Why Tickets and Passes in Mobile Wallets Offer the Best Customer Experience

When Google announced that tickets and boarding passes would be supported in their mobile wallet, Google Pay, they teamed up with Urban Airship to show how mobile wallet can unlock new revenue streams for your brand, and create a magical experience for your customers  — no app required. You can watch the webinar here.

In the webinar, Urban Airship’s Jonathan Rueda and Google Pay’s Bon Mercado talked about how brands can leverage the unique features of Mobile Wallet to make tickets and passes come to life. Looking at numbers and the use cases, they came to the same conclusion: Tickets and passes belong in mobile wallets because they offer the best customer experience.

Here are three reasons why you need to put your tickets and passes in a mobile wallet to offer the best customer experience for your customers.

Give Your Customers What They Want: Mobile Wallets

Customers want to use mobile wallets for their ticketing experiences—and it’s not just millennials. 51% of Gen X and 28% of Baby Boomers surveyed have already adopted mobile wallet (along with 67% of Millennials). Beyond generations, 55% survey said they want mobile wallet for boarding passes, and another 52% said they wanted for it for event tickets.

At Urban Airship, we’re seeing tremendous statistics and usage around boarding passes and event tickets. Boarding passes and event tickets make up almost  80% of all wallet item types that flow through our platforms. We expect adoption and demand to grow as more brands come to understand what a better customer experience ticket and passes on mobile wallets offer. Mobile Wallet is the channel that provides all the information that users need to enter an event or board a plane, and the numbers are showing that customers are getting on board.

Do Away with the Screenshots

During the webinar, Bon Mercado pointed out that fraud protection is a top priority for airlines, ticketing companies and consumers. With that in mind, Google made sure that their mobile wallets had fraud-prevention features, such as disabling screenshots.

Not only are there security liabilities associated with screenshots or even printing out important passes like airplane tickets, but it’s also just really bad CX. Print-outs can get lost and both print-outs and screenshots can get outdated at any moment during the check-in process and become a hassle when handling multiple tickets. Apps can offer more convenience and security, but often are reliant on connecting to the cellular network, which is not always available at airports or foreign countries. Mobile wallet can help alleviate those pain points.

Mobile wallets can offer real-time security with moving images and are easily updatable so that your user has the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. Users can easily store and organize multiple tickets, and be programmed to stay at the top of the screen while its needed.

Go Cross-Channel with Mobile Wallet

We often get this question, “I already have an app, do I really need a mobile wallet?” To which, we ask a question of our own: “Do you want to provide the best user experience?” If so, then there are clear benefits of not just having both, but having the two of them work together.

A mobile app is a great way to engage with customers, but the competition to take space on a user’s phone is fierce and users are not always able to download the app for various reasons (phone is not compatible, storage is not available, etc.) There’s also no guarantee how long your users will keep your app before removing it. Mobile wallets are already included in most Android phones, and Google Pay wants to provide the best user experience outside of your app for your customers while continuing to drive your business goals.  

You can use your app and mobile wallet together, for a more complete customer experience. Google Pay has features that allow brands to point users to your app (or other channels), and you can do vice-versa with your app. One of our large movie theater customers have been using both, and 75% of their mobile app users have added tickets into their mobile wallet.

Don’t limit yourself to just the mobile app and mobile wallet combo; mobile wallet also works great with SMS and email, especially for those customers that may not have your app installed. You can still provide those users with a seamless real-time day-of event experience through a mobile wallet item delivered through other channels outside of the appl. No matter what multi-channel strategy you use, our Digital Growth Platform gives you the capability to get the full view of your customers across all your different engagement channels. With data from the platform, you can target, orchestrate, and segment to give your users that personalized, tailored experience.

Want more? For more insight and examples, watch the replay of the “Unlocking the Upside of Tickets & Boarding Passes With Mobile Wallet” Webinar.

Ready to improve customer experience with mobile wallet? Schedule a mobile wallet demo today!