Phoenix Suns

Sports Franchise Scores a Win with Customer Relationship Management System

Phoenix, Arizona may be one of the most competitive sports and entertainment areas in the United States. In addition to the Phoenix Suns of the NBA, Phoenix is host to teams from the NFL, NHL, and MLB, as well as year-round golf and NASCAR. Suns Legacy Partners operates the Suns, three other sports franchises, and a family events arena. For years, the company struggled with customer information spread across several nonintegrated systems, which often meant duplicate data-entry efforts and lost marketing opportunities. To strengthen its ability to attract fans and build loyalty, the company implemented Microsoft Dynamics® CRM to gain a comprehensive view of ticket buyers and event attendees. The company can track and manage all customer interactions, understand and measure the success of marketing campaigns, and identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

Situation

Suns Legacy Partners 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 the U•S Airways Center sports and event facility.

“I was sold on Microsoft Dynamics 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

There is stiff competition in the Phoenix area for each entertainment dollar. “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 [Professional Golfers’ Association] golf, LPGA [Ladies Professional Golf Association] golf, and the Nike Tour as well as the four majors: Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, National Football League, and National Hockey League, plus the Women’s NBA 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 and enjoy sports, but it makes business competitive if you work in sports and entertainment.”

To compete effectively in this environment, Suns Legacy Partners needed to manage customer data from multiple teams, with the ability to match customers with numerous ticket packages, including single tickets, season tickets, and luxury suites. The company also needed to track sponsorships, community relations activities, and marketing campaigns for all the teams and for individual concerts and events in the arena. 

Limited Visibility into Customer Data
To address data management needs, Suns Legacy Partners had previously implemented a customer relationship management (CRM) system. But the old system didn’t connect the customer service database with the ticketing system. “Ticketing data is the lifeblood of any sports organization,” says Walker. “It wasn’t that the previous 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.”

Managers at Sun Legacy Partners knew they needed a better solution. “We wanted more,” says Walker. “We sought to improve every touch point with customers and deploy more sophisticated data integration tools for the business intelligence that we needed to be successful.”

Suns Legacy Partners had a clear vision of what it sought in a CRM solution. The new solution needed to meet the following standards:

• Provide a centralized view of all of its customers that brings 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 mid-level customers for upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
• Work with existing Microsoft® desktop applications that are familiar to employees, such as Microsoft Office Outlook® and Microsoft Office Word®.

Solution

Suns Legacy Partners found what it was looking for in Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. “I was sold on Microsoft Dynamics 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 Solution in Use
Suns Legacy Partners business processes have improved as a result of using Microsoft Dynamics 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.

Suns Legacy Partners customized Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet the unique needs of the sports and entertainment industry. “We 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 Dynamics 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.”

“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 upsell,” 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.”

Microsoft Dynamics CRM also empowers Sun Legacy Partners to run its business the way it wants to. “We really wanted to make the system work with our existing processes,” says Jenna Corday, Senior Director of E-Commerce and CRM for Sun Legacy Partners. “With the new version, we’ve been able to take the customizations and mirror them against our business rules. For example, we have a business rule that the sales department needs to follow up a phone call a certain number of times before we consider it dead. We created and customized our phone call form to match that process. We have drop downs for each of those follow-up calls so we can manage and monitor that process.”

“We really wanted to make the system work with our existing processes. With the new version, we’ve been able to take the customizations and mirror them against our business rules.” Jenna Corday, Senior Director of E-Commerce and CRM, Suns Legacy Partners

Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports sales and marketing campaigns that each of the sports teams and the arena use to reach their customers.  “We use the information from our Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to help them with targeting and messaging that we think will be most effective for their campaigns,” Corday says. Customers also benefit from the new solution, because the calls they get are now 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 Dynamics 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.”

Benefits

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides 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 not only improved its overall efficiency, but also its customer service, marketing campaigns, and sales techniques.

Smarter Decision Making with a Centralized View
Since the company deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Suns Legacy Partners has conducted marketing segmentation—analyzing and organizing all of its customers into separate categories and opening targeted sales opportunities.

These targeted marketing and sales efforts can now be tracked and measured for effectiveness. “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 internal operations. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company can easily measure the productivity of its sales and customer support groups. Suns Legacy Partners uses reports generated in Microsoft Dynamics CRM for sales force management, evaluating the number of calls made, the status of the opportunities, and the 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 Dynamics 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, and even make projections for an entire sports season.”  

Efficiency Gains with an Integrated, Easy-to-Use System
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM in place, Suns Legacy Partners has centralized CRM data all the way from ticket sales to marketing campaigns. Through comprehensive functionality in one easy-to-use system, the company has gained internal efficiencies.

“Since the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 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 Dynamics CRM is easy on the eyes and user-friendly for our employees because they’re already used to programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Word.”

“Using Microsoft CRM has delivered so many benefits to us—and our customers—that we want others to follow suit.” John Walker, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Suns Legacy Partners

Customer Service Improvements
Using Microsoft Dynamics 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 Dynamics CRM, we are in a position to identify and use many different factors about our customers as drivers for the different sales campaigns that we conduct.”

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 from 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 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.”

Foundation for the Future
From its own positive experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Suns Legacy Partners wants to be in a position to help other sports franchises serve their own customers better. “It’s important that fans know that their sports teams care about them, and we want to be the industry leader when it comes to CRM,” says Walker. “Using Microsoft CRM has delivered so many benefits to us—and our customers—that we want others to follow suit.”

 
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success.
 
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics

 

For More Information
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For more information about the Phoenix Suns call (602) 279-7880 or visit the Web site at:
www.nba.com/suns

 

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