Arsenal Football Club

Arsenal Football Club was founded in1886 and now has in excess of 27 million fans around the world. In April 2010, business magazine Forbes ranked Arsenal as the third most valuable football team in the world, valuing the club at £768m.

On 22 January 1927, their match at Highbury against Sheffield United was the first English League match to be broadcast live on radio. A decade later, on 16 September 1937, an exhibition match between Arsenal's first team and the reserves was the first football match in the world to be televised live. Arsenal continues to be in the vanguard of new media with some four million followers on Twitter.

The Problem

After their move from Highbury to the new Emirates stadium, Arsenal FC realised that their customer contact centre was not as effective as it could be at dealing with the many sales enquiries that came in from around the world. Each of their product lines such as match ticket sales, stadium tours, restaurant reservations, home shopping, soccer schools and many other options, had their own dedicated telephone number (15 in total) each with a specialist sales agent.

This ‘siloed’ approach resulted in lost cross selling and upselling opportunities and other serious inefficiencies in the system led to a poor customer experience.

The Solution

During the consultative sales process, it was determined that Arsenal FC needed to consolidate their product offerings and
centralise their sales agents in order to provide a cohesive, structured and efficient single touch point for customers who needed
information or wanted to purchase any one of the multiple product lines. The solution needed to be scalable and provide
measurable results.

Based on these customer requirements, Freedom designed and deployed a solution based on the award winning Genesys Customer Experience centre along with some 750 IP telephony handsets.

The Genesys system provides a graphically rich and tightly integrated solution, which incorporates the OmniPCX Enterprise voice platform to offer fully extended telephony and unified communications features.

The solution features the Visual Contact Centre, a ‘software cockpit’ that integrates, in a single user interface, all the tools required to configure, control and measure contact centre activities:

• Routing: the routing matrix concept brings a visual way to control call flows
• Visual IVR: featured IVR with graphical script editor
• Monitoring: real time KPI of all steps, from entry points (services) to agents
• Reporting: statistics dashboards with Excelbased reporting, customization wizard, report scheduling, email delivery
• Configuration: Configuration of all objects with only one interface: Agents, Skills, Routing points, Switch extensions

New work and call flows were created along with new scripts for inbound call handling, incorporation of email and a sales agent training process was instigated.

Arsenal’s four million Twitter followers are not forgotten either as the Genesys Customer Experience Centre also allows for social media integration via Twitter and Facebook so that companies can respond, inform, and notify consumers while also directing and routing messages to the most appropriate resource.

The multi-channel contact centre can support Twitter and Facebook integration and with 0.5 million Twitter followers and 2.5 million
Facebook fans, social media is taken seriously.

Benefits Experienced

The Executive and Board implemented a solution that meets the demands of a global brand and which can support their commercial strategy for brand promotion to Arsenal’s fan base. In addition, there has been a significant increase in service levels and sales growth that are directly attributable to the implementation.

From a financial management perspective, this investment has enabled the sales agents to become much more effective at selling as they are now able to talk through a varied selection of products whereas before each was siloed into niches. Not only has this led to an increase in sales but also to a more productive and happier team. Furthermore, the integration with TDM voice means that
outbound proactive sales calls can be made.

The IT team has delivered a solution to a problem that was affecting sales and customer satisfaction. In addition they have delivered a multi-channel contact centre that can support customer enquiries in the medium the best suits customers.

The fan base has benefitted from clarity of information that is provided much more efficiently and opportunities to support their No1 club by being able to more easily purchase merchandise and game tickets.