Getting more out of Tessitura CSIs

CRM systems track interactions with your customers and store information about them, building a holistic picture of your audiences over time. This may include personally identifiable data (address; date of birth; contact details) or more contextual data (accessibility requirements; visitor satisfaction feedback; lost property notes; seating requests).

However, venues often struggle to store this qualitative data in a way that is useful, secure and easily accessible for staff. Many use spreadsheets, siloing it away from the wider staff team and disconnecting it from the ‘macro view’ of each visitor that your CRM has the power to generate.

For organisations who use Tessitura as their CRM system, a common approach to mitigate this is by using CSIs (Customer Service Issues).

What is a CSI?

A CSI is a text-based note field “that can be used to record and internally communicate responses, requests, and special needs” – Tessitura. Think of it like adding a post-it note to a customer record. CSIs can be associated with a performance or event (e.g. if a customer is requesting access assistance on a specific date they're visiting). You can even assign a CSI to individual staff users, meaning they take responsibility for following up on the issue if action is required. A CSI can either be closed once resolved, or left open - either way the note remains recorded in the database, adding an audit trail that can be referred back to in the future.

Because the CSI is an open text-field, it’s easy to see why they’re commonly used for multiple purposes. However there are some limitations. In Tessitura’s online checkout path - TNEW - there are only a limited number of pre-defined points that you can collect data that you want to store in a CSI. Conversely when we look at offline usage of CSIs (e.g. Box Office teams who log in to the Tessitura application directly) there is no enforceable structure or template which data has to follow as it’s inputted. This can create inconsistencies in the length and quality of data recorded.

This got us thinking about whether we could find a way to make CSIs even more usable and useful by providing more control over how you can get data into a CSI (both online and offline), and more flexibility over how you can view and track CSIs. We’ve spoken to three organisations who all use CSIs very differently, but have now taken the Tessitura out-the-box functionality to the next level by using Action Links to either collect, format or circulate CSI data for maximum efficiency. Here’s how they did it…

Collecting long-form text data

Birmingham Hippodrome

Sometimes you need to ask your visitors to answer questions that don’t have fixed pre-defined options - instead they are open-ended and can require significant detail. In these scenarios, an obvious place to store responses is a CSI due to their generous character limit (4,000 characters). For example, at theatre venue Birmingham Hippodrome users making a booking in the restaurant are prompted to provide notes about dietary requirements when checking out online (Birmingham Hippodrome use Viadukt as their checkout provider). These are stored in Tessitura as CSIs, allowing the restaurant team to review and prepare appropriately.

But Birmingham Hippodrome also needed to collect long-form text data during online interactions with users that weren’t actually moving through their checkout at all. And this is where Action Links stepped in. We worked with them on two online journeys (an application form and an enquiry form) that both needed to collect qualitative data, to be stored on the customer record in Tessitura.

Both of these processes needed to maintain a human touch-point from staff (either assessment for eligibility, or personal contact as part of a philanthropic relationship). In these scenarios where you don’t want to fully automate a process, a CSI can be a great intermediary point to collect and store information in a hands-off way, before prompting a secondary follow-on step from your team that needs to be manual.

Standardising CSI data entry

London & Whipsnade Zoo

As well as being created via online journeys, CSIs are frequently used offline by Contact Centre staff. However because a CSI can’t be ‘templated’,  information gathered can be inconsistent in detail and length.

This was a familiar challenge at London & Whipsnade Zoo who offer a wide range of Experience events, from ‘Meet The Giraffes’ to ‘Lodge Sleepovers’. Each different experience has a unique set of question and answer information that ticket sellers must collect from the booker. This can include XXX. If you book online, this data is collected via TNEW custom forms (a different form per Experience), flowing back into a CSI in Tessitura.

If booking over the phone or ticket desk, this same data needs to be collected. Previously this relied on the seller looking up the relevant set of form questions for each Experience (stored in a shared company document), then copying and pasting these into a CSI before inputting the customer’s responses. Sometimes the incorrect set of form questions was copied, at other times questions were skipped entirely and not answered, so the team were finding gaps in the data they were collecting.

