Customer Spotlight: Chris Rue from Seattle Sounders FC

It’s spotlight time again, when we learn more about how Amperity users do the wonderful things they do and then share it with you.

In this installment, we get a view of how Chris Rue has been evolving his use of Amperity to make his work go faster and add a personal touch to campaigns and initiatives.

Chris in five:

• Senior Business Analyst at Seattle Sounders FC, Seattle's Major League Soccer team

• Uses Amperity to automate workflows, explore the customer base, and segment audiences for a variety of marketing initiatives

• Has found new and more complex ways to use Amperity over the past three years

• Is a fan of personalizing communications to Sounders fans

• Enthusiastic amateur chef who cooks by sense of smell and taste … because who even needs recipes?!

What are you responsible for as a Sr. Business Analyst?

I am primarily responsible for helping to oversee our ticketing and customer databases and any data flows that are related. We use a vendor to do the development work for our data warehouse, but I help direct the setup and structure, I make sure the data is accurate, and then ultimately I use it to support Sounders business initiatives.

What internal teams do you work with or support? What does this entail?

The teams that I primarily support:

• Ticket Sales and Service: Primarily focused on CRM administration to support both sales and service needs, sales lead generation and lead management, service/renewal risk scoring, ticketing product mix strategy, and all reporting needs.

• Marketing: Primarily focused on supporting email marketing, personalized engagement strategies, and segmentation for paid lead acquisition. I am responsible for making sure that relevant contact information and relevant fan profile elements are up to date and available to be used in various marketing efforts.

• Ticket Operations: Primarily focused on ensuring the data flow between the ticketing platform and our data warehouse environment is working as needed and is consistent with how historical data has been delivered. Reporting and data needs for this team have increased this past year due to COVID and our ticketing platform change (SeatGeek to TicketMaster). We have worked hand in hand to ensure that things such as COVID Credits/Refunds are accurate and that our move to the new ticketing platform is seamless.

How has your use of Amperity changed how you get work done?

First and foremost, it has taken a lot of work off of my plate by automating the segmentation, structuring, and delivery of our data. Not only do I no longer have to manually support our marketing communication efforts, but we are also getting more and more personalized with our messaging by bringing all of our data into one view.

How has your use of Amperity changed over the 3+ years you’ve been using the platform?

At first we viewed it as a cool tool that helped to deduplicate our customer database and to apply some automated list scrubbing. As we got more experienced using Amperity, we started to realize it could really power up our segmentation and personalization, and that is when we really started to leverage Amperity to help support some pretty significant initiatives.

There was both push and pull to our increased usage of the tool: the automated work that it could do saved us time so that we could focus on other things beyond the manual work we were doing, and with that extra time we realized there was more that we should be doing in order to take advantage of what Amperity could offer. We have increased the amount of data sources that are integrated in Amperity and have also increased the amount of output sources that we send segments from Amperity as well.

How does the organization use the information from the dashboards and/or segments you create? What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do with data?

We have simultaneously improved our ability to use personalized marketing communications while also reducing the amount of manual work it takes to execute the list/segment creation. My personal favorite is our season member birthday emails that we send each day without needing to pull any lists.

The birthday email is a personalized send that is automated within Salesforce Marketing Cloud and it includes a birthday wish message from the club, as well as a Pro Shop discount offer that they can use. Amperity is pulling birthday information from our CRM environment and including that in segments being sent to Marketing Cloud.

Some of our service reps were sending birthday messages when they would remember, but it was not consistent and was totally manual as they had to keep track of the birthday and remember to draft and send a note. It is not necessarily the most impactful of all of our work with Amperity, but it is one of those smaller things that we would have never done otherwise that can add up to be really positive touchpoints with our customers.

What kinds of results have you seen with the work you’ve done with Amperity?

Amperity is a part of a lot of improvements we have made across the organization. Some examples:

• We have run multiple successful paid marketing campaigns using segments from Amperity that we would have otherwise not been able to target.

• We have used Amperity to support our risk/retention modelling in order to help our service team best spend their time.

• We have revamped our email, survey, and fan profile efforts because we now have a better Customer 360 to support them.

There was an organization-wide push for improvements in these areas outside of just using Amperity, but it has definitely helped us succeed and I think we are only getting started.

What is your favorite feature or capability in Amperity and what do you use it for?

My favorite feature is being able to add database tables to our production environment myself. Amperity has been a great partner when it comes to helping us set up what we need, but sometimes I am not exactly sure what I want or need from a new data set until I have had time to work with it. It started as a way to play with the data to see what we had, but I have ended up creating a couple of new tables within Amperity that have unlocked data that we were not able to use as well before. Being able to self-serve within the tool is a really cool feature.

What were you surprised to learn once you had access to your data?

It was a bit surprising to learn how many duplicate records we had in our database, but it is great to know where we really stand and how we are really changing over time. By being able to accurately identify duplicate records, we are now able to support categories such as first time customers much better than we could before because we can be more confident that they really are.

What sort of things are you doing with the segments you are running?

• Supporting our personalized email marketing efforts by making sure that up-to-date data is sent each day

• Supporting our lead generation efforts as it is very easy to target and scrub lead lists to best suit our sales team needs

• Not currently active due to seasonality, but we use segments to support the targeting of our paid marketing campaigns

• Pushing Amperity IDs to our CRM environment to better deal with duplication issues within CRM

• It’s also so easy to build segments that it is usually my first stop when it is time to do some data exploration in order to answer one-off questions or come up with new use cases

Tell us about a hobby or a skill or an experience outside of work

I love to cook (…maybe because I love to eat?) and have ever since high school. I like to cook to my sense of smell and taste more than follow recipes to their exact nature and I think I would be pretty good on a “non-professionals” version of a cooking competition like Guy’s Grocery Games where they have to make dishes with unusual ingredients or cooking-style conditions.

Below is a photo of one of my favorites to make on weekends with my wife. These are Pelmeni Russian dumplings, they are relatively simple in terms of ingredients but actually quite a bit of work so we make as many as we can at once so that we can stock up on them as they freeze really well.

Thanks to Chris for sharing, and for our readers, we'll be back soon with more Customer Spotlight! You can also check out earlier installments here.

Seattle Sounders FC uses Amperity built on AWS.

That one time Chris singlehandedly won the Major League Soccer championship

The Pelmeni Russian dumplings we've heard so much about, and would like to get to know personally