Today I worked with the Ticket Operations department and mainly worked with Peter Wallace who is the Director of Ticketing. He is in charge of the ticketing staff including the box office workers and the ticket takers during games as well as working with the ticketing software and predicting future ticket trends.
We started the morning by going over the different software that the ticketing department uses including the website that the tickets are sold on as well as other software programs that use the ticket data to explain various ticketing trends. The goal of the overview was to show me that the ticket operations department is based on data analytics, so they want all of the data that they can get in order to better the ticketing process and increase the number of tickets sold. After the overview, I put the data analytics to work by doing some data entry.
Throughout the morning, Peter got lots of phone calls and emails asking for tickets for various people for various reasons, but there were two that were notable. The first was a call about getting a suite for a family with a 11 month old boy that isn’t expected to live past mid-June, so the Bulls donated a suite for this weekend to that family. The next call was helping an old Bulls worker with proposing to his girlfriend using the field. After both of these calls, Peter told me that this was a completely normal day.
For the game, I scanned tickets at the main entrance of the ballpark. Since this was a Thursday night game, I probably scanned over 500 tickets myself. After I was relieved, Peter showed me the current data for the amount of people that had entered the ballpark, putting my work of scanning into concrete data.
Overall, I thought that the ticket operations was very interesting and definitely very data driven, which I thought was really cool. All of the different software programs give the Bulls so much information about each ticket buyer as well as show the weaknesses of their current marketing.
