What 3622 customer conversations taught us about booking tickets
Christmas Day. 8:34 in the morning.
A customer with access needs opened their laptop and tried to book tickets for a show at Blackpool Grand Theatre. The box office was closed, with the team enjoying a well-earned break with their families. Karo, an AI Agent, handled the conversation. The customer got the help they needed.
We tracked that conversation. We tracked 3,621 others. And over six months, the data changed how we think about what it means for a cultural venue to truly be present for its audience.
How we got here
When we built Karo, we had a working hypothesis: a significant proportion of customer questions arrive outside box office hours, and those conversations represent real engagement that venues have no practical way of covering. We thought we understood the scale of the opportunity, but the data showed us we had significantly underestimated it.
Karo has been live at Blackpool Grand Theatre since October 2025. From launch through to April 2026 – six months of real, unfiltered customer interactions – we recorded, anonymised and analysed every conversation. What follows is what we found, and what it changed about the way we think.
Finding one: Customer engagement is always-on
84.5% of all customer conversations happened outside the box office’s advertised opening hours.
That is 3,060 out of 3,622 conversations at a single venue over six months.
When we looked at the breakdown, the pattern became clear: 1,400 conversations came after 3pm on working days – people checking details before an evening show, people who had just seen a social post and wanted to act on it, people who finished work and finally had a moment to think about booking. A further 653 came before the box office opened each morning. And a combined 1,007 conversations happened on Mondays and Sundays.
Most strikingly: on every single day of the week, peak customer demand fell outside the advertised core staffed hours.
This is not a scheduling issue. It is a reflection of how people engage with cultural organisations today. The decision to book, to enquire, to check details happens when people have time. When the kids are in bed. During a lunch break. On the commute. At 11pm on a Sunday. Without operating 24/7, no team can be in all of those places at once, all the time. But the appetite is there, and it is consistent.
Immediacy is vital to customer confidence, particularly around booking, access and planning a visit. Karo strengthens the human service theatres are known for by giving customers the answers they need straight away, while allowing our team to focus their time where personal support adds the greatest value.
— Andrew Howard, Head of Audiences, Marketing and Sales at Blackpool Grand Theatre
Finding two: accessibility is the highest-volume, most time-sensitive need
Nearly one in four conversations – 23.7% – involved accessibility. Access card bookings, wheelchair queries, carer tickets, CEA cards, disabled seating. 859 conversations across six months, from customers navigating what is often the most detailed and considered part of the booking process.
83.8% of those conversations happened outside staffed hours – 720 accessibility enquiries handled by Karo across evenings, weekends, and overnight periods.
The reason this matters goes beyond availability. Accessibility bookings are genuinely complex. Card type, companion requirements, seating preferences, show availability – these conversations need proper back and forth. The average access chat with Karo ran to 6.1 messages, compared to 4.3 across all conversations. Karo works through those questions in full, patiently, at any hour. 85.7% of wheelchair access queries were resolved without a human needing to get involved at all.
For customers who find phone calls difficult, who need more time to work through options, or who simply have lives that don’t fit neatly around box office hours – having a patient, knowledgeable resource available around the clock is genuinely valuable. Being there for those conversations builds the kind of trust that brings audiences back.
Finding three: closed doesn’t mean quiet
One of the most counterintuitive findings in the dataset: on one of the venue’s advertised closed days, customer engagement was higher than on one of its open days.
530 conversations happened on a day the box office was shut. Of those, 254 involved active booking intent – people who were ready to commit, looking for the information they needed to complete a purchase. Karo was there to support them through it.
This points to something worth sitting with. Sunday afternoons, bank holidays, the days between Christmas and New Year – these are often when people make leisure plans. They have time to browse, to think, to decide. The fact that those conversations are happening is a good sign: it means the audience is engaged, motivated, and thinking about your venue. The question is simply whether you have something in place to meet them.
Finding four: customers discover the depth of what’s possible – and use it
One of the more unexpected things the data showed was a clear behavioural shift – not just in volume, but in how customers engaged over time.
When Karo launched in October, 6.3% of conversations included an event lookup: someone asking what was on, searching for a specific show, checking dates or availability. By January, that figure had risen to between 37% and 43% – and it stayed there consistently.
