How the hugely popular London Symphony Orchestra handles high demand onsales

Challenge

To sell the sought-after seats for their 70 performances each year, the London Symphony Orchestra had been releasing their tickets through seasonal online ticket sales. The combination of this year’s seasonal program release announced in tandem with a preview of LSO’s new visual identity was sure to attract a significantly above average level of visitors to their website.

When fans flooded the LSO website, LSO redirected their customers to the website of their home venue, the Barbican Centre, to handle any overflow of traffic during online peak sales. In order to find a solution which would create consistency between their brand and own their customer experience, LSO wanted to secure a complete and more efficient ticket onsale process that could deliver a consistent online experience.

LSO’s focus was to maintain their reputation and deliver the overarching thrill that goes along with seeing one of the top orchestras perform by approaching their onsales with the same values adopted in their brand. This required a reliable solution able to maintain their website capacity, capable of serving as significant road blocks in their marketing efforts.

Solution

London Symphony Orchestra decided to use the virtual waiting room after a first-hand experience of the Barbican Centre’s use of Queue-it as part of the Hamlet ticket release, one of the most popular performances the venue had hosted. By closely working together with the Centre, London Symphony Orchestra identified that the waiting room could be implemented with simplicity and ease on their own website. The integration enabled LSO to control the process for handling user inflows, and secure a smooth, undisrupted experience for their ticket seekers.

Having seasonal ticket sales, LSO’s decision to use Queue-it was also based on an additional benefit the brand-conscious organization identified: introducing their new online visual identity, launched in September 2017. Announcing the seasonal launch together with the preview of the new brand identity proved to be a key event for LSO, bringing exposure to the local community and press from the art and culture industry who were anxious to see the redesign of the LSO brand. This event created a new level of anticipation for the seasonal ticket onsales, resulting in online traffic activity achieving new heights.

"We did not want something that is hard to set up. Queue-it just had all the elements that we needed. Being this fast and easy to implement proved its expertise."

Jo Johnson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, LSO

Results

The waiting room managed to smooth out the increased flow of customers during their online season ticket launch. The waiting room proved to be a reliable solution for both ticket-selling and marketing related efforts. Queue-it’s virtual waiting room successfully maintained customers on LSO’s website, helping them complete their ticket purchases, while creating awareness around LSO’s new brand identity.

"The biggest advantage was, of course, that the website stayed up. The waiting room made people acknowledge the importance of the event and the way in which it was managed, which generated the desired hype and positive feedback. Reputational aspects were important for us."

Jo Johnson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, LSO

About The London Symphony Orchestra

The London Symphony Orchestra is among the top performing orchestras in the world, attracting thousands of music enthusiasts every year. Being a top attraction for classical music fans all over the UK, their collaboration with top performing artists have made them one of the biggest players in arts & culture.