Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Sports Franchise Scores a Win with New Customer Relationship Management System
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Entertainment
Customer Profile
Suns Legacy Partners is the ownership group for several entertainment venues and sports franchises based in Phoenix, Arizona, including the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association.
Business Situation
The company was frustrated by its customer relationship management system from Onyx Software, which was difficult to use and could not consolidate all of the company’s disparate data sources.
Solution
Suns Legacy Partners chose to implement a Microsoft® CRM solution to improve its sales and marketing processes.
Benefits
Smarter decision making with a centralized view
Efficiency gains with an integrated,
easy-to-use system
Improved customer service / “I was sold on Microsoft CRM the first time I saw it. The solution made so much sense because of the integration with the Microsoft desktop applications that we already use.”
John Walker, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Suns Legacy Partners
Competition in sports is intense both on and off the court. For Suns Legacy Partners, intimately understanding customers is critical to success, but that was increasingly difficult because its customer information was spread across several nonintegrated systems. Plus, there was no companywide method of managing sales and marketing processes, and the company struggled to track and improve its customer relationships. Suns Legacy Partners worked with partner Resolute to implement Microsoft® CRM, pulling together all customer information into a single solution that provides a comprehensive customer view. The company can track and manage all customer interactions, understand and measure the success of marketing campaigns, and target cross-selling and up-selling offers. Employees accomplish their tasks and respond to customer issues using familiar tools such as Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003.
Situation
Suns Legacy Partners is a sports and entertainment management company based in Phoenix, Arizona. It operates the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Phoenix Mercury of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), and the Phoenix Roadrunners of the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL). It also oversees America West Arena and Dodge Theater, both located in Phoenix.
There is stiff competition in the Phoenix area for each entertainment dollar. “In recent articles I've read, Phoenix has been cited as the number one most saturated sports market relative to the number of professional sports opportunities there are per fan,” says John Walker, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Suns Legacy Partners. “We have a NASCAR track that holds several events a year. We have PGA golf, LPGA golf, and the Nike Tour as well as the four majors: MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL, plus the WNBA and Arena Football. And we have spring training games in March for 8 or 10 major league baseball teams—all of which are ticketed events. There's a lot to do in Phoenix. That's good news if you live here, but it makes it competitive if you work in sports and entertainment.”
Lack of Data Visibility
In 2000, Suns Legacy Partners found itself faced with a number of challenges, including:
Rapid growth due to the creation of new sports franchises and new entertainment venues.
Disparate customer information management systems and processes across the new franchises, including different technology and databases used to store and manage customer data.
Difficulty integrating the business-critical information from third-party data and service providers.
To address the data management aspect of its business, Suns Legacy Partners purchased a customer relationship management (CRM) system from Onyx Software to automate its customer-related processes. But the system ended up requiring a significant amount of customization, which was both time-consuming and expensive because the company did not have the internal expertise to modify the system. What’s more, members of the sales and marketing staff found the Onyx system to be cumbersome and not at all user-friendly; some shied away from using the system at all and continued to rely on paper notes and stand-alone worksheets for managing their customer relationships.
The successful implementation of a CRM solution is not dependent on technology alone; it also requires a strong understanding of the business processes that support the sales and customer service functions. The Onyx system, however, caused Suns Legacy Partners to have to change its business processes to match the system’s automated workflow. For instance, the company had to adjust its sales processes—everything from the assignment of leads to the pursuit of corporate sponsors—to follow a different, more regimented model that was difficult for employees to use.
The biggest problem with the Onyx system, though, was that it did not provide a complete view of the company’s customer base. The customer service database used by Suns Legacy Partners was separate from its ticketing system, and the Onyx system had no easy way to connect the two. To be able to manipulate raw data into usable information is critical, and Suns Legacy Partners was unable to get this information from its Onyx system. “Ticketing data is the lifeblood of any sports organization,” says Walker. “It wasn’t that the Onyx system didn’t ultimately have the capability to get us the information we needed. It was that it would have taken considerable resources to customize the system to the degree necessary to accomplish that goal.”
The Need for Change
Suns Legacy Partners had a clear vision of what it sought in a CRM solution. The new solution needed to:
Provide a centralized view of all of its customers that easily brought detailed customer information to the surface.
Deliver information more easily and provide users with more flexibility.
Give the company the ability to identify its best customers across all franchises and venues.
