The small team at Evvnt is scrappy, agile, and unapologetically disruptive in how we take care of our customers—because we have to be. We don’t just serve our partners. We serve event promoters and their ticket buyers all over the world.
We’d like you to meet one of the people behind the curtain—Bryan Boettcher, our Director of Client Services. Bryan leads our four-person customer service team, which manages more than a thousand support tickets every month.
From troubleshooting tech issues to tracking down lost tickets, Bryan’s team makes sure no problem goes unresolved. While most customer service departments in the event space hide behind chatbots or endless forms, Evvnt stands out for one simple reason: we pick up the phone. Whether you reach out by email, chat, or call, we’ll be there.
So, here’s a little more about Bryan’s process in his words.
How did you find Evvnt?
Bryan: I worked for GeoTix which is in the calendar system. That’s how GeoTix first connected with Event, right? So, we were just one of those data sources. But when the pandemic hit and we were hurting in the ticketing world, there were still the need for calendars and events to be posted, even if they were virtual events.
So, Event was saying, well, let’s make a play for the long haul and acquire this ticketing company. So, when I came in, I had myself and I was working with one other, that person was let go. So I was like one of the few employees that was still around at Geotix. I say, like, I was the one who was manually processing refunds for all the events that were canceled.
Coming out of the pandemic, we got picked up by Event. And I was then essentially working with Fabergé (Customer Support), who was working the support desk with Richard at Event. And so now Richard had acquired a company that had its own support department, and that was one person at the time. It was me.
So, I took over. I worked with Fabs and started figuring out this other piece of software and merged the two systems, that, you know, connected all the accounts. And now I’m supporting not just ticketing, but calendars and all these other site partners and everything. So just, yeah, just took over.
What’s your process for working with customers?
Bryan: So, if a client needs help with something, they’re not getting a service, and they need a service. We are the hands in the machine, right? I’m the human that bridges the gap between the interface, the software, and the customer, right? That’s supposed to be the interface, that’s supposed to be the UI/UX, but whatever you can’t do there, you supplement and provide a human, and that’s me.
One thing that Richard likes to do early on was make references to movies and things, especially the movie 300. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that movie. It’s an action flick from about 15 years ago. It’s a, I don’t know if it’s Roman times. It might have been a Greek mythology, Roman mythology, some kind of story, like an Odysseus-type story. And it’s about 300 Spartan, maybe? They’re like the original warrior-fighter types of man, of human, right? Not of myth, but of human reality. And they were fighting against all these huge armies, and 300 men were able to defend their area or whatever by just being a really small but strong force, right?
Very targeted, useful with the resources, witty, smart, making the best attack efficient. So, Richard used that metaphor a lot, that we’re a small team, but we’re fighting on a lot of fronts, and we’ve got big ambitions, and we’ve got a big thing to make happen and defend in the marketplace, and we each kind of had a role within there.
And I said that my department, our job, and we are the shield, that there is this, the thing that keeps the people fighting every day is they have their shields and these really big, strong shields, and when people come at us, good or bad, we’re the first line of defense. Routing all of this communication and making sure that it’s taken in and getting to the right people, and getting interpreted properly.
Well, it really boils down to that, yeah, that communication routing. That also means that my hands are in all the things. My ear has the ability to hear all the things, and, you know, all the things. Try to piece them all together and catch things before they collide. As things move along. Oh, we’ve got this update coming. Oh, we’ve got this event coming. Oh, those are going to collide. Hard to keep track of it all.
How do you keep track of it all?
Exactly, and that’s where the learning has been useful this past year, working with Matt (Senior Vice President), especially. Matt’s been more hands-on with me. Richard’s got so much stuff and such high-level business things that he can’t deal with the operations. So, yeah, Matt’s been much more closely working with me the past, you know, year, and it’s paid off quite a bit.
What’s it like working with the event promoters/creators?
Most event creators, they’ve got their systems, they’ve got things dialed in, but there are event creators that are trying new things, and there are event creators that are trying to provide special promotions, special, you know, extra things happening in the ancillary.
And as they try to do that, it can throw a wrench in the whole, you know, system. And so, to avoid those things from happening when somebody, you know, presents that unique or, you know, specific concern, we’re going to look at it. Because if we take five minutes to look at it now, it’s going to save us an urgent issue that’s going to take hours, you know, when tickets go on sale or when orders are flying in and things are wrong.
