Arts People vs. Verint Community

Arts People is one of the best business decisions our theatre has ever made. It relieves staff of some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks while increasing the ease of selling tickets and subscriptions. That's our goal--to sell tickets easily, in a user-friendly manner at a reasonable cost. That's what Arts People allows us to do. It works for tiny venues (to greet each guest personally) as well as huge venues (ticket scanning solution). It is less appropriate for a one-time event. An Arts People user should have an ongoing series of events to take advantage of all the features (it even has a membership feature) and the time for training.

Incentivized

If you need a community platform that's very versatile and has a relatively low entry-cost to get started, Verint is a good pick. If you need a solution that is guaranteed to work seamlessly and have no hiccups or issues overall, it is not well suited. Although it is a SAAS solution, some of the aspects of the platform do not make it seem so.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is unsurpassed. Sometimes several folks will be working on different aspects of a complicated request, to address all the details. Once things are exactly the way I want it, as in season subscription package sales, a representative checks in to make sure we're satisfied. Only then is the ticket closed.
• They have a very comprehensive, full featured ticketing system for all types of events and venues. Their dynamic door list is our favorite feature--no static printed door lists for us. That helps us greet each patron with up-to-date information and check them off the list. While my box officers are doing that, I can be at a remote location and see in real time who has arrived. We can make collaborative decisions about, for instance, holding the curtain for a critics arrival or adding a chair for an unexpected guest of a ticket-holder. We can keep a couple of tickets on hold for box officer discretion to address those unforeseen ticket window requests. Great flexibility which allows us to be efficient while giving good customer service to our patrons.
• Even though the system is full-featured, it is not beyond the skills of those who considers themselves non-technical. Two sessions of training will get a box officer up-and-running. Because there are different levels of access, we don't have to worry about someone changing essential programming while they are checking in patrons.
• They made their ticket landing page look like our website, so people don't even realize that they have been taken somewhere else. Plus, the patron can easily navigate back to our actual site, seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Forums - organizing forum questions and identifying answered
• Various layouts of blogs, divided by groups to enable different or similar layouts throughout the site. Ability to enable all to view the same or have particular groups of blogs to stand out and have it's own look and feel
• ability to customize widgets to the needs of your use case

• Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• I would like to see engagement in the Elevate platform increase in discussions. We get so busy in our day, it is hard at times to get enough activity in a topic I know many struggle with in the contact center. The more sharing the better.
• It would be nice if it were easier to connect as friends. That piece in Elevate seems difficult to build a network group and communicate with them all at one time on a topic or encourage them to join a discussion board when you know they have contributions that would benefit.

I am not part of this decision making process, but I did provide positive feedback to the decision making board.

Incentivized

If you are an experienced online community professional, Verint offers the flexibility you need. You do need to have a lot of expertise if you want to build a solid user experience because there isn't a template out-of-the-box that is just ready to go for various use cases. It will take awhile to fully understand the capabilities of Verint Community.

While the support portal (cases) is helpful, I've been even more impressed by their own support community. I always get quick, thoughtful, and interesting answers to my questions from support personnel, in-house developers, other users, and even the VP/GM himself! They have a really wonderful thing going there.

all customizations should be under warranty so that you get the right level of support from the 3rd party

• Eventbrite is better for single, one-time events but isn't as full-featured as Arts People.
• Brown Paper Tickets is clunky to use and harder to change globally when an event changes or adds shows.
• Vendini--never used it because when I researched 10 different ticketing companies, they were the least helpful. They didn't listen to our needs, and instead told us what we should have. They were much more expensive than Arts People as well.
• Constant Contact is truly great as a marketing tool. But their events feature was awkward and the payment method was Paypal. However, since it's integrated with Arts People, we can use Arts People for sales and Constant Contact for marketing.

Incentivized

I believe Verint Community stacks up very against previous solutions I have worked with. For an externally facing community, I think Jive-X was the best in class for many years, and Verint matches up very well from a features and configuration perspective. The other key point for me, is that Verint Community is also similar to Jive in that it has an extremely strong customer community of experienced community professionals. Verint does a great job of engaging with us about future plans, roadmaps, events, etc. I think this is a very under-rated benefit of a community platform, and Verint's is exceptional.

Incentivized

Highly scalable system with the ability to expand to an increasing number of users and communities

• Positive - Our online vs phone call or in-person sales have increased steadily over the past 4 years since using Arts People. Less labor for us, more sales.
• Positive - People are buying their tickets earlier than they used to - to reserve a coveted seat in a possible sold-out performance. That makes planning our marketing easier--whether to offer HotTix or special coded offers for shows that have fewer sales.
• Negative - Some older folks still have problems with redeeming their subscription tickets for individual tickets without our personal assistance. We've been trying to pinpoint what that is--and Arts People helped us make a few adjustments. Sometimes people don't like to log in. That's one of the challenges of an integrated system. If the patron's profile changes in a way that impacts their subscription links, we need to step in. However, the overall time it has saved us in managing subscriptions is immeasurable.

Incentivized

• Verint Community has helped to gain more than one lakh users which shows that the platform is extremely stable and engaging. This helped for more brand awareness and e-commerce conversion rates
• We have had huge problems with non English countries where this platform's limitations has caused huge number of loss and less user count. Hopefully this is fixed soon.
• Our major plan was to expand our segments and verticals such as gaming, education and business which was done very well by using this platform and our team was able to customize it based on our brand's identity. We looking to expand to much more countries and hopefully target all our worldwide businesses.

Incentivized