Waitrose choose IRIS Ticketing Solutions to enhance customer service at Farm Food Festival
The Waitrose Spring Food Festival is a key event in the Waitrose calendar. More than 8,000 people are expected to attend the event over the late May bank holiday weekend, which features local and regional food suppliers, cookery demonstrations and workshops. This year Waitrose have chosen IRIS Web from IRIS Ticketing Solutions to handle their ticket sales, expecting to sell up to 90% of the tickets in advance through their website. IRIS Web offers Waitrose a cost-effective, flexible ticketing solution that enables them to match their brand values and levels of customer service across the whole festival.
“We have been running the event at our farm in Leckford for 5 years now and the attendance has grown from 100 to over 7,000 in that time,” Carolyn Thompson of Waitrose explained. “This year we faced the challenge of keeping an eye on ticket fulfilment costs, whilst needing to improve the quality of service to our customers, which is the highest priority for Waitrose”.
“We are very happy that through IRIS Ticketing Solutions we have now got our own ticketing system and managed to keep the costs as low as possible”.
Carolyn continued, “It was important for us to be able to reflect the quality of our brand and our service. IRIS Ticketing Solutions has provided us with a solution that is professional looking and matches our website brand“.
“We are also delighted with the reporting side of IRIS Web and being able to view who has purchased tickets, or booked a timed farm tractor tour. We previously had to request this information and wait for our agency to send it to us – which did not reflect the service we expect. Also, we now have the flexibility to offer farm tour tickets online, set up using time slots to manage capacity.” She concluded.
Jonathan Kirkpatrick, Business Development Manager at IRIS Ticketing Solutions commented, “We worked hard to offer Waitrose a solution that meets their customer service needs, at a cost that is right for their business. We have used CSS Style Sheets in the kiosk to reflect their branding, and they can simply log into IRIS Ticketing Solutions to access the online reporting for all their ticket sales updates. We look forward to helping Waitrose achieve a sell out event and increasing their online sales to nearly 100%.
