It may not have been an after school paper route, but Joel Thompson certainly had his fair share of jobs when he was in school.
While he was studying communications at the University at Buffalo, Thompson got his first exposure to sales by working for the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bisons ticket offices. After graduating, Joel moved farther into the box office by taking a position at Ticketmaster where he gained valuable experience – not to mention countless memories – by working on such high-profile events as Woodstock ’99 and the 2001 Presidential Inauguration of George W. Bush. Two years after starting at Ticketmaster, however, the lure of his alma mater proved too strong and Joel returned to UB in 2001.
“When I was at Ticketmaster, the Center for the Arts was one of my clients and I admired the facility and working with the staff,” Thompson explained. So when the opportunity arose I jumped at the chance. I’m a UB grad, and there’s always a sense of attachment to the campus as a whole.”
Starting his current position as Director of Ticket Operations at the Center for the Arts with a very impressive background, Joel knows firsthand that his role is more than just distributing tickets.
“We are literally the first people you see when you enter the Center, so the customer’s experience starts in our hands,” Thompson said. “As the saying goes, ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression,’ and I take that very seriously. My goal, even if the customer is purchasing online or by phone, is to make sure our patrons have easy access to not only tickets, but also any other information they might be looking for at the time of purchase.”
While Joel’s dedication to customer service is not limited by medium, he has noticed that more and more people are changing the way they buy tickets. Having watched the industry evolve over the last decade, Joel and his staff have had to adapt to better support and protect their customers.
“The ticket industry has changed dramatically in the last 10 years,” Thompson explained. “Part of my job is to make sure that the Center stays on the cutting edge of new technology that comes available, and we’ve done a good job in that area. The Center was one of the first venues in WNY to employ ticket bar coding to combat counterfeiting. As we shift further into the digital age, even more changes are coming. I expect that very soon our customers will be coming to the venue with tickets downloaded to their cell phones. When I was working at Ticketmaster we were surprised when we saw 50 percent of tickets sold online. Now, it’s not abnormal to see 80 percent sold online.”
While accounting for the 100,000+ tickets sold every season is a large task in and of itself, Joel also serves on the Center’s programming committee with Assistant Director Rob Falgiano and Director of Marketing Dave Wedekindt. Although Joel admits that he would love to bring Chris Isaak to the Center, he was very candid about the importance of putting the season’s schedule ahead of his own preferences. Still, it is good to have someone who can appreciate the arts greeting us at the door.
“Personally, I’ve always been a music lover across a range of genres from rock,” – adding parenthetically “Springsteen is my all-time favorite” – “country, pop and I think that makes a position in a venue like the Center all the more fun and interesting to me. Like my own tastes, we do such a wide array of events, and no two events are ever really the same. It keeps the day-to-day operations exciting and keeps you fresh even when you’ve been putting in the long hours necessary to be successful.”




