The importance of listening to customers: Utah Jazz CXO

Listening to customers’ feedback and acting on it is a simple yet critical part of creating a good customer experience, according to Andrea Williams, chief experience officer at NBA team Utah Jazz.

Williams spoke to Digital Nation Australia at the Qualtrics X4 Summit in Salt Lake City about the importance of listening to customer feedback and providing the bare minimum of expectations.

She said, “The listening component although it sounds so simple, it's something that's so critical in order to make those lasting impressions on people in terms of their experience.”

Williams said the customer experience evolves based on the NBA teams’ work and its response.

They send out surveys after every basketball game and get the percentages based on what their net promoter score is and how they fare on every element of the experience like ticketing, marketing game.

The Utah Jazz allows for real-time and post-game commentary which Williams said is one of the most important parts of the feedback.  

She said, “You’re reading what people are writing about their experience, and we're responding in real time."

Williams gave an example of some fans who went to the wrong seats, some confusion arose and they became frustrated with the process.                         

She explained, “We heard that so we reached out to them [and said] ‘would you like to come back to a game we'd love to make sure that you have a better experience this time’. We do that throughout the year.

“During our games, if there's something that we can do in real time as well like moving someone to different seats, or if they had a cold hot dog, they'll deliver some hot food to them, we will take advantage to do that.”

She said it is all just a matter of listening to your customers, which can be hard.

“The whole reason for the survey is we want to get better, we want to improve. They ding you for things that are in your control and some things that are not.

"It's our responsibility to say you are part of the Utah Jazz family, you paid your hard-earned money to be here we have a due diligence and responsibility,” she added.

Building purpose-led experiences

Willaims explained that at every game they want to create a meaningful experience for everyone, but that looks different for each individual fan.  

“For everybody that's coming it looks a little bit different. Maybe I'm a tightwad, so for me my priority might be cost savings, or someone else's priority might be the experience someone else might be the fit,” she explained.

“But there's a common theme and it's about how do you maximise these opportunities to create these wonderful experiences for people? For us, we spend a lot of time combing over data that we receive.”

Using Qualtrics, Utah Jazz gets their fans to record their experience and according to Williams they read every survey response.

“It's lovely to get positive feedback, but we're always looking for ways to improve, which is where the constructive feedback comes in. But ultimately, it's looking at when the first the journey of our fan begins,” she said.

“Before you even think about buying that first Jazz ticket what is that experience? But fans or patrons nowadays are so much savvier and the expectations are far greater. Everybody wants more bang for their buck.”

Athina Mallis travelled to the Qualtrics X4 Summit in Salt Lake City as a guest of Qualtrics.