When Miles Leven arrived at Cheltenham Playhouse as its new Theatre Manager, he found something that told him everything he needed to know: a wooden tray, purpose-built over a decade ago, filled with alphabetically sorted printed tickets. Every booking generated a physical ticket. Staff sorted them by customer, then re-sorted them month by month, show by show. When customers asked for postal delivery, the theatre covered the postage itself. When customers lost their tickets or forgot to bring them, staff simply reprinted them.
"You would probably be shocked," Miles says, "to discover the vast amount of printed tickets and the man-hours going into box office in its previous iteration."
Cheltenham wasn't unusual. These processes exist at venues across the country, not because anyone chose them deliberately, but because they evolved gradually, and changing them can feel daunting.
At Cheltenham, the manual processes had their own internal logic: staff knew the system, customers had adapted to it, and it functioned. But the costs were quietly adding up: postage, reprinting, and the staff hours spent sorting and resorting. And the customer experience wasn't keeping pace with the quality of the work on stage.
Miles had seen similar warning signs before. At Sandpit Theatre in St Albans, his previous venue, the signal was different but equally telling: four or five phone calls a day from customers who couldn't complete a booking online.
"I'm struggling to book through your website, can you just do it for me?" That kind of feedback, Miles says, is worth listening to. When the booking process creates friction for customers, it's worth asking whether there's a better way.
"Sunday night export. Monday morning everything was there. By Tuesday everything was correct."
Winning over the board wasn't difficult either. Miles presented live demos, drew on his experience at previous venues, and made a straightforward financial case. The model works on a booking-fee basis: the cost of the system is covered by a small fee on each transaction rather than sitting as a fixed line in the operational budget. This means the system scales with activity rather than adding to overheads regardless of how busy the season is.
"For us, it's effectively cost neutral."
Miles had already seen how quickly this could take hold. At Sandpit, student volunteers took to scanning almost instantly. He set up simple NFC tags labelled "Usher 1" and "Usher 2." Volunteers tapped the tag on their phone, were taken straight to the check-in screen, and were scanning tickets within seconds. This meant that the venue was able to stop scheduling a dedicated box office staff member at every performance entirely.
"The duty manager can now handle almost everything from their phone."
Ticket queries, seating questions, check-ins: all resolved on a mobile device, without anyone needing to sit behind a desk. For a 180-seat venue where every staff member and every pound counts, that's a meaningful operational saving.
One of the features he was most eager to activate was Apple Pay and Google Pay through Ticketsolve Pay. With a significant proportion of bookings happening on mobile, the friction of manually entering card details at checkout was a real barrier.
"As a consumer, I hate it when I have to get my credit card out. I'm so used to just double-clicking to pay."
Fewer steps to checkout means fewer abandoned bookings. It means fewer support calls. And it means customers have an experience that matches the quality of the show they're coming to see.
Not everyone on Miles's team was a digital native. Several box office staff had been in their roles for over twenty years, and the prospect of a new system understandably prompted some anxiety.
What made the difference was the way the transition was handled. Live training sessions, box office courses, and access to the Ticketsolve Academy gave staff the space to build confidence without feeling overwhelmed. The morning of this interview, Miles's team had spent an hour working through a Box Office Essentials session, a repeat of training they'd only received a week earlier.
"The team were made to feel at ease."
Miles is clear that much of the initial apprehension came not from unwillingness to learn, but from the complexity of the previous system. Ticketsolve, by comparison, works the way people expect it to. Things are where you'd instinctively look for them.
Miles has now implemented Ticketsolve at two venues and worked with it at a third. All three are still using it.
"I can speak confidently from managing multiple 200-300 seat venues. Ticketsolve gives you a professional level of service in a package that works for smaller theatres. I haven't found a reason to move on."
Small and mid-scale venues are often told that professional-grade systems are out of their reach, too expensive, too complex, too built for bigger organisations. Miles's experience suggests otherwise. The right system just has to work: for the staff using it, the customers booking through it, and the board that needs to justify the investment.
At Cheltenham Playhouse, the wooden ticket tray is already a thing of the past. What's replaced it isn't just a new piece of software, it's a front of house operation that finally matches what's happening on stage.