How Ticketek dramatically improved their customer service team

“Not having to go through the recruitment process is a gamechanger. With Sidekicker, everything is taken care of. The time saved on admin significantly outweighs the cost.”

Steve Prosser, Head of Frontline Services, Ticketek New Zealand 

Ticketek is the leading ticketing partner to the sports and entertainment industry.

Ticketek provides venues with an end-to-end ticketing and promotion service – from online sales, event delivery and frontline services to a dedicated team of call centre representatives and box office sales.

The challenge

Operating in a highly seasonal industry, Ticketek experiences significant peaks and troughs in demand for their frontline workforce (i.e. call centre staff, box office staff, event day labour, and ticket scanning staff).

To manage this, Ticketek would run recruitment drives around the country 3-4 times per year, hiring dozens of casual staff at a time to scale up their workforce to cover peak periods.

Steve Prosser, Head of Frontline Services, describes the process:

Our casual staffing operation would cause a lot of additional work during peak times. The process was a massive job for an already lean department – posting job ads, shortlisting candidates, interviewing, onboarding, preparing contracts, and then following up on paperwork – all just to get an employee set up. Not to mention the preparation of rosters, collation of timesheets and the weekly payroll process.

Unable to provide regular work during downturn periods, quality casuals would churn, requiring Ticketek to go through the entire process again when their next peak period approached.

The solution

Engaging with Sidekicker Ticketek had 2 key concerns–cost and compromising staff quality. These were swiftly mitigated in the following ways:

Saving time and money

Not having to go through the recruitment process is a gamechanger. With Sidekicker, everything is taken care of – advertising, interviewing, onboarding, payroll, etc.

The ease of the platform also gives us flexibility, so we’re able to just get the right people in when we need them. The time saved on admin significantly outweighs the cost of Sidekicker.

Improving staff quality and retention

The fact you can choose your own staff on Sidekicker (compared to traditional agencies) using profiles with experience and bios mitigates any potential problems with quality or brand fit. And the ability to simply blacklist staff who don’t work well with our brand allows us to continually curate our Sidekicker workforce.

We’re able to really own the relationship with the staff and rehire the best workers through private Talent Pools. And given that staff have access to other work on Sidekicker means we don’t lose the best talent during our quiet periods.

Our staff repetition has greatly increased, which means we save time training new staff when our regular Sidekicks can simply walk in the door and pick up the job on the day.

We love it when we see familiar faces applying for jobs with us and are really proud of the fact that these staff are wanting to come back to work with us time and time again

The results

Since February 2019 Sidekicker has provided Ticketek NZ with 100% of their casual frontline workforce. During this time the following has been achieved:

  • Considerable time saved using Sidekicker to recruit and onboard new staff
  • Time and financial savings with reduction of casual labour payroll and processing
  • Improvement in staff quality
  • Improved staff repetition & retention
  • Fully engaged, well presented and happy casual employees who enjoy what they do

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