What changed was not the product. It was the audience’s understanding of it. As customers realised that Karo could actually search the programme, check real availability, and answer follow-up questions – rather than returning a scripted FAQ response – they started using it differently. Not just as a support tool, but as a way to explore.
One visitor made 26 separate event lookups in a single session, browsing the entire programme show by show, comparing dates and availability. Effectively using a conversation to do what a more traditional what’s on page cannot: respond to “what else is on that week?”, narrow by genre, follow a thread of interest wherever it leads.
Behind each of those event lookups is a live call to the Spektrix API – Karo is not returning cached content. It checks real-time availability and responds with accurate information. Across six months: 2,838 individual API lookups, 1,260 event searches, 452 direct booking links served to customers ready to buy.
It’s great to see partners like SynapTix using the Spektrix API to solve real-world challenges for venues and their audiences, helping organisations stay present for customers whenever they choose to engage.
It’s exciting to see how this integration enables organisations to provide excellent responses by combining the powerful data within their Spektrix CRM with an intelligent customer service interface.— Tom Nolan, Head of Global Ecosystem at Spektrix
Finding five: conversation is a new engagement surface
The month-by-month usage data told a clear story: 13 average conversations per day in October, rising to 15 in November, 18 in December and January, peaking at 27 in February, settling at 21 in March.
Volume roughly doubled over five months. The variation tracks programming – busier show periods generate more engagement. But the underlying direction is consistent. Customers were not trying Karo once and moving on. They were coming back, telling others, and building it into how they interact with the venue.
Speed is part of why. 75% of all conversations were resolved in under a minute. 90% within five minutes. Whether that’s 2pm on a Tuesday or 2am on a Sunday, the experience is the same: a question asked, a real answer returned.
For the theatre industry, this represents a major step forward: moving beyond static FAQs, extensive website content and delayed responses towards intelligent, always-available support that provides immediate answers and continues to improve through testing, refinement, and learning.
— Andrew Howard, Head of Audiences, Marketing and Sales at Blackpool Grand Theatre
What the data changed about how we think
We built Karo with a service capacity argument in mind: some customer queries are repetitive, some conversations happen when no one is available, and an AI agent can handle those well. All of that remains true.
But the more interesting story in this data is not about capacity. It is about reach.
The 530 conversations on a closed day represent customers whose enthusiasm for your venue did not pause because it was shut. The 37 accessibility conversations that happened between midnight and 6am represent people planning a night out on their own schedule, in their own time. The user who conversationally browsed through all 26 events in the season represents someone who found a better way to explore the programme than a static page could offer.
These are not conversations that were being handled badly before. In most cases, they simply were not happening – the audience demand existed, but there was no channel for it. What Karo adds is not a fix for something broken. It is a new surface for engagement, access and sales that genuinely did not exist before.
What makes Karo so exciting is the way it combines powerful theatre data with a more natural, conversational customer experience.
It can be customised around our venue, our programme, our access information, and the specific questions our audiences ask, ensuring customers receive answers that feel relevant, immediate, and genuinely useful.— Andrew Howard, Head of Audiences, Marketing and Sales at Blackpool Grand Theatre
For venues using Spektrix, the integration is designed to feel like a natural extension of the platform. Karo reads your live Spektrix data – events, availability, pricing, seating – so every response is accurate, current, and connected to your actual booking system. Customers are guided toward real availability and real booking links, not generic information.
Now SynapTix have built and tested the integration with Blackpool Grand, there’s an opportunity for all Spektrix users to adopt this innovation and immediately enhance their own customer experience.
— Tom Nolan, Head of Global Ecosystem at Spektrix
What this means in practice
If your audience is engaging the way Blackpool Grand’s does (and we believe this pattern holds across the sector) then the majority of customer intent is arriving outside your staffed hours. Some of that intent converts anyway; motivated customers will wait until Monday morning. But some of it fades.
The data from six months of live conversations makes the opportunity visible: real volume, real booking intent, real customers at real hours. Venues that want to meet their audiences where they are, now have a practical way to do it.
If you want to see how Karo works in practice – the conversational interface, the Spektrix integration, and what the analytics look like – we’d love to walk you through it.
Karo is built by SynapTix. It integrates directly with Spektrix and is live at venues across the UK.