Ticketmaster Case Study

Background
Ticketmaster (NASDAQ: TMCS), the world's leading ticketing and access company, sold 86.7 million tickets in 2001 valued at more than 3.6 billion dollars, through approximately 3,300 retail Ticket Center outlets; 20 worldwide telephone contact centers; and Ticketmaster.com. Ticketmaster serves more than 7,000 clients worldwide and acts as the exclusive ticketing service for hundreds of leading arenas, stadiums, performing arts venues, and theaters.

The Company also operates Match.com, the premier online matchmaking service, ReserveAmerica, a leading campground reservation clearinghouse, and Citysearch, a leading online local network enabling people to get the most out of their city. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Ticketmaster, majority owned by USA Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: USAI), is a part of USA Networks' Interactive Group. Ticketmaster was formed through the combination of the operations of Ticketmaster Online-Citysearch and Ticketmaster Corporation in January 2001 and renamed Ticketmaster.

Business Issues
Nearly anyone who has purchased tickets to a concert, play, or sporting event knows that Ticketmaster provides comprehensive ticket inventory control and management, along with a broad distribution network, and dedicated marketing and support services. Ticket orders are received and fulfilled through operator-staffed contact centers in the United States and abroad, as well as through independent sales outlets, and the Ticketmaster.com Web site and related international Web sites.

The company has eight contact centers in the United States with about 4,000 agents, which handle millions of customer calls and e-mails each year.

Recently expanding its ticketing operations outside of the United States, Ticketmaster operates in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Australia, and Mexico, and is exploring further opportunities in Europe and Asia. Additionally, the company also has expanded its ticket distribution capabilities through the continued development of the Ticketmaster.com Web site and related international Web sites, which are designed to promote ticket sales for live events and disseminate event information. Ticketmaster agents handle a variety of telephone and e-contact projects, such as ticketing, campground reservations and Match.com customer service.

Until early 2002, Ticketmaster's contact centers used a paper-based system to track agent performance and create evaluations. Documents were compiled by hand into Excel spreadsheets for supervisors.

"It was so manual before," says Lorne Wood, Quality Assurance Director at Ticketmaster. "It created an excessive amount of busy work. Every one of the projects in each center required its own spreadsheet."

When Wood compiled a quality assurance report for contact center performance, he had to manually take data from 45 different spreadsheets.

Business Solution
What Ticketmaster needed was a complete, easy-to-use system for measuring and evaluating agent performance that could manage information from a number of sources and physical locations.

Choosing the Right Partner for Success
After looking at a variety of solutions, Ticketmaster's Wood chose etalk AdvisorTM in March 2002. After a short implementation and training period, Advisor was up and running in five of the eight U.S. contact centers by April.

The first browser-based agent quality control solution, Advisor delivers detailed information on the quality of contact center agents.

"We looked at all of the options," says Wood. "Advisor gave us much more bang for our buck. We wanted a Web-based enterprise solution, and the fact that you could just buy Advisor as a standalone product was attractive."

An Enterprise Solution
Also attractive to Wood was Advisor's ability to create custom reports with Crystal Decisions' open report designer. Using the designer, Wood created monitoring forms for each of the 20 project groups. And, because all the report data is held within the same database, Wood is able to compile monitoring information from all the projects and put them onto a single report to compare the performance of each as well as the overall performance of individual contact centers.

"etalk has given us the ability to manage all these projects while maintaining quality," says Wood. "With Advisor, it's all on one database, I just have to run a report and it's done automatically. I can drill down into the data if I want and I can run an enterprise-wide report on one question. For example, I can run a report on the courtesy question and find out how courteous we are across the contact center organization."

Streamlined Approach to Increased Quality Performance
Thanks in large part to Advisor's streamlined data entry system, Wood also says Ticketmaster has been able to increase the frequency with which it's able to monitor agents. "Before, we could monitor each agent about once a month, now it's about every 10 days."

As a result, Ticketmaster has increased the number of agent evaluations and increased the overall quality of those evaluations by replacing hand-written evaluation forms with computer-generated forms. The new evaluations carry more credibility with agents and, according to Wood, have helped improve quality in the contact centers. In just eight months, agent performance scores have increased by about 10 points on a scale of 1 to 100.

Seamless Integration
The implementation of Advisor went off "without a hitch," according to Wood. Getting evaluators up to speed on Advisor was just as easy. Because the initial training class included everyone who would serve as on-site administrators for Advisor, the group was not only able to learn the software, but also to determine how to configure it specifically for their business model.

"Whenever we told the trainer that something wouldn't work for our application of Advisor, the etalk trainer would come up with the solution," says Wood. "We were never told: ‘it can't work that way'."

Advisor is currently deployed at all of Ticketmaster's eight U.S. contact centers, Wood plans to roll it out to two contact centers in the United Kingdom early next year.

"For the money we spent, it was the deal of the century," says Wood. "For us to be doing what we're doing right now is just phenomenal."