Customers

StubHub

"Business Objects has enabled us to get the right information to the right people."

Rob Singer
Director of Business Intelligence
StubHub

Challenge

San Francisco-based StubHub is an online marketplace where fans buy and sell tickets for live events such as theater, concerts, and sporting events. Since its founding in 2000, StubHub grew exponentially year-over-year, and in the process, outgrew the Microsoft Access database and Microsoft Excel pivot tables it used for reporting. Taking anywhere from one to three days to load the Access data warehouse and refresh the pivot tables, StubHub’s static and untimely reporting process limited its ability to understand key business drivers or to make sense of customer data and leverage it for more astute marketing practices.

"We didn’t have a good way to monitor key metrics," says Rob Singer, director of business intelligence (BI) at StubHub. "With the Access database, we were unable to create a customer view or segment our customers in ways that would enable us to develop meaningful relationships with them." According to Singer, the company’s decision-making method was "more gut feel instead of data-driven."

Singer notes that StubHub focused its marketing efforts on obtaining new customers, but lacked the proper insight to establish its relationship marketing efforts. "We wanted to establish long-term relationships with customers, and make the most of our existing relationships rather than continuously buying new ones," says Singer.

Approach

StubHub realized it needed a scalable and extensible data warehouse that could accommodate its customer and marketplace data as well as external data feeds. Incorporating best-of-breed technology, StubHub used a three-phased approach to create and roll out an extensible BI and data warehouse infrastructure, with Oracle as the central database and BusinessObjects™ Web Intelligence® as the primary information delivery engine.

Phases 1 and 2 included putting a scalable infrastructure in place, replacing the Access database with a star-schema Oracle data warehouse, migrating key Excel pivot tables into Web Intelligence reports, creating new, value-added reports, and enabling ad hoc reporting through the innovative use of "sandboxes." Phase 3 includes defining key performance indicators (KPIs) and rolling them into dashboards using BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager.

Results

Limited to 2 gigabytes of storage space in its Access database, the scalable infrastructure now enables StubHub to maintain 250 gigabytes of data, with plenty of room for expansion. The data warehouse is updated daily instead of weekly—enabling StubHub business users to make informed marketing decisions on a daily basis. Moving to a Business Objects reporting environment from Excel, StubHub’s BI analysts now focus on high-value projects, such as quantifying customer lifetime value and segmenting StubHub’s customer base.

Using Web Intelligence, StubHub’s BI team created more than 300 standard reports that end-users can access and customize to suit their needs. StubHub moved from a push environment, where BI analysts developed all the reports, to a pull environment, where end-users are empowered to find their own information and manipulate reports. Additionally, business users now have access to richer historical data.

Reports that track key StubHub metrics include an interactive market segment report, which breaks down ticket sales and orders by region and event (with rollups to categories), and a marketing channel allocation report, which monitors marketing channel efficiency metrics. Additionally, StubHub maintains a variety of sandboxes-highly interactive subject-area reports that make it easy for business end-users to create custom reports. StubHub business groups are now able to consistently make informed, data-driven decisions on a daily basis.

Each report adds value to the business, tangible or intangible. The marketing channel allocation report enables the StubHub marketing team to quantify the effectiveness of each marketing channel on a daily basis and enables them to make daily modifications to their spend strategy. In 2006, the market allocation report helped reduce StubHub’s cost per order by one-third. More difficult to measure but undoubtedly valuable, executives and business users now have visibility into key company drivers. "Our end-users are more engaged with the data and constantly monitor key metrics,” says Singer. “You can ask people in the halls data-based questions and most know the answers off the top of their heads. That wasn’t the case prior to us rolling out Business Objects."

One of StubHub’s key goals is to provide a superior customer experience, maximizing customer loyalty. StubHub used satisfaction surveys to identify possible customer pain points and customer service gaps-and built reports to help monitor those issues. The Business Objects reports alert the appropriate business owners to where potential problem areas are, enabling StubHub to respond quickly. Singer says, "We saw significant gains in our customer satisfaction this year because of our ability to respond." With greater understanding of customer buying patterns, StubHub is able to anticipate demand and deploy changes to its marketplace in near real-time to accommodate market-changing events.

In the near term, StubHub plans to finish defining its KPIs and roll them into Business Objects dashboards, which will provide executives with focused, efficient delivery of mission-critical data. Additionally, StubHub will use Business Objects to enhance its operational reporting capabilities.

"Using Business Objects, we intelligently use information to provide our customers with world-class ticket buying and selling experiences. We believe that we know our customers better than anybody in the tickets industry knows their customers, and we use this knowledge as a competitive advantage. We have also used these tools to converge upon a predictable revenue model, and we’ve stemmed seasonality and other major risk points. A big reason for that has been our ability to get the right data in front of the right people at the right time," says Singer. "Business Objects has enabled us to get the right information to the right people."

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