In the US, Ticketmaster is the premier ticketing service, providing assistance and ticket sales for 80,000 to 100,000 callers every day through five national call centers.

For years, Ticketmaster has continued to receive recognition as an industry leader in providing excellent customer service through its live-agent call centers.

The company's success in the marketplace drives a high volume of customer telephone transactions, which consequently causes long hold times — an issue that Ticketmaster is not willing to accept.

Always looking to enhance its already-excellent customer experience, Ticketmaster decided to investigate various call center automation tools to expedite caller transactions.

Best-in-Class Service Demands State-of-the-Art Technology

"Our business is solely based on quality customer service. In order to provide the type of support our customers have come to expect from us, we determined it was time to take the next quantum leap in the level of customer service we offer. Once we learned that the technology was available, we wanted to incorporate a fully automated, speech-enabled ticket purchase and delivery solution for our national call centers," said James Boyce, National Network Director of Ticketmaster.

Enhanced Call Process

Concentrating on customer service in their call centers, Ticketmaster sought the assistance of TARGUSinfo to automatically identify each caller's contact information — including name and address. Combined with a speech capture application, TARGUSinfo On-Demand Identification for CRM & marketing was able to provide the following key benefits:

• Reduce call times by more than a minute with a fully automated customer ticketing solution to capture and verify customer name and postal delivery address.
• Handle over 85% of all telephonic ticket requests through the Interactive Voice Recognition unit (IVR) allowing live agents to provide enhanced customer service for specific requests.
• Eliminate returned mail caused by live agent transcription errors; callers now confirm their delivery address through the IVR.
• Decrease hold times by providing customers the ability to purchase tickets through the IVR rather than wait for a live customer service agent.

A Successful Implementation

The results are clear. Since implementing the TARGUSinfo solution, Ticketmaster has seen impressive results:

• Costs associated with staffing live agents have been significantly reduced.
• Senior-level agents have been redeployed for more customer-centric duties, rather than routine tasks.
• Telephone calls have been shortened by an average of 45 seconds per call. TARGUSinfo: Customers
• Conversion rates have increased now that many more calls can now be processed daily, providing more callers with the chance to purchase tickets.
• Returned mail has been virtually eliminated.
• And most importantly, Ticketmaster has become a model for customer service across industries.