Targus Information Corp.

Ticketmaster Provides World-Class Customer Focused Ticketing Solutions with TARGUSinfo

Ticketmaster, the world's leading ticketing company, sold 100 million tickets in 2003, through www.ticketmaster.com, retail Ticket Center outlets and worldwide telephone call centers. Ticketmaster serves more than 8,000 clients worldwide and acts as the exclusive ticketing service for hundreds of leading arenas, stadiums, performing arts venues and theaters. In the US, Ticketmaster provides assistance and ticket sales for 80,000 to 100,000 callers every day through their five national call centers.

Business Opportunity

First and foremost Ticketmaster is committed to providing excellent customer service through its live agent call centers. Their brand recognition and significant ticket offerings drive a high volume of customer telephone transactions, which can occasionally increase customer hold times--an issue that Ticketmaster is not willing to accept. Always looking to enhance their 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 are always looking for new ways to improve our technology and offer consumers greater service and increased transaction speed. One way we believed we could do that was through Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR). Once we learned that the technology was available and reliable, we wanted to incorporate a fully automated, speech-enabled ticket purchase and delivery solution for our national call centers," said James Boyce, Vice President of Operations, Ticketmaster Contact Centers.

Enhanced Call Process

Concentrating on customer service in their call centers, Ticketmaster sought the assistance of TARGUSinfo real-time intelligence to automatically capture a caller's name and address. Combined with a speech capture application, this solution was able to provide the following key benefits:

* Reduce call times with a fully automated customer ticketing solution to capture and verify customer name and postal delivery address.

* Handle 30% of all ticketing orders within an IVR system, 85% of which automatically return name and address through TARGUSinfo.

* Eliminate returned mail caused by transcription errors; callers now confirm their delivery address through the IVR.

* Decrease hold times by offering customers the choice of IVR interaction or live customer service agent.

A Successful Implementation

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

* Senior-level agents have been redeployed for more customer-centric duties, rather than routine tasks.

* Telephone calls have been shortened.

* Many more calls can now be processed daily, thus increasing sales and providing more callers with the chance to purchase tickets.

* Returned mail has been significantly reduced.

And most importantly, Ticketmaster is better able to efficiently satisfy the needs of its consumers.

"We have helped provide Ticketmaster with a speech-based ticketing solution that is simple and intuitive, facilitates faster and more accurate transactions at a significantly lower cost, and dramatically improves the success on every call handled via automation. The true test of a successful application is the rate of call completion within the application. Ticketmaster has enjoyed call completion of greater than 85% within the speech-based ticketing module." states Dennis Ainge, Senior VP for TARGUSinfo.