The formatting of the data within these CSIs is also critical because the Experiences team use a custom Tessitura report to review and prepare for each day’s bookings. If the CSI data does not exactly match the required formatting structure of the report, then the report will error and break. (Cue the team then having to manually search through countless CSIs by hand to find the culprit and edit the formatting by hand). This was becoming time-consuming and inefficient.

London & Whipsnade Zoo have now completely revolutionised how Experience booking data is collected for offline sales, using a combination of Tessitura custom screens and Action Links forms. (For those unfamiliar with custom screens, they’re a way to load browser-based webpages within the Tessitura application). So how does it work?

• The seller opens a custom screen in Tessitura (set up within a custom tab on the constituent view) which loads an Action Links ‘Experience Booking’ form. 
• They select the relevant Experience (e.g. ‘Meet The Giraffes’) as Action Links triggers a stored procedure to look up a Tessitura Keyword tag on this performance. 
• The Keyword indicates which set of form questions are required for the Experience - these are fetched from XXX.
• Action Links displays the correct set of form questions and the seller is required to complete all of them. Action Links then sends the form response data to a CSI on the relevant customer record, but crucially it does this in a uniform, standardised data structure.

Using the custom screens functionality in Tessitura keeps the entire selling journey within the Tessitura application, rather than the team having to open shared documents to copy and paste form questions. Action Links requires every question to be answered, preventing staff from skipping or missing questions and ensuring there's no more missing data. A streamlined process for staff, and a watertight way to prevent poor quality data collection.

Reviewing and tracking CSI activity

Newcastle Theatre Royal

The lifecycle of a CSI doesn’t have to end at the point the customer information is captured and stored. Newcastle Theatre Royal have reimagined their entire customer feedback process and are now using CSIs end-to-end.

Previously, audiences had to submit feedback via email to an inbox overseen by staff. Feedback was recorded in a spreadsheet and the emails forwarded to relevant teams to review, but after that the outcomes were unknown - the audit trail would go cold. None of the feedback made its way into Tessitura so there was no easy way to see a holistic or historical view of a customer’s interactions with the venue - good or bad - or to view the status of any ongoing issues and spot recurring themes.

The team have now built an entirely new feedback process that uses both CSIs and Action Links hand-in-hand. This starts with an Action Links form that allows users to submit feedback via the venue's website, but first requires them to login to their customer account. This allows us to identify who the user is and therefore which customer record in Tessitura we want to associate with the feedback.

The form also allows users to select which area of the business their feedback relates to and this assigns a relevant CSI ‘Type’ in Tessitura. This means that behind the scenes, feedback can be grouped and filtered by business area - essential when you’re dealing with large datasets.

But it doesn’t stop there. Newcastle Theatre Royal uses Tessitura’s ‘Customer Service Issue Tracking’ report to automatically email each department daily, informing them of new CSIs that relate to their teams. This report includes a clickable URL that opens an Action Links webpage where staff can look-up a CSI number and review the customer feedback in more detail than the report shows. The staff member can add notes and next steps, or even change the status of the CSI to ‘closed’ if the issue is now resolved - any changes are automatically updated in Tessitura.

This look-up page is critical for staff who do not have access to Tessitura (e.g. Hospitality staff or Building Tours), removing the reliance on Tessitura trained staff to be the only ones managing CSIs. Newcastle Theatre Royal have been able to hand over responsibility for tracking issues directly to the teams they relate to, whilst still retaining a record within Tessitura of actions taken.

Storing feedback in Tessitura also now allows Newcastle Theatre Royal to reflect on trends or repeat issues. They utilise Tessitura Analytics dashboards to review the proportion of negative and positive sentiment, which areas of the business these are originating from, and how this changes over time.

Tracking this data in a more formalised way has made reporting on customer sentiment KPIs much quicker and easier too (Newcastle Theatre Royal have a target of responding to all feedback within 10 days and previously this was impossible to measure). If you haven’t yet explored Analytics dashboards, it’s worth checking them out as a way to get more familiar with your data and the insights it can hold.

If this has inspired you to review how you collect, store and use CSI data and are keen to find ways to make more efficient use of them, we’d love to hear from you at hello@actionlinks.io