Spektrix is on a mission is to help arts organisations be more successful. It does this by providing organisations with a best-in-class solution for ticketing, marketing and fundraising. With the arts sector in need of support now more than ever, we thought we'd catch up with Spektrix's Senior Software Engineer, Ron Heywood.
Can you tell us a little bit more about Spektrix as an organisation and your goals as a business?
Spektrix is a service provider for the arts and entertainment industries. Our browser based software application provides all-in-one ticketing, marketing and fundraising tools for organisations - primarily theatres and museums, to run their box office, and marketing initiatives.
We have offices in London, Manchester and New York. A big part of our business model is to provide close support to our clients. Most of our support staff come from the industry themselves, so we have decades of experience managing and operating event venues.
Explain your role within the company?
As a Senior Software Engineer, my day to day role is maintaining the codebase and adding functionality to the system to meet new requirements.
We have a very feature rich system that caters for a lot of different use cases - small to large venues, theatres, museums, event centres and football clubs - all our clients have slightly different processes, and need software that lets them work in the way they are structured.
Optimising existing tools in the platform to cope with greater demand is part of the job, but as we’ve started to move into North American markets, we’ve found that the culture there needs a slightly different approach, so there’s plenty of opportunity for building new tools.
What is the most exciting project that you’ve worked on at Spektrix and why?
I get most of my satisfaction as an engineer from making something very complicated, look really easy. For that reason the change we made to allow the system to work under a subdomain of the clients website gave me the biggest thrill when we delivered it.
The problem we were trying to solve was how Privacy changes rolled out by the browsers caused issues with the theatre seating plans (which are built in the Spektrix system) and how they appear on the clients website when customers are choosing their seats.
The change meant that session cookies weren’t being passed back to Spektrix, so we couldn’t keep track of which events had been booked as the user clicked around the pages of the clients website.
We knew that we could solve it with some complicated configuration, but often our clients don’t have dedicated Digital teams maintaining their website full time, we needed something that we could explain quickly.
The system we put in place, means the client only needed a single DNS record adding by their hosting provider- which we could easily explain.
Behind the scenes - some complicated proxy services, and Security certificate processes were being handled by shiny cloud native functions. But the important part - from the perspective of the support teams, and the clients, it just worked by submitting a form in their browser.
COVID-19 has hit the arts industry quite hard, how has this affected your business, and have you had to make any pivots in these difficult times?
I’ve been very impressed with how robust the partnership between Spektrix and our clients has been. Our primary concern was helping the box office with the process of closing out their existing commitments for performances.
I think the thought and imagination everyone at Spektrix put into that process, was some of the best examples of how knowing your market gives you great opportunities.
We created a solution that allowed customers to cancel their bookings - but enabled them to choose to Donate all or part of the ticket amount, and take the balance as credit or refund.
The engineers on the team really showed their skill in that process - I wrote a blog post about it: https://www.spektrix.com/blog/you-cant-engineer-that
What innovation or new technology do you see on the horizon that may prove to be a game changer for the arts industry?
I think we need to do a lot more for accessibility in the arts. We’re doing a lot to make sure we have the right integrations to help people access performances, both during their visit, and during their booking process, but I see a lot of opportunity to help people experience the arts remotely. I think live Streaming will become more prevalent in the near future, but I also think virtual reality, and augmented reality will play a part in helping you get a better experience even when you can’t physically attend
I also think the growth of interactive immersive performances is really exciting - Really cool stuff like Secret Cinema, but also the smaller Zombie experiences that pop up around Halloween time.
I think there’s a lot of scope for some cool personalisation to the experience and it’s likely to become more prevalent, as the cost of the technology decreases, and the quality increases.
What can an organisation that partners with Spektrix expect to receive in return?
Our software just makes life easier, but part of the battle is knowing what it can do with the features it provides, and in that respect I’ve always felt that the fantastic support teams provide so much value.
We’ve really built a flexible solution, but we’ve also worked with so many venues, that anything special that our clients ask for, has often already been figured out.
But the team are so imaginative, even if we do get an interesting new challenge, we can usually come up with an answer within a few hours.
In terms of culture, what is it like to work at Spektrix, and how does the company retain and attract new talent?
The culture at Spektrix is built around taking care of each other, and you can see it presents itself in a few ways - not just ready access to snacks, refreshments and drinks on a Friday, but in the support networks that form around the business.
The best part about the culture at Spektrix for me is the attitude to Remote first working - We’ve really got it right I think - all meeting rooms have conferencing equipment hooked up to the calendar meetings, invites - there’s never any delay from technology issues that prevent getting the meeting going.
From an engineering perspective - we’re pretty good at structuring the work, so that the right people have the resources they need to get on with their goals. Always room for improvement but there’s a good attitude towards finding ways to do things better.
We’ve managed to implement daily releases to production, and many releases to test, but many releases per day into production is still a goal we’re looking forward to reaching.
From a personal perspective I would say that it was during the interview process, that I gained the confidence that Spektrix was the place I wanted to work. The culture really shone through.
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