and accomplish their mission. This is the fun part that we love and how we define success at AudienceView.
Perhaps now you better understand why the question “what is customer success?” simply doesn’t have a straightforward answer. But it’s also why we love working with our clients, their customers and everyone else in live events. Every department in our company – from engineering and support to finance and HR – supports our customer success methodology and desire to serve this complex industry while making it look simple. At AudienceView, we live for this and value the role that everyone plays in creating success.