Like, we need to make sure that we’re out ahead of things. And so, it’s that preventative care, right? It’s that eat your vegetables stuff that your doctor tells you so you’re not dealing with huge, huge issues decades down the line.
How can anyone needing customer service from a partner to an event promoter, to even a ticket holder, help YOU help them?
My coffee mug says tech support, defined, it’s a noun, is a person who does precision guesswork based on unreliable data provided by those of questionable knowledge. See also wizard, magician.
So, yeah, when someone comes to us, we’re always going to be asking that context. You know, like, who are you, what are you dealing with, where are you coming from, are you on a phone, are you on a computer, are you selling tickets, are you buying tickets? Like, you know, so much of that context we try to grab systematically so we can automate things, and that’s kind of a big focus right now.
Do you have a memory with a customer or event that really stands out?
What’s really nice is even before my next day, but especially on the next day, when you start the morning, you get a lot of things where it’s like, this issue has been reopened, and you’re going and looking at those things that are reopened, and it’s just, oh, thank you so much. Oh, that’s awesome. Oh, my gosh, you saved the day. It’s like, ah. So like all day long, it’s so great. Never gets old to get that feedback. I would say I love hearing about unique events, cool events.
One thing I like is a lighthouse tour that was in a county in Wisconsin. So, being in Michigan, this is just on the other side of the lake, right? So, there are very similar types of boats, and we have lighthouses around here. And so, I can definitely picture everything that they’re doing, and they had boat and plane tours.
They do it two times a year, and they coordinate over the course of like, I think, one weekend. They might have, yeah, I think they do it over a couple days. Weather permitting, oh, my gosh, right? This is happening in the spring, and then again in the fall in the Midwest on the shores of Lake Michigan, okay?
There’s a reason that there are lighthouses here, okay? Because there is weather, and there are dangerous waters and things. And so she’s trying to coordinate dozens of tours that all take place a couple of days in the fall and the spring and arrange flights and boats and waivers and information and updates that, oh, this flight changes and that flight changes. And sure enough, we didn’t get on like for a good month, multiple times a week, just things coming up.
But you get into a cycle, they figure out what you need to know, you figure out what they need, and you do your best to enable them to get it done. Sometimes that’s doing it for them, but sometimes that’s just like saying, hey, here’s how you do it.
How do the event promoters inspire you?
Whether introvert or extrovert, either way, an event represents social engagement, it represents performance, it represents coordination, synchronicity, like, it’s an amazing thing that these people are selling. They’re selling a gated time and space. They’re selling a time and space where if you pay, you can be part of it, and there will be a happening here. They create their own scarcity. They are using essentially no resources other than time and space, the resources that we’re all using all the time. So, but they create this product out of nothing, you know, and it’s so abstract, and then how are they controlling that, right? There’s nothing, you know, there are some physical things, but those physical things aren’t a reality until the day’s around them, you know? It’s such a weird experience to try to do that and feel confident that it’s all going to happen. You never know, especially like, so the thing about the lighthouses, the weather, right?
Oh my gosh, there’s things that have to change, there’s things that have to adjust, so how can we bake in that reality, the reality that life in the world and physical timing and getting things all to happen in a certain spot at a certain time and make sure we know who can come and who can’t, and how do we create that invisible barrier and maintain that scarcity and that reality of what we’re trying to do? Like, it’s anxiety-inducing.
Tell us more about Bryan outside of work?
Overall, just as a job, I am a tinkerer. I like to tinker with things. There is a pile of things that I will be assembling into a music cabinet to hold my record player and my records. But I’m getting rid of my stereo receiver, this big black box that powers my old-school speakers. I’ve got to provide some watts to those.
So, I’m building into my wood cabinet the space for a car stereo. So, when I find the right Bluetooth line-in subwoofer car stereo, I can just put that into my custom-made vinyl cabinet, and I can get rid of my big bulky thing and just have my record player on top. And then I’ve got this little light-up car stereo that powers my speakers. It gives me front and back sound, left and right. So now, and with a subwoofer, I would have five channels, so I’d have home entertainment set up. So, I’m a tinkerer. That’s fun.
Bryan, we deeply appreciate all of the hard work you do to take care of our customers here at Evvnt.