Provide Suns Legacy Partners with business insight to help the company target midlevel customers for up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
When new president Rick Welts joined Suns Legacy Partners, he recognized the crucial role CRM played in the company’s business success. He made it a priority for Suns Legacy Partners to become sophisticated in the CRM arena. The first decision the company then faced was whether to spend the necessary time and money to customize the Onyx system or to abandon the system altogether and start over with something more compatible with the company.
Suns Legacy Partners considered several other CRM solutions, but the company felt that they were too specific to data collection, contact management, or e-marketing systems, rather than solutions providing a holistic view of CRM. “We wanted more,” says Walker. “We sought to improve every touchpoint with customers and deploy more sophisticated data integration tools for the business intelligence that we needed to be successful.”
Solution
Upon introduction to the Microsoft® CRM solution, Suns Legacy Partners ended its search. “I was sold on Microsoft CRM the first time I saw it,” says Walker. “The solution made so much sense because of the integration with the Microsoft desktop applications that we already use. I realized how much we could increase our efficiency if we could do all of our CRM work right in the familiar interface where we already spent all of our time.” The company uses Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 productivity tools, including the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client, and it uses Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, as its database.
Suns Legacy Partners turned to Microsoft Business Solutions consultants to recommend a partner for help with the Microsoft CRM implementation. After considering a handful of qualified companies, Suns Legacy Partners chose Resolute, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Bellevue, Washington, with offices in New York and Phoenix. “Working with Resolute was wonderful,” says Walker. “The consultants were extremely dedicated to our success, and their help was invaluable.”
Implementation and Training
Resolute and Suns Legacy Partners defined the scope of the CRM project and began its design in October 2003. In February 2004, Resolute helped develop some custom applications and identified the challenges involved with migrating data from several disparate sources into Microsoft CRM. Transferring data from other systems, such as Ticketmaster, turned out not to be as straightforward as everyone had thought. Resolute worked with Suns Legacy Partners to determine how it wanted the data to appear and then configured the system based on that process mapping and the initial business requirements it had gathered.
Although Suns Legacy Partners discontinued all of its previous internal systems, such as Onyx, the company still needed a way to receive data from others, such as Ticketmaster, and integrate it into Microsoft CRM. The partner used a third-party scripting tool to design the system to update all daily changes from Ticketmaster and import the data into Microsoft CRM each night.
“If a customer purchased a ticket from Ticketmaster and later purchased a ticket directly from Suns Legacy Partners, that person was likely to show up in the database as two different people,” says Leslie Salvo, General Manager of the Southwest District for Resolute. “We brought together the various data sources, which were quite a bit different in terms of format, and made sure that all of the data conformed to a common specification and that all data duplications were eliminated. Getting rid of all the bad data was the primary challenge for us.” Through the data-cleansing process, Resolute estimates that it eliminated approximately 100,000 duplicate contacts.
Application testing began in May 2004, and Microsoft CRM went live in June 2004 with an initial rollout to 30 sales representatives. The company added approximately 10 employees at a time over the next two months. By August 2004, all 80 employees were up and running on the Microsoft CRM system. “It was a great partnership scenario: the Suns led with the vision, Resolute delivered the expertise, and Microsoft provided the right software package and key recommendations,” says Salvo.
Resolute provided Suns Legacy Partners with customized user guides for training, but the company conducted its own in-person training sessions. The sessions were informal and targeted toward small groups of segmented users, such as a three-hour session for the ticketing group or a four-hour session for the customer sales group. “There was some initial trepidation on the part of users,”says Walker. “But after the implementation, users were genuinely enthusiastic as to the simplicity and usability of the screens in which they could now work.”
The Solution in Use
Suns Legacy Partners now has a solution that is adapted to meet the unique needs of the sports and entertainment industry. “We have customized an area in the application for tracking our sponsorships, and we have another area directed toward tracking our community-relations efforts,” explains Walker. “We also programmed functionality relative to the ticket sales process that is customized for sports teams—not only for our NBA franchise, but for our WNBA and ECHL teams as well. Microsoft CRM is customized to show us a detailed profile of our customer, whether he or she is a suite holder, season-ticket holder, sponsor, single-game buyer, or concert-ticket buyer.”
Benefits
Migrating to Microsoft CRM has provided Suns Legacy Partners with a consolidated view of customer information and an automated system that can be used companywide. With easily accessible, detailed information, the company has improved its overall efficiency, as well as its customer service, marketing campaigns, and sales techniques.
