Seat upgrade and relocation request tracker
Problem
A supporter who wants a better seat or to move blocks calls the box office, and whoever answers checks availability by eye against a printed seating chart or the ticketing platform, quotes a price from memory, and promises to follow up. The promise lives in that person's head or a sticky note. If they are off sick the next day, the request is gone. Two staff members sometimes offer the same seat to different supporters because neither checked what the other had promised. Accessible seating and concession linked requests get the least consistent handling of all, because the eligibility rules sit in someone's memory rather than anywhere written down.
Product idea
A shared queue for every upgrade and relocation request, whoever takes the call. Each request records the supporter, the seats involved, the reason, and any accessibility or concession basis, and is assigned to a named staff member with a due date. A hold marks a seat as offered so a second agent cannot promise it elsewhere, and the hold expires automatically if the supporter does not respond. Anything untouched for two days escalates to the box office supervisor. It does not check live seat availability against the ticketing platform: an agent still confirms the seat is free there before making the offer, and the final move is still entered into the ticketing platform by hand.
Who it is for
Box office supervisors and supporter services agents handling day-to-day requests, membership managers reviewing accessible seating and concession cases, sponsored by the head of ticketing who owns pricing and policy.
Possible first version
A request form staff use in place of a sticky note or email, a queue showing status, assignee and due date, a manual seat hold that blocks a seat from being offered twice with an expiry timer, and escalation to a supervisor after two days untouched. Out of scope for version one: live seat availability lookups against the ticketing platform and any automatic write-back of the completed move. Both stay manual until the workflow itself is proven worth keeping.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Box office supervisor, Supporter services agent, Membership manager, Head of ticketing
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Venue & stadium operator, League office, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Ticketing and access control platforms, CRM, Spreadsheets
- Product framing
- Automate a workflow
Questions we get asked
What do we need to hand over before this could work?
A current export of your seating chart or inventory, however you already maintain it, and your existing rules for accessible seating and concession eligibility written down rather than held in someone's head. Nothing else is required to start, because version one deliberately checks the ticketing platform by hand rather than reading from it.
Does this replace our ticketing platform's own relocation tools?
No. The ticketing platform stays the system of record for the seat itself, and the final move is still entered there by an agent. What this adds is the missing layer above it: a record of who asked, who is handling it, what was offered, and whether anyone else is quietly promising the same seat.
Our box office team already manages this by phone and it mostly works. Why add a tool?
It mostly works until someone is off, two agents offer the same seat, or a request quietly stops being followed up. Those failures are rare enough that nobody has fixed the process, but frequent enough that a supporter occasionally gets a broken promise. If your team genuinely never duplicates an offer or drops a follow-up, this has nothing to add.
What happens to a relocation request that comes in during a match, when nobody is watching the queue?
It sits in the queue as unassigned until someone picks it up. Version one is not built for real-time, in-seat relocation during an event, where the decision has to be made in minutes by whoever is on the concourse. That case stays a walkie-talkie and a judgement call. This is for the requests that can wait until the next working session, which is most of them.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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