Overview
KORE Ticketing collects data from your vendor’s system, then deduplicates and processes that data for use in your CRM. Ticketmaster’s Archtics system is our most frequently used integration.
The Archtics API[1] provides updated data to KORE Ticketing, which processes and deduplicates your data. Ticketing pushes the updates to your CRM where you can use the additional tools we provide. You can open the Ticketing Data Manager (TDM) and make changes which will automatically be copied to all of these systems.
Initial load
Main article: Initial load
The first time KORE reads your data from Archtics, there’s far too much data for us to retrieve it our normal way—it would overload Ticketmaster's systems. So instead, a Ticketmaster engineer copies all your data up to a particular date and time. It takes about two weeks for them to make this large data set available to us. Once it’s ready, Ticketmaster sends it to us—bypassing the API—and we copy it into our own systems and run our processing logic. This step takes quite a while since there’s so much data to evaluate.
You can keep using Archtics just like normal throughout this process. Since we know the cutoff date and time for the initial load, we’ll copy all the changes you make during this period when we run the first incremental update.
Incremental updates
Main article: Incremental updates
Ticketmaster doesn’t allow us to constantly monitor their database. Instead, we connect to Archtics hourly (with occasional exceptions) and download a copy of all the records which have been changed since we last checked. Then we apply those updates to our own copy of the data and check for duplicate records to combine. That’s why the most recent changes in Archtics aren’t viewable through your CMS immediately. Depending on how the timing lined up and if we encountered any issues during the update, it could take anywhere from just a few minutes to two or possibly three hours.
Deduplication
Main article: Deduplication and the mapping table
We perform deduplication of Archtics accounts during each incremental update. Without deduplication, a sales rep looking at Archtics data wouldn’t know if a given customer has two other records. Deduplication helps you avoid pitching a sales opportunity to someone who already bought tickets using a different Archtics account, for example, preventing poor relations and wasted time.
Every Archtics account has a unique ID number. For each Archtics account we receive during an incremental update, we first check our mapping table to see if we’ve previously evaluated it. If the Archtics account ID is in this table, it’s already mapped to a CRM contact and we can make any appropriate updates.
If the Archtics account ID isn’t already in that table, then we run our full deduplication logic. We compare this Archtics account to every other Archtics account in the mapping table, searching for information that matches. If we don’t find a match, then we create a new CRM contact, add the Archtics account ID to our table, and mark it as the primary Archtics account for this CRM contact. But if we do find a match, we mark this Archtics account ID as a secondary Archtics account for the CRM contact it matched.
Our deduplication logic works for both people and company names. We also use “fuzzy matching” to help match up information that isn’t written in exactly the same way, such as First St. and 1st Street.
If the Archtics account also has a company name associated with it, we also use deduplication logic to check if there’s an existing CRM account or if a new one needs to be created. CRM accounts represent companies and let us display all of your contact people at that company together in one place.
CRM views
We provide new abilities to your CRM and make it possible to gain new insights into your customer base. CRMs like Salesforce or MS Dynamics lack concepts that are critically important to the sports market. We create those concepts for the CRM and give you the ability to track different groups of customers like season ticket holders and single-ticket buyers who attend multiple games each season.
All of this can be found in the Ticketing Module within your CRM. Additionally, we provide valuable tools like Fan Finder, Purchases Grid, Attendance Grid, Ticketing Data Manager (TDM), Ticket Groups, and more.
Ticketing Data Manager
Ticketing Data Manager (TDM) can be opened from a CRM contact’s page. The tool allows you to edit details about a CRM contact and ensure the changes are kept in sync across all the systems involved: Archtics, KORE’s staging database, and your CRM.
We strongly recommend that you always use TDM to edit contacts. If a CRM contact is edited directly without using TDM, then Archtics and the CRM will become out of sync. Even worse, the updated information in the CRM will be overwritten with older information from Archtics the next time that Archtics account is included in an incremental update. Most CRM managers therefore lock down (make read-only) the fields which are mapped to an Archtics account, forcing changes to be made through TDM instead.
[1] An API (application programming interface) is a common way for one system to make automated requests for another system’s information over the internet. KORE Ticketing requests data from Archtics using the Archtics API.