In 2016, AXS, the second largest event ticketing company with over $2B in ticket sales annually, needed major improvements to key products in order to meet or exceed industry standards.
(Rob was initially Product Consultant and later VP Product at AXS from 2016 through 2018- see Rob Canning Bio for more info.)
secondary marketplace modernization
In 2016, AXS's standalone secondary market ticketing product was widely adopted by clients and generating significant revenue for both clients and AXS, however the consumer experience and conversion rate were falling behind competitive offerings.
Rob developed a comprehensive, multi-phase strategy that integrated three disparate legacy systems, and then led a 25 person cross-functional team to launch the project.
The result was a beautiful, usable, and high-converting commingled seatmap and checkout consumer experience that resulted in 4x increase in the conversion rate for secondary ticket sales.
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event creation upgrade
In 2016, the process for creating a new event in AXS's ticketing system was a 30-45 minute, repetitive process that required significant time, training, and client support help. This was particularly frustrating to smaller clients with smaller staffs. Additionally, clients could only create events via a legacy application installed on their office computers.
Rob set an audacious goal: reduce time from 45 minutes to 5 minutes, and then developed a product strategy to achieve that by creating a template-driven system that populated the majority of the event parameters based on the most common event configurations for each client. This was conceived and supported via interviews with clients, AXS's internal support team, and competitive research.
Rob also championed modernization into a web-based application so that clients could create and modify events from anywhere, including their mobile devices (this application is now the hub of the future client web interface that will eventually allow clients to create, manage, and analyze events via a web browser).
The new web-based tool integrated with multiple legacy systems, such as the ticketing application, CMS, and secondary market platform.
powerful dynamic pricing dashboard
In 2016, concert promoters managing ticket inventory for tours across venues and dates, needed an intuitive, powerful, quick tool for dynamically pricing individual tickets across shows.
After many interviews with concert promoters and internal experts, as well as competitive research, and analysis, Rob developed a strategy and later detailed requirements for a best-of-breed web-based inventory and yield management dashboard dubbed AXS YieldManager.
The new and improved interface consolidates all key data onto one screen and includes keyboard shortcuts and other usability features that allow promoters to manage pricing and availability of thousands of tickets with ease.