Delivering a technology solution to streamline customer services

Challenge

In the UK, sport drives around 10m more attendances a year than a decade ago – and with Covid restrictions eased in 2022, demand for attending live sport is predicted to equal or exceed 2019 levels.

To capitalise on this, sports rights-owners need to ensure those attending their events, including a record number for the first time, have a seamless event experience – starting from when they look to buy tickets – to ensure fans increase the regularity with which they attend live sport.

Insight

Rugby union is the most popular sport in Wales, and watching the Welsh international teams in the Six Nations and Autumn Internationals is one of the best live experiences in world sport.

Investing in the systems used by the Welsh Rugby Union to interact with fans and respond to their queries relating to live events would enable the WRU to ensure attendance for and eventday revenue generated by Welsh international rugby grew in line with UK sport.

Solution

By using its experience building bespoke data-driven customer relationship technology solutions for sports properties, Two Circles would be able to recommend and implement a new technology solution that enabled the WRU to improve its customer service – through the delivery of personalised responses based on customer data, faster response times and tackling common sources of customer queries at source.

Action

In 2018, Two Circles delivered the WRU an end-to-end customer relationship technology solution, identifying the right solution for the organisation’s needs all the way through to implementation and ongoing technical and strategic support.

Two Circles began by understanding the WRU’s full needs, which were a technology solution that enhanced customer service capabilities; past case history for each customer; easier access to data to resolve issues; real-time reporting on case volume and time-to-resolution; tracking of common sources of queries; and ability to pool data around customer enquiries for transparency across ticketing, hospitality and membership teams.

After assessing the potential systems available and the existing technology used by the WRU, a Salesforce platform was identified as the best solution, and the Two Circles Sales and Service Automation team worked with the WRU, through a series of workshops, to design both the business processes and the platform itself.

It was then implemented and customised, including integrations to the WRU data management, data analytics and email platforms. Following implementation, Two Circles worked closely with the WRU team to upskill users following launch.

This system has enabled the WRU to deliver an enhanced personalised customer service offering to Welsh rugby fans, improving its customer service offering despite having greater volumes of enquiries (6.3k customer services cases a month in 2021 vs 4k in 2018) – all with the same level of staff pre-technology implementation.

Ultimately, this is enabling an improved relationship between the WRU and fans of Welsh rugby, and ensures the experience of going to watch Welsh rugby union being played live is one of the best experiences in world sport.

Matthew Clarke, Ticketing Manager, Welsh Rugby Union