Day 8: How to deal with customers on the door of your event

In Day 8 of our Lead up to New Year’s Eve series of blog posts we’re going to look at how to deal with customers on the door of your event.

We all know what it’s like on the door of a club, it can be a rowdy and sometimes high stress environment and if it goes wrong it can spoil everyone’s night. For Skiddle’s part there are some things to bear in mind to keep everything running smoothly.

As discussed in yesterday’s post in this series, once your tickets have closed (either at the time you specified when setting tickets up, or if you manually close them), you will receive an email containing an eTicket list as an attachment.

This list is an optimised A4 print-out, which lists all customers in an easy-to-read A-Z format, sorted by customer surname. This list has been carefully designed to make it as easy for you to use on the night as possible.

You need to print your list on A4 paper (landscape for large lists) and take this list with you to the event.

When customers arrive, they simply give you their full name, you locate them on the list then ask to see their debit/credit card. The card type and last 4 digits are shown on your list for easy reference. Then simply cross the customer off the list and admit them to your event.

Refusing Entry:

There are times when you may need to refuse entry to a customer, due to reasonable grounds, such as health and safety. Please note, in cases of events reaching capacity, customers who have pre-purchased tickets should always be given priority over walk-up customers.

In cases of refused entry, customers will often contact Skiddle after the event asking for a refund, to which they are entitled if they did not enter the event. At this point, we would contact yourself for confirmation.

Our standard policy is if a customer has already purchased a ticket through Skiddle, is that you give them an on-the-spot refund of the face value they paid in advance.

There are a couple of circumstances in which you may refuse entry. The first may be that the customer hasn’t brought their ticket (or RapidScan barcode), or their debit card with them. It’s made clear to the customers what they should bring to the door with them depending on the type of ticket they’ve purchased.

e-Tickets customers are specifically informed that they need to bring the card that they purchased the tickets with so the last 4 digits can be checked against the list you’ve got from Skiddle. If they don’t bring the card with them, your door staff are well within their rights to refuse entry.

The other things that are likely to come about (and let’s hope this doesn’t happen this New Year’s Eve) is that someone is going to be causing a disturbance and you’ll have no choice but to refuse entry.

In both of the above circumstances be as polite as possible in the circumstances, using your discretion where you can and remember if you have to refuse entry your door staff must refund the face value of the ticket there and then.

How this affects the ticket money remittance process

If you follow the above rule of thumb there should be no issue. However in some circumstances we may need to hold your event’s ticket remittance back while we investigate any refund claims that come through. This allows us to ensure we still hold the money to process the refunds if authorised.

This can be difficult, especially if the customer contacts us a few days later and you may not be able to remember who was turned away, and ultimately no promoter wants their ticket money delayed – so the best practice is to make it clear to the door team that anyone who is refused entry should get a face value refund on the spot.

If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager by calling 0843 289 9489 or by emailing actmanagers@skiddle.com.