Approach
BOOKMYSHOW USES ALTERYX TO TARGET THEIR CUSTOMER BASE, WHICH HAS INCREASED THE CONVERSION RATE FOR EMAILERS AND ONLINE NOTIFICATIONS
BookMyShow is the largest online entertainment ticketing portal in India. They provide consumers information and online ticketing for movies and other live events such as theater, sporting events, and concerts. As the market leader for online entertainment ticketing, BookMyShow is in a unique position to work with event venues, entertainment companies, and sports teams to help them understand what drives ticket sales and maximize sales potential. Anujay Mathur leads the analytics team of 12 people at BookMyShow. The team supports several functions within the company, including customer relationship management (CRM), business development, and marketing.
Problem Statement
In Mathur’s two years at BookMyShow, he has seen the online ticketing industry grow and change. When he joined the company, they were doing about 400 or 500 million page views in a month and selling mostly movie theater seats. Today they have about 3 billion page views in a month and the number of events has more than tripled in the same timeframe, with support for not just movies, but also sporting and cultural events. Mathur’s initial challenge was finding a tool that could deal with the size of their database and run analytics on complex data. BookMyShow needed to understand their overall market share and identify the revenue potential – not only on a geographic basis across India, but for specific show times and venues.
BookMyShow needed to understand the profiles of customers attending various events. They had vast information about customer sales, timing of new releases, movie genre, actors, theater locations, theater size, and more. Ticket sales open four days before a movie screening, and customers may purchase tickets online in advance for a convenience fee, or on the event date at the ticket counter for no fee. Mathur’s team wanted to know who would pay a convenience fee and under what conditions, such as when the event date is closer and less seats are available.
BookMyShow was one of the first to provide online ticket sales, and Mathur realized that the best way they could maintain their market lead in India was to add value to their venue clients that they didn’t get from other vendors. His challenge was to find ways to help venues understand their markets and maximize their sales potential. BookMyShow needed to distinguish itself with more sophisticated and tailored data analytics to provide venue clients information with the most financial impact, like finding the right ticket pricing strategy. BookMyShow wanted to get into the business of providing content and information, rather than a purely transactional business model selling tickets.
SOLUTION
Mathur evaluated a lot of tools. He needed a sophisticated BI solution that integrated with their current IT environment through a variety of applications to reach information in various databases and make calculations with bigger sets of data. During his evaluation of Alteryx, Mathur found that he could develop reports in just a few hours that previously took two full days. This time saving is what sold Mathur on Alteryx, and since he was already using Tableau for visualization, he appreciated how easy it was to integrate Alteryx with the existing infrastructure. Implementing Alteryx allowed him to generate more interactive dashboards.
Mathur has been pleased with how quickly his team has integrated Alteryx. He has been particularly pleased with the easy user interface. Before Alteryx, he had to bring on people with six to eight years of experience because he needed extensive coding proficiency. Now he hires people with little to no experience because he knows that new hires are able to become proficient in Alteryx in about two weeks. This has been critical to Mathur’s ability to keep up with the company’s internal and client demand for data analytics. Mathur says, “Instead of making someone learn SQL and Mongo, and taking about six months of time [for training], the guys who are joining the team today usually take about a week or two to get on the line of work and they are able to make their own workflows.”
Mathur’s team uses Alteryx to connect to MongoDB. Mathur touts the Alteryx platform as a significant benefit because it is compatible with the data sources and output that he wants to run. It has become essential to keep his analytics team innovating.
If Mathur didn’t have Alteryx, he would have to double or maybe triple the number of members on his team to manage the same amount of workload. His deadlines would be impacted and it would diminish the value-added services that they provide to customers.
BENEFIT
Identifying Growth Opportunities With Alteryx, Mathur put in place a multi-phased project to gain deeper insight about the company’s performance. In the first phase their goal was to assess overall market share. For example, what percentage of tickets sold are purchased through BookMyShow? From that, they gained insight into what kind of movie gave BookMyShow high penetration vs. low penetration. Then, he moved on to understand the theater metadata. For example, does a western Bombay theater differ from an eastern Bombay theater? Or does the New Delhi Theater business differ from Bombay? Finally, his team added another layer of geographical data to understand the effect of proximity of the theaters in a geography. Alteryx allows Mathur to take all of this data and run statistical models to understand how variables affect each other. For example, how does occupancy and the BookMyShow penetration correlate with each other?
Time Savings
Mathur has realized huge time savings with Alteryx. He recalls queries that used to take a full day or two. He had to constantly supervise them because he had to run a code, wait for it to process, then run the next code, etc. With Alteryx he finishes these same queries in a couple of hours — without constant supervision. He can create a workflow, validate it, and run it in the background while he works on other projects, rather than having to wait for sections of the code to run.
Creating Consultative Analytics for Clients
Apart from running price-optimization models with predictive tools in Alteryx, Mathur has been able to analyze which sections of a stadium could sell better to optimize revenue. Mathur says, “We actually recommended changes in the layout of one of the stadiums because it supported better pricing. Because our recommendation was something different than what the layout allowed, the client made some changes in the layout by creating a new section out of an existing section.” They made the recommendation based on data, and the new layout and mix of seating generated more revenue for the client.
More Effective Marketing
One of Mathur’s key accomplishments using Alteryx has been creating a workflow that helps his team guide marketing and strategic initiatives. Mathur says, “It helps us understand where the revenue potential is, where to target, where to channel our spending, our marketing activities, and business development guides. Some of the analysis done has become a part of our branding strategies.”
With Alteryx, BookMyShow now has a clearer picture of its overall market share and a better view into data at the customer level. Mathur has been able to create next-level data analytics evaluating how various marketing efforts change customer behavior.
Mathur uses the predictive tools in Alteryx to better understand their customers by comparing that behavior to similar consumers and uses that analysis to target their customer base. Target marketing has increased the conversion rate for emailers and online notifications. Mathur says, “There are a lot of projects that we have done and I need to give credit to Alteryx because I don’t think we would have been able to do it in our normal scripting or some other coding language.”
The simple Alteryx interface allows Mathur’s team to run analyses that they would not have tried with SQL or coding. They have been able to do exploratory analysis, which has led to product innovation at the company. Mathur successfully implemented several product launches, including referral programs and targeted coupons, using Alteryx and will continue to do even more. Mathur is excited about applying Alteryx to data for future growth. “I think personally that we are using Alteryx to about the 60% mark right now.” He comments that there is still room for growth that his team hasn’t explored yet and Mathur is eager to learn more and use Alteryx to its full potential.
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