The double funnel
Ticketing is unlike almost any other e-commerce experience. You often have to start the transaction just to get basic information. We front load our websites and apps with pricing info, who the lead is, what the running time might be… But if you want to know what a £45 ticket actually gets you versus a £65 one? Click “Book Now.” Curious about whether there’s availability of £25 tickets for Saturday evening? Enter the booking flow. Wondering what the view is like from the Upper Circle? You’ll need to load the seating plan – which means starting the purchase journey.
Welcome to the double funnel conundrum.
The information funnel
Before anyone is ready to buy tickets, they need answers:
– What dates and times are available?
– What ticket types exist and what do they include?
– What’s the price range and what do the different bands get me?
– Where would I actually be sitting and what’s the view like?
– Is there step-free access? Can I bring a child? How long is the show?
This is research. It’s browsing in the truest sense – gathering information to make a decision, often on behalf of a group. Someone checking availability on their phone during a lunch break, screenshotting options to send to friends, comparing a few different shows before committing to one.
The purchase funnel
This is what most venues think of as “the funnel”:
- select seats, add to basket,
- enter details,
- pay.
It’s transactional, linear, and crucially – it’s where all the analytics live.
The problem is that these two funnels have collapsed into one. The booking flow has become the *de facto* information source, which means customers who are still in research mode end up starting transactions they were never intending to complete. In system land, this is failure, because a transaction has been opened and not completed – was this a problem? To your customer they may have had to click through seating plans, or compare pricing and it’s just all a bit of a faff.
What this does to your data
When information-seekers and purchase-intenders enter the same flow, your abandonment metrics become meaningless.
A 70% abandonment rate sounds alarming. But what does it actually tell you? Are people leaving because your checkout is broken? Because your booking fees are too high? Or because they successfully found out that there’s no availability on Saturday and moved on with their lives?
You can’t tell. The person who spent three minutes exploring the seating plan before leaving looks almost identical, in your analytics, to the person who got to the payment page and abandoned it because their card was declined.
Why then do we treat these different experiences the same when clearly the outcome for the customer is different, and actually successful for that first person?
Cognitive overload
The instinct is to surface more information earlier. Put pricing on the event page. Add a static seating plan image. Include FAQs. Show availability calendars.
Even if we exclude the cost of designing user interfaces that support all the potential information, cleanly and on brand, front loading that information creates a different problem: cognitive load.
Event pages are already doing a lot of work. They’re selling the show, conveying the experience, providing practical information, handling multiple dates and venues, and funnelling people towards booking. Every piece of information you add competes for attention. Too much, and the page becomes overwhelming. Too little, and people click into the booking flow just to find what they need.
There’s also a practical limit. You can’t possibly anticipate every question. What if someone wants to know about hearing loops? Or whether there’s a pre-show talk? Or if they can leave a pushchair somewhere? The long tail of questions is effectively infinite, and you can’t put all of it on the page.
Information on demand
This is where contextual AI becomes interesting.
A well-implemented AI agent can hold the full context of an event: dates, times, availability, pricing, seating layouts, venue facilities, access provisions, show details, box office policies. Everything that’s currently scattered across web pages, PDFs, and booking flows.
So when someone asks “are there any aisle seats left for next Thursday?”, the AI can answer. When someone asks “what’s the view like from Row F?”, it can describe it or show an image. When someone asks “is this suitable for a 10-year-old?”, it can check age guidance and content notes.
The key shift is that this happens *before* the booking flow, without adding anything to the page itself. People who don’t need the information never see it. People who do need it get exactly what they asked for.
At Synaptix we have stopped considering our Karo Agent as merely a “chatbot” (and we really hate that term!) but as a universal agent that has a malleable interface to suit the needs of the organisations we support. Karo therefore is the brains of the operation, not the face, and however we choose to implement that face you still get the same great tooling and support.
That’s why we are introducing our latest project we are calling Blink. Breaking clear of the traditional chat interface, Blink is an in-line AI tool that feels more familiar to customers and more integrated into the context of the web page it supports. It feels like in page search, but with the full power of Karo in the background, assessing all the queries your customers have with full API driven ticketing context – and some of our other magic ✨.
Blink therefore becomes your information funnel. No more clicking… just ask.
What Blink changes
When information gathering happens elsewhere, the people who enter the purchase journey are genuinely ready to purchase. Your abandonment rate becomes a meaningful signal. You can now address any friction points in the purchase path with genuine clarity and in the information funnel, you capture intent you’d otherwise never see.
Every question someone asks is data. What are people unsure about? What’s stopping them from booking? Currently, a visitor looks around, can’t find what they need, and leaves. You have no idea what they were looking for. A conversation leaves a trace and reveals intent.
The alternative is usually either a cluttered page (friction through cognitive load) or a sparse page that forces exploration through the booking flow (friction through unnecessary steps).
Blink offers a third option: a dynamic webpage that offers all context, without destroying the brand and assets on the page.
Redefine context
Event pages are not going away, but using the booking flow as a de facto information source is fundamentally flawed. It conflates two different user needs and produces data that’s almost impossible to interpret.
We believe that getting contextual information into the customers hands in the most integrated and intuitive way not only improves the service your site provides customers, but will improve the value and quality of your purchase funnel analytics.
If a traditional chat interface isn’t quite right for you and you’d like an advance preview of Blink, let us know.