The long running digital transformation at Sydney Opera House, which saw an overhaul of its core marketing tech systems earlier this decade, has enabled an organisational overhaul that helps teams from marketing, technology and customer experience better prioritise and deliver better outcomes for patrons.

Mi3 reported 18 months ago that the decision to transform the marketing stack was made several years ago but was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. A strategic review took place in the first half of 2021, followed by a tender process later that year.

According to the NSW Government eTendering website, the project sought a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing automation or email service provider platform that would integrate with Tessitura and provide the Sydney Opera House (SOH) with deeper audience insights and improved marketing efficiency. The scope also included implementing the marketing platform and integrating it with its online ticketing platform, Tessitura, the selected content management system (CMS), and other Opera House data platforms.

Additionally, the tender called for a SaaS website CMS to enable the Opera House to manage continuous development internally, offering flexible site components and an enhanced customer experience. The CMS implementation went to Acquia. Collaboro, a digital asset management (DAM) system was also part of the overhaul, and was aimed at improving the storage, management, and sharing of digital assets—including images, copy, and video—across teams and platforms such as email, website, social media and signage. The website rebuild was completed in 2022.

Subsequently, communications strategy consultancy Zuni secured a $460,000 tender for CRM and email software implementation. That work included deploying Prospect2 and ActiveCampaign. Zuni, the local partner of Lynch2—the company behind Prospect2—was involved in the initial strategic review, according to people familiar with the project.

The transformation is central to the Opera House's success given it attracted over 7.5 million visitors to its website, and beyond that it also has 700,000 subscribed to its marketing database.

According to Paayal Dharmani, Head of Digital Marketing, at Sydney Opera House, the digital transformation forms the backbone of the iconic enterprise's new ways of working.

"We have put in really strong governance across how the different teams and different portfolios work together. There is now one big forum to get the leaders of ticketing, technology and marketing together," he said.

That allows for a holistic view and assessment of custom customer feedback and insights. "That helps us decide the areas of priority, which then get built into a roadmap for development."

While the technology changes were significant, Dharmani says the organisational change is more important.

"We have basically created forums or squads. That's led to just really strong collaboration and to some strong, data-driven decision-making. Establishing clarity of responsibilities across the various layers of the organisation made it easier for their teams to build out new functionality.

"Who's going to do the reporting, who's going to come back with the feedback? How are things going to work together, what are the different meetings that we need to have, the different forums that we need to present," says Dharmani.

Krystal Nolan, program manager, of marketing technology told MI3: "We  get a large amount of unsolicited feedback that comes through the customer service channels, We react to that in the same way that we would react to the survey or VOC feedback as it comes through, we hold that customer feedback very highly, whatever channel it comes through."

The Opera House team is now much better placed to respond as feedback filters in. "It's actually enabled us to be more nimble, more agile in terms of how we can roll changes out, " Dharmani adds.

As to the hope they better prioritise development efforts, Dharmani says, "There's a whole grid of stuff. We've got a pillars around engagement, conversion, user experience, operational efficiencies, compliance,  and a scoring framework that help us prioritise.

Early wins

Seat selection, more seamless logins, and additional payment options are three of the early pain points identified by the teams which have been prioritised. Per Nolan, the process of seat selection is a good example of the improvements in customer experience.

"As part of the digital transformation, we implemented a new Select Your Own Seat tool. The most complex part of the project was actually the photography that had to take place to be able to implement the view from faith," he explains. "We took something like two and a half 1000 photos around the venues. So the Concert Hall, the Jones Sutherland Playhouse, and the Drama Theater. And we had to map out that photo structure so that wherever you choose the view from, you're within five seats of where, where that photo was taken.

"The system chooses the best image available to the customer. It took us a couple of months to get the styling and pieces right, and we were able to roll that out reasonably quickly once we were able to dedicate the time to it."

Customers have responded positively, says Dharmani. "It's been really impressive to see the adoption of the tool."

A new password-less login has also been implemented, new payment options like Apple Pay are currently being worked on, and Opera House is working through what Dharmani and Nolan characterised as teething problems.

As to what's next, Dharmani describes the pipeline of things that the team wants to as ambitious.

"At the moment, we're just focusing on improving some of our very heavily trafficked pages such as the Event pages and we are working through some UX improvements there. We are also doing a whole piece of work around improving accessibility across the website, on the seat maps, and the whole journey."