Ticketmaster Talks About Serving Customers Right

At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise analyst conference, Elizabeth Gotto spoke with UCStrategies' Blair Pleasant about how Ticketmaster is using ALU/Genesys technologies to improve customer service and save money.

Blair Pleasant: This is Blair Pleasant at the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Analyst Conference and I am here with Elizabeth Gotto from Ticketmaster. Elizabeth is the VP, Global Contact Center Technologies, and Elizabeth, yesterday you gave a great presentation about how Ticketmaster is using Alcatel-Lucent and Genesys Technologies. So can you talk a little bit about what you are doing and why you also why you chose Alcatel-Lucent?

Elizabeth Gotto: Sure. We went with Genesys; we launched a platform going on a year ago, and we implemented the CIM platform for call routing, intelligent call routing, as well as SIP server, and we are full IP once the call hits our network, all the way through to agent delivery. And we have done that without any hardware on the agent desktop. We are the largest SIP server implementation in North America. And we built an environment that is fully redundant within two data centers that we can plug and play globally. It's really been a fun experience to go through that implementation.

Blair Pleasant: So tell us specifically about the application and what you are doing.

Elizabeth Gotto: We have two physical data centers and we've virtualized our hardware environment as much as possible. Like I mentioned, we are 100% redundant, so if we have issues within one data center we can route 100% of the traffic to the other site and most often we do that before there is even an impact to our agents. We are also running a softphone application on the agent desktop and we've decreased our hardware footprint by about 50% moving to a VMware environment.

Blair Pleasant: And are you doing any special kind of routing or analytics?

Elizabeth Gotto: Yes. We have created a dynamic customer front door, so that when a call comes into our network we can decide within Genesys, intelligently, where we want to send that call within milliseconds. And it may be that we are going to send a call to an IVR for automation, or it could be that we are going send the call to queue for treatments, whether it's music on hold, or to learn more about our wait times or any treatments that we want to give. Or it could be an exception exceeding call that we want to send straight to an agent.

Blair Pleasant: And you also mentioned about customization, so that if you do put someone on hold, you can play specialized music based on what you know about them.

Elizabeth Gotto: That is a future capability, now that we have the framework up and running. Customizing the fan experience is going to be a big initiative for us this year and if you indicate while you are in queue that you are going to see U2, we're going to recognize that you made that preference and hope to play you U2 music.

Blair Pleasant: That sounds very cool.

Elizabeth Gotto: Yes.

Blair Pleasant: So what are some challenges that you have found?

Elizabeth Gotto: A lot of challenges that we had in our initial - our prior platform - was that it was very hardware intensive. We had separate data and network infrastructure and we have really consolidated that network and we have seen a lot of financial benefit as a result.

Blair Pleasant: And have you been able to quantify any of the benefits?

Elizabeth Gotto: Originally, when we looked at the benefits we were projecting a year and a half payback and now that we are ten months in, it looks like we are going to be more aggressive with our payback. We are looking forward to our one-year anniversary so we can conclude that analysis.

Blair Pleasant: And what would the payback be based on?

Elizabeth Gotto: It is based on operational expense savings. I would say the biggest three drivers are from the consolidated infrastructure, as well as maintenance costs, and moving to the virtualized hardware environment.

Blair Pleasant: And what are some lessons learned that you would be willing to share?

Elizabeth Gotto: Lessons learned - that is always a good one for a big install. It's really spending the time in the presales process, making sure that requirements are documented and understood by both parties. And really defining and having a dictionary of what you mean when you talk about technical terms, because what we found is one thing to us might mean something different to a vendor. So really spending the time and doing thorough documentation in the presales process.

Blair Pleasant: Anything you can talk about as far as your plans going forward?

Elizabeth Gotto: Sure, our plans for this year and beyond are really to expand globally. We would like to extend to the European countries next. As of last week, we launched the platform to our Canadian counterparts and we were able to bring them on to a new toll-free vendor, as well as launch a new IVR, and move them off their physical ACD onto the SIP server, with the CIM intelligent routing. And we were able to do that within a few months of our implementation in the U.S., with very little CAPEX costs and save on the OPEX side. And then beyond that, it's really going to be integrating the multimedia touch points, bringing in chat and email so that we can really leverage routing to maximize agent efficiencies, as well as Facebook and Twitter from a social media standpoint. And then lastly, like we just talked about, is really customizing the fan experience. Taking the data that we know about the customer, whether it is from their preferences online or from any of their prior transaction history with Ticketmaster and really making it a unique fan experience when they call in to the phone channel.

Blair Pleasant: Great, well thank you so much, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Gotto: Sure.