De La Warr Pavilion

The Pavilion is a consumer-focused business, but, until recently, it wasn’t up to speed with the technological revolution that’s transforming customer experiences globally. Stewart elaborates on their predicament.

Challenges

“Our box office services were stuck in the 1970s. It’s the most important part of the business – we currently sell over 50,000 tickets a year – and many of these transactions were done face-to-face or by post. We were also still counting ticket stubs at the end of the night to find out how many people had come to a gig.” The building itself – although a stunning example of modernist architecture – posed another set of issues. Its metal framework acts as a Faraday cage, blocking phone signals and inhibiting Wi-Fi. Firstly, this problem affected audiences who wanted to share their experience on social media. Secondly, the Pavilion is keen to become a business hub for Bexhill, a position they couldn’t hope to achieve while unable to support people working on their laptops in the café. TV companies who often needed to live stream data from the building also suffered. On top of all this, much of the team’s servers and hardware was unsupported or on its last legs.

Solutions

Beaming’s technical abilities were just part of the reason Stewart chose us as his connectivity partner, as he explains: “What also attracted me was their wider presence as a company. Many telecoms providers are one-dimensional, but Beaming’s ethos in both service and social responsibility align with ours; they’re involved in community projects, run university internships and are big into research.” Once onboard, our number-one task was to upgrade the Pavilion’s connectivity, installing a 100mb broadband fibre-optic line along with the necessary infrastructure. It’s given them one of the fastest connections in the area and allows them to move many of their services into the cloud. The box office now has mobile compatibility, and ticket scanners do away with those tedious stubs. In the office, the replacement of infrastructure happened without the loss of a single file. To ensure everything came together, we worked closely with other suppliers, including the web developers and the company that runs the box office. It’s an aspect of our role that Stewart wasn’t expecting: “Beaming demonstrate joined-up thinking; some of the stuff they do isn’t really their problem at all.” And our involvement continues; we’re currently working to ramp up the public Wi-Fi, creating multiple zones to overcome the building’s inherent compatibility.

Many providers over-promise. Beaming also ‘over-promise’, but then they deliver it. I’d say Beaming has made about 1,000% improvement on what we had before.

Stewart Drew, CEO, De La Warr Pavilion