Smarter Decision Making with a Centralized View
Fast access to aggregated customer data is making a big difference for Suns Legacy Partners. Since the Microsoft CRM deployment, the company has been able to conduct marketing segmentation work, analyzing and organizing all of its customers into separate categories and enabling targeted sales opportunities. “When a customer speaks with one of the members of our staff now, we know more about them than we ever did before. We can even tell what they’re spending across all of our different teams and events, which helps us cross-sell and up-sell,” says Walker. “For example, our representative can see that the person on the phone bought four tickets to a Suns game in the past, which provides the opportunity to pitch a six-game mini-pack, tickets to four better seats, or a WNBA game.”
Marketing segmentation also has enabled Suns Legacy Partners to conduct much more targeted marketing and sales efforts; Microsoft CRM then helps the company track the effectiveness of those efforts. “Before, we had to guess at our marketing success rates because we had no way of knowing if customers were calling as a result of one of our campaigns,” says Walker. “Now we’re able to look at a direct mail campaign that went out last week and see what, if any, business has been generated. In the future, once we have more baseline data, we’ll be able to see how changes in wording, graphics, or the offers themselves affect our success rate to see where we should focus our efforts.”
In addition to knowing more about its customers, Suns Legacy Partners now understands more about its own internal operations. With Microsoft CRM, the company can easily track the productivity of its sales and customer support groups to measure performance. Suns Legacy Partners uses Microsoft CRM–generated reports for sales force management, evaluating the number of calls made, the status of the opportunities, and success rates. “In the past, by the time we knew there was a problem, it usually was too late to activate a corrective plan. Microsoft CRM gives us increased confidence in our business because we can track performance in real time,” says Walker. “We also can be savvier with revenue forecasting. Before, we could only look one week ahead for what we could expect in revenue; now we can predict a month ahead.”
Efficiency Gains with an Integrated, Easy-to-Use System
The way that Suns Legacy Partners handles its operations processes has improved as a result of using Microsoft CRM. In the past, sales representatives would give handwritten ticket requests to the ticket office; now the company uses an electronic queue to manage ticket fulfillment. “Data consolidation has been crucial to our automation success because we’ve eliminated the need to rekey information,” says Walker.
With Microsoft CRM, employees can work within the familiar Outlook 2003 interface to conduct many activities, including task management, account activity, and opportunity management. “Since the implementation of Microsoft CRM, we’ve really been able to streamline our efforts because users have a much better understanding of our expectations of them,” says Walker. “Their desktops include their individual ‘to do’ lists and the next steps to manage their sales contacts.”
Walker notes that the transition to the new way of doing business was a relatively easy one for staff. “Microsoft CRM is so easy on the eyes and user-friendly for our employees because they’re already used to programs such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, and other programs.”
Improved Customer Service
Using Microsoft CRM has improved customer service for Suns Legacy Partners. “As consumers, we want offers for things we have an interest in—and not for things that we don't,” says Walker. “Previously, we may have sent you a Suns direct mail solicitation without really prescreening or predetermining if you're a viable candidate for that offer. Thanks to Microsoft CRM, we are in a position to identify and use many different factors about our customers as drivers of the different sales campaigns that we conduct.”
Customers themselves are feeling the positive effects of the new solution. They’re now receiving loyalty rewards for their support of Suns Legacy Partners franchises. Plus, the calls that consumers receive now are tailored to their interests and buying history. “We created customized templates with tracking capabilities for communications with our season ticket holders. We’re able to alert them that a tip-off time has changed or that there’s been an addition to the schedule, and our customers love that special touch,” says Walker. “Our overall goal is to enhance the guest experience. Microsoft CRM helps us do that by giving us complete access to more detailed information, which we use to answer questions and resolve issues more quickly and address our communications to target an individual’s specific needs.”
Foundation for the Future
Walker feels that CRM is no longer optional for those in the sports and entertainment industry. “What's interesting about our business is that our customers invest more than just the dollar—they devote time and emotion as well. People are passionate about a band that they love or the team that they follow, and that's different than other products they might consume. There’s a real loyalty that has to work both ways,” says Walker. “We have to find ways to thank to our customers for that loyalty and passionate commitment, and it’s really hard to demonstrate that appreciation to season ticket holders or other customers unless you have a thorough understanding of their likes and dislikes and a sophisticated mechanism for tracking your interactions.”