Miami HEAT boosts season ticket sales by 30% and saves approximately $1 million on operations

For the Miami HEAT, a successful National Basketball Association (NBA) game is about more than what happens on the court. From admissions and concessions to in-arena wireless networking, every game is a masterpiece of logistics as fans gather for fun, food, and team spirit. The HEAT’s customer satisfaction scores prove that it’s doing something right.

“The fan experience is everything,” says Matthew Jafarian, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy for the Miami HEAT. “The better we understand fans—what they want, what they need, what they do in the arena—the better we can deliver an unmatched experience. To do that, we need to gather all possible data and make sense of it.”

Starting with the benefits of centralized data

While customer data is vital for the HEAT, it was fragmented in the past. “We had a wide variety of systems across the organization, but we had no good way to bring the data together and answer questions about the business,” says Edson Crevecoeur, Vice President of Strategy and Data Analytics for the Miami HEAT. “We sent spreadsheets around via email as our primary source of information and communication. It took hours to produce those spreadsheets, and they became obsolete as soon as the numbers changed.”

The HEAT chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure data services to gain a comprehensive, holistic view of its data. “With Azure, you can easily access preconfigured data services in minutes and quickly design and publish new services,” says Crevecoeur. “Microsoft has the best end-to-end cloud solution, including data integration, transformation, security, AI, and end-user visualization and analysis with tools like Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power BI, and it costs probably one-fifth of what it would cost to do everything in-house.”

The HEAT uses these tools to make data a true power player within the organization. “With Microsoft solutions, we have insight, accountability, transparency, and the ability to democratize data throughout the organization—we’re empowering everyone to make better decisions,” says Crevecoeur. “We want to be an innovation leader in the NBA, and Microsoft technologies are helping us achieve that goal.”

Transforming fan engagement with a 360-degree customer view

With Dynamics 365 Sales, the HEAT can manage all fan-related information in one place, including engagement and purchase histories, to create 360-degree fan profiles. In addition, each profile is scored with predictive machine learning to determine the likelihood of future purchases. This helps the sales team identify top sales prospects and personalize offers, increasing win rates. “After we implemented the data warehouse and Dynamics 365, we had a 30 percent year-over-year increase in our season ticket sales with essentially the same team on the floor,” says Jafarian.

Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with Adobe Marketing Cloud to optimize the digital customer journey. “We pass the fan profiles to our digital marketing team, which leverages Adobe Campaign to engage customers through our digital channels with messaging, content, and products that match their interests and experiences,” explains Crevecoeur. “We use Adobe Campaign to identify potential new customers who resemble existing customer profiles, and new leads are pushed into Dynamics 365 for follow-up by our sales team. This helps us retain existing fans, strengthen ongoing relationships, and add new fans who love the HEAT.”

The HEAT uses Azure data services to create a single source of truth, combining data sources like external ticketing systems, food and beverage systems, points of sale, and e-commerce into one centralized data warehouse. Combined with predicative analytics, this data allows the HEAT to estimate how many people will be in the arena for any given game down to the seat level.

Moving to data-driven decision making across business offices and the arena floor

As the HEAT dug further into Microsoft solutions, Power BI became a standout resource. Nearly every department within the organization and the arena uses Power BI to access the metrics that are important to their operations with a 70 percent Power BI adoption across the organization.

When a game starts, decisions must be made quickly from locations across the venue to optimize foot traffic, boost sales of food, drinks, and merchandise, and give fans the best possible end-to-end entertainment experience—no one wants to spend game night standing in lines. “Because Power BI is mobile, we can push key metrics directly to employees’ phones,” explains Crevecoeur. “They can get real-time information about ticket sales and view dashboards about how many people are in the building, what they’re spending on concessions, and what entrances they’re using. We can make on-the-fly decisions to improve flow and reassign resources to manage ingress.”

According to Jafarian, the improvement has been significant. “With Power BI, we’ve moved way beyond spreadsheets,” he says. “We can immediately integrate information across lines of business—from arena activity to online retail and social engagement—and present that data across mobile devices, desktops, and tablets.” Adds Crevecoeur, “Data is always available, always current, and it serves as a single source of truth for everyone. That keeps everyone on the same page, at the same time, with the most important facts about our business priorities so we can make operational decisions that enhance the fan experience during a game or show.”

Centralizing data and providing a simple way to view it has already created financial benefits for the HEAT. The organization realized that it could shift hourly workers’ schedules by just 15 minutes in some cases to better match fan attendance patterns. This simple change resulted in approximately $1 million in savings, and there have been other benefits, too. The HEAT grew its online business by a factor of 10 and achieved a 20-times return on investment on social media platforms over two years by segmenting and re-targeting customers using its stored fan profiles.

“Using Power BI and the entire Azure data platform, we can predict attendance for all 44 games of the season within hours of the schedule being released,” says Crevecoeur. “Last season, we got within 4 percent of the actual numbers for the whole season, two months before any games had been played. This puts us in a better position to identify opportunities, mitigate risks, and manage our resources in a more efficient fashion. Ultimately, this helps all areas of our business focus on enhancing the fan experience.”

The HEAT has had a great experience with Microsoft business applications so far and is looking forward to even more innovations. “We selected Microsoft because there’s no other place where we can find an enterprise-capable platform to do so many different things,” says Jafarian. “We expect Microsoft to be a strong partner into the future, and I’m excited to see what we’ll be able to accomplish together over the next 10 years.”

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