Hoyts highlights its mobile-first journey

Hoyts is continuing to optimise digital- and mobile-first experiences for customers, with further personalisation and self-service capabilities being pursued.

Chief technology officer Adam Wrightson told the iTnews Podcast that the company is focused on delighting customers and improving its digital experience.

“What we see today is that three-quarters of transactions for people buying movie tickets now happen through self-service channels," Wrightson said.

Hoyts' mobile app had initially been sourced from its enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider, but "didn't provide the customisation [and] the flexibility we ultimately wanted with this being such an important communication and sales channel for the business,” Wrightson said.

It has more recently redeveloped its mobile app, with the help of the same digital agency - Chook Digital - that it used for a 2023 revamp of its website.

The website and mobile app also share some architectural features and components - built on an Azure stack and using a microservices-based architecture.

Wrightson said Hoyts had a “vision about what we wanted the underlying architecture to be like”, and this helped to assemble a mix of inhouse and external resources to support the vision.

“We've found the right balance of working internally and externally while drawing on core competencies from both our internal team, who have expert knowledge of our systems and our integration points to integrate into our ticketing systems and financial systems," he said.

“Then, by combining that with experts in UX design and frontend development through our agency is what led to the success we've seen in that whole [digital transformation]."

Wrightson said the biggest indicator of customer satisfaction is reflected in-app ratings and the number of support tickets logged through its customer service centre.

Next steps

“For us, the next steps are about greater personalisation. What customers want and expect now is the content that they're being served, the offers that they're being served, need to be personalised to their preferences," Wrightson said.

He said the team will be “spending a reasonable amount of time of our focus ... on how we achieve that greater personalisation”

“That will then lead into a number of initiatives that we're looking at to help streamline the customer journey even further.”