With the launching of our new Lake Washington Dining Cruises and Cruise Tours, we knew we had to improve our customer service in the area of online ticketing.  Our sales, marketing and IT team evaluated a number of “plug-and-play” online ticketing systems; looked at systems used by our competitors; evaluated our third party system, which served us in 2009; looked at all the new technology available to develop our own “ticketing module”.  We found it all lacking.  We found most online ticketing systems not to be “user friendly”. Being “user friendly” was our Goal Number 1!

 

So we decided to launch our own effort to develop a “state of the art” online ticketing system to graft onto our website. We climbed on this bucking bronco in January. What an undertaking  for a small company!

 

First, we put a team of our Waterways people together to shepherd the project to completion…or abandonment!  Then we asked a group of customers to tell us what “The Module” needed to do to make the buying process as good as Chef Udo’s food on our Sunset Dinner Cruise and as good as our crew’s service.  We developed three pages of criteria of what we wanted “The Module” to accomplish.

 

We asked our long-time web developer Montana Banana and IT Manager Spain McMillen at Sound Event how we could meet the lofty goal we set for ourselves.  They said they were up to the task.  Katya Turnbow, our Director of Marketing volunteered to “herd the cats.”   We set a budget and a schedule and off we went into the murky world of software development.   Well, we exceeded our budget by a bit.  It took much longer than we expected.  We discovered what creativity in the IT world is all about.   The good news is that we got what we asked for – a great ticket purchasing machine and an easy-to-use experience for our customers.

 

On June 15th we launched our updated website and “The Module”, which is now called “Waterways Websales“.  If you purchased tickets recently, let us know what you think about the process!  After all, our Number 1 Goal was to make it “user friendly”!  We look forward to hearing your feedback!