Pro sports teams gain customer insights with KORE Software & Tableau


KORE Software—a Tableau OEM partner—offers consulting services along with a suite of subscription-based products called KORE ProSports. The products transform CRM software into a complete sales, marketing, and operations platform. KORE’s customers understand their data through Tableau visualizations embedded into the cloud software product. Russell Scibetti, Vice President of Product Strategy shares how customers benefit from interactive, easy-to-understand reports, regardless of technical skill. Tableau Server makes it easy for the KORE team to set permissions on sites, projects, and workbooks—ensuring security and pleasing customers.


Tableau: What’s happening with the data professional sporting organizations collect today? Russell Scibetti, Vice President of Product Strategy: Sports right now is undergoing a bit of a data revolution in terms of the volume of data every team is collecting, the amount of resources that they're putting behind, more analysts, more technology platforms. It's really a tremendous opportunity. Tableau: Who uses KORE software? Russell: KORE has had a lot of success in the professional sports arena. At this point, more than half of the professional sports teams in North America use one or more of our products. Tableau: What does KORE software do? Russell: So our software comes into play to help them manage those relationships. Everything from nurturing fans, from being a single-game buyer all the way to a full season ticket holder. And managing the relationship for corporate partners. Tableau: Where does Tableau fit into your services? Russell: Our application runs in the cloud. And so as an OEM partner of Tableau, we run our own OEM Tableau Server that is multi-site, supports all of our different customers inside of a single cloud software product.

Being a SaaS application, it's really critical for us to have a strong multi-tenant architecture. Tableau fits really seamlessly into that with the site structure, with the API and the other commands available to manage across multiple sites, all the different levels of permissions from the sites down to the projects down to the workbooks.

Tableau: What does being a Tableau OEM Partner provide to your customers? Russell: The logical extension of that is providing more data, more reports, more understanding across an entire organization. So it was key for us to identify a product that was very interactive, that could provide very easy-to-understand reports, regardless of the level of organization of that particular staff member, and really just bring everything together in a very easy-to-digest, easy-to-work-with manner. Being a SaaS application, it's really critical for us to have a strong multi-tenant architecture. Tableau fits really seamlessly into that with the site structure, with the API and the other commands available to manage across multiple sites, all the different levels of permissions from the sites down to the projects down to the workbooks. Tableau: How do you serve multiple clients with Tableau Server? Russell: We have a very common data schema that all of our customers use. So the ability for us to push that content across different customers that have that common schema, but still maintain that security across those customers, has worked really well. Tableau: Which Tableau visualizations are working the best for you? Russell: We've got several popular visualizations that our customers like to use. On the ticketing side, we provide interactive maps that allow customers and our teams to compare different audiences of ticket buyers. Let me see the distribution of our season ticket holders compared to our single-game buyers. So the mapping and the geography is very popular. We provide data that compares primary ticket purchase price to secondary resell price so people can see the gap between their face value of the tickets that were sold and then how they were sold on the secondary market. That's also a pretty popular component on the ticketing side. Tableau: Is there anything else you’d like to say about Tableau? Russell: Tableau can really cover the entire spectrum, whether you're a super user that knows SQL that can really dive into all of the formulas and calculations and statistics. Or a simple user, who's really just looking to have a better understanding of your basic reports. Tableau is the best to cover that spectrum of customers. Tableau: What other Tableau features are you digging in to? Russell: One of the things coming down the pike that I'm really excited about is the increased Web authoring functionality. So for our use case where we're providing a Tableau Server and our customers are connecting through that Tableau Server experience, the more we can empower them to continue to develop on the content we've created through that Web interface, or even through the mobile and tablet interfaces, which they also showed here at the conference. Tableau: What did you use for visualization before Tableau? Russell: Tableau's the first time we have brought in an external visualization solution. In the past, we've just built our own reports and we continue to do that. There are certain times where it makes sense for us to continue to build our own reports or build some of our own consoles where we have programmatic logic key to our application that is important for us to control. Tableau: Can you give us any details on the types of visualizations you are doing with Tableau? Russell: On the corporate partnership side, the visuals provide year-over-year reporting, year-over-year pipelines, forecasts of when contractual revenue is coming on and off the books. Insight into the inventory, the components of the deal, how much of our revenue is generated from digital media versus signage versus radio versus other assets. Tableau: Where is your data stored? Russell: CRM has always been using SQL Server, and our data warehouse product uses Amazon Redshift. It was also important us as an OEM partner, to select a platform that will operate across those different data sources so we don't have to create different siloes of different products for our data warehouse versus our CRM solutions. Tableau: What was integrating Tableau like for you? Russell: The integration process between Tableau and KORE has been pretty seamless. It's very easy to do a single sign-on, to be able to pass through so the end user never has to do a double logon to see the Tableau-generated content.

Tableau can really cover the entire spectrum, whether you're a super user that knows SQL that can really dive into all the statistics, or a simple user, who's really just looking to have a better understanding of your basic reports. Tableau is the best to cover that spectrum of customers.

Tableau: You must be working with a large amount of data. Russell: Clearly, we collect and manage a lot of data on behalf of our teams through our different software integrations and all the data that they're collecting directly through our product. So we were looking for a solution that can help advance the level of interactivity and display power of that information across the team. Tableau: Where does CRM fit into the picture with your customers? Russell: Sports teams are very active CRM users. They have a wide range of relationships to manage from the consumer side of their ticket buyers and fans all the way through to their corporate partners that are advertising with them. Tableau: Have you had to train your customers on Tableau? Russell: One of the nice things about Tableau is it's very easy to educate customers on how to use the product. I pretty much self taught myself through Tableau's existing documentation, training videos, manuals. When our customers are onboarding into our product and they want to start experimenting and playing around with the Tableau visuals, I can take them through the basic elements of training and how to create copies of dashboards, customize them, set their preferences. And I encourage them to do the same and do their own exploration using all the resources that Tableau provides through the website. So, really, it's been a very easy process to self teach how to get a lot out of the application.