AI and Analytics for Business

Updates

Diny Hurwitz Revisits “Successful Applications of Customer Analytics”: Part 2

Diny Hurwitz and Matt Horton co-presented What Are the Best Indicators of a Baseball Season Seat Holder Renewing Their Season Seats? Since we had so many questions left over, Diny agreed to answer some more!

How do you account for season tickets purchased by a group, i.e. coworkers purchase a package and split the games?

Using StubHub as the example, when a ticket is sold on the secondary market, we see the data that the ticket has been sold and used by someone else because of the system integration StubHub has with our ticketing system.  In other cases when a ticket was given to someone else without using electronic means, we don’t currently have the ability to capture that data as most tickets scanned at the gates are not digital.  However, we believe that the use of a ticket is more significant on the overall renewal rate than whether the ticket was transferred to another individual.

How did you use this model to improve sales?

We initially used the model to help our sales reps prioritize their calls over the course of our off season when the majority of our marketing campaigns take place.  Along with information such as that from surveys and past purchase history, sales reps were armed with the information of whether an account was likely, unlikely or was on the fence to renew using the predictive model.  It allowed them to target accounts at earlier stages in the campaign that may need more time and resources to make a sale.  Future advances using the results of the model include increasing touch points within the current season for  accounts that are potential renewal risks, varying the sales tone and messages to match the renewal risk levels and using email marketing through MLB to test various elements such as timing and message.

What is your CRM platform and how often do you refresh/reload the analytics data into it?

We are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.  Currently, sales data in CRM is refreshed nightly and analytics data is refreshed once a year before the off season marketing campaigns begin.  In the near future, we intend to integrate our CRM and analytics data with our business intelligence tool.  This will give us the ability to refresh the data more frequently and will enhance the process that sales reps use to target new leads and help maintain current customers.