Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE:LYV) is the largest live entertainment company in the world: connecting 200 million fans to 100,000 events in over 40 countries. The organization’s business model includes selling concert videos via Apple and iTunes as well as sponsorship, ticket sales and service fees generated from TicketMaster.

Challenges

Currently Live nation performs all of their voice of customer (VOC) techniques with an internal team of 15. Operating without the luxury of IT support, this global research department is responsible for providing decision support to multiple departments that include: ecommerce, products, marketing, venues, touring, sponsorship and corporate brand market share, retail outlets, and call center sales channels.

Priority one was to create a self-sufficient research and analytics group that could operate without depending on external resources or internal IT resources. Because most of the VOC information captured is online – via survey responses, customer service, email communications or customer transactions – Live Nation needed a flexible, fully integrated solution that would allow for analysis of both data and contextual information such as call center verbatims.

Vendor Selection

Collaboration with the chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer led to a bake off between SAS & IBM SPSS. Given their current environment and capabilities set, the team determined SAS was more complex to use – an example provided was the modeling tool interface. According to Wilkinson, “investment would be higher and reliance on our IT team would be necessary if SAS were chosen.” Ultimately, the global research and analytics team found that the integrated approach of the IBM SPSS Data Collection suite would facilitate creation of actionable customer insight for all departments it desired to support.

Operationalization

Live Nation has increased their velocity by 10X. Survey emails are sent out within 24 hours of customer purchases. Automation has enabled unique links to be embedded in outbound email that authenticates and validates that the person who purchased ticket actually took the survey. Additionally, all customer transactions are stored in one database (Infor) and then fed into the survey database to authenticate customer information such as concert genre selected, demographics, etc. Because this information is already present in the survey database, the number of questions required is reduced, leading to higher completion rates.

The team is now empowered to perform both data mining and survey functions in terms of customer knowledge – i.e., transactional behavior + survey attitudes in one group. Moreover, a critical goal has been achieved – the global research team is able to put the why into VOC insight rather than just disseminate operational business intelligence (BI) reports.

Results

Now that the team is able to capture, manage, and analyze VOC by comparing results from different channels (phone versus, retail, versus online) and points of view, clear cause and effect in regard to issues is apparent. Global research provides additional value to multiple departments. Prime examples that resulted in significant return on investment are with:

• Sponsorships – helping them illustrate customer segments and validate value of sponsorship
  
  
• Marketing – correlating the effect cannibalization rates have on incremental tickets sales
  
  
• Retail sales – comparison of gift tickets versus online purchasers
  
  
• Venue/Artist – results have led Live Nation to make changes based on VOC research
  
  
• Ticket Offerings – customer input resulted in several changes:

For more information on vendor selection criteria, primary research products (such as our March 2011 study “Operationalizing Voice of the Customer: Maturity Models, Benchmarks & Best Practices) or scheduling an analyst briefing, contact: ZGR@HypatiaResearch.com or Research@HypatiaResearch.com.

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