ESPN improves app performance with Domo analytics tools

Ratings rise

ESPN, founded in 1979 and based in Bristol, Conn., is a sports broadcasting network that operates multiple broadcast channels, a website and an app. Domo was founded in 2010 and is based in American Fork, Utah.

ESPN televises live events, including all four major North American sports -- baseball, basketball, football and hockey -- as well as golf, soccer and tennis, among others. In addition, ESPN produces sports news shows that run frequently on its main network and ESPN2, sports magazine, and sports debate programs and reports on sports news around the clock on ESPNews and its website and app.

Meanwhile, with an ESPN+ subscription of $6.99 per month, customers can stream live sports on both the website and app when they're not in front of their television.

Many customers, however, were dissatisfied with ESPN's streaming capabilities in the spring of 2021, and it was being reflected in the middling ratings of the broadcaster's app.

So, in an effort to improve customer satisfaction, ESPN, which started working with Domo in 2018, began using an application called Voice of Customer Experience (VoCx) developed in Domo by robotic process automation (RPA) vendor RXA. The application was shared by RXA on Domo Appstore, where it was made available to all Domo analytics customers, and ESPN customized the application to suit its own needs.

With the application, ESPN is able to share and analyze customer data across its marketing, engineering, product and programming teams and then use that data to inform decisions about how to improve the streaming app, according to Lien.

"Exposure to this feedback has strategically guided these teams to identify and investigate where the ESPN app could improve, and we saw the success of this process," she said.

According to Lien, using the VoCx application, ESPN captures customer data, including feedback and sentiment in Domo, and then shares that data across its various teams for analysis.

A support ticket is automatically created each time a customer contacts ESPN for support on the customer app. ESPN then uses that support ticket to track each customer service experience, enabling its product team to see the customer's original reason for contact and the handling of the complaint through to its resolution.

By sharing customer care data in Domo, we were able to identify and document common app issues, address fan feedback and release further app updates to improve the fan experience.

And, as data is gathered, it gets fed into data models that help inform ESPN decisions that lead to improvements in the app, increased customer satisfaction and, ultimately, rising ratings.

"By sharing customer care data in Domo, we were able to identify and document common app issues, address fan feedback and release further app updates to improve the fan experience," Lien said.

Efficiency through automation

Although the ratings of ESPN's app have increased, ESPN sees an opportunity to further increase customer satisfaction by taking advantage of additional capabilities in the VoCx app.

Now, rather than focus solely on the performance of its app and streaming capabilities, ESPN is also focusing on the performance of its customer care team.

Because RXA is an RPA vendor, the customer analytics and experience app it developed in Domo includes automation capabilities. Now, ESPN aims to use the app to automate parts of the data ingestion process to free agents from gathering and inputting data and enable them to give more of their focus to customers reaching out for support.

By using natural language processing and automation together, the VoCx application is able to decipher a customer's reason for contacting ESPN and automatically input certain data, freeing customer care agents to devote more attention to the customer's needs.

"We've captured data to enable product and engineering teams to work more effectively and more efficiently with regard to our issues at hand, so in 2022, we want to take tagging and the [categorization] of these contacts to the next level by automating this process," said Doug Kramon, ESPN's head of customer care and fan support.

Kramon compared the job of a customer support agent to that of a race car driver.

A driver's primary responsibilities are to drive as quickly as possible and not wreck the car, he said. But, in order to drive as quickly as possible without crashing -- and hopefully win the race -- information such as tire pressure, wind speed and engine performance are critical.

However, if the driver is worried about tire pressure, wind speed and engine performance, they're going to be distracted from driving as quickly as possible and most likely wind up driving slower than they would if all they had to concentrate on was driving.

Instead, drivers have support teams that worry about all the underlying data that leads to performance -- freeing the drivers from distraction so they can concentrate on, well, driving.

Similarly, customer support agents manually inputting data into a CRM system as they interact with customers are distracted from attempting to resolve customers' issues.

When they're making decisions about how to categorize a complaint -- for example, about streaming performance or billing -- they're not concentrating solely on resolving the problem. They're also slowing down the resolution of the problem, delaying when customers are able to again view the event they want to watch.

If that categorization were automated, however, it would result in more efficient use of customer support agents' time.

"The nature of live sports demands that we in customer care be nimble and efficient when supporting live events, and those live events never end -- there's always a live sporting event," Kramon said.

Agents, therefore, are in contact with customers via text, phone and social media in real time as events take place, he continued.

"This endeavor to automate the [reason for] contact will have major upside by making better use of the agents' time and ability to support," Kramon said. "What we're working to remove is the tagging from the care agent's set of tasks, and that will allow them to focus more on what they're there to do, which is interact with the customer, resolve the issue or educate the fan."

Accuracy

While more efficiency is one benefit of the addition of ESPN's expanded use of the VoCx application, a higher degree of accuracy is another, according to Patrick Negron, vice president of data strategy at RXA.

By removing the responsibility of categorizing customer complaints from customer care agents, human error usually is also removed.

Customer complaints that were mislabeled -- or not labeled at all -- now are more accurately labeled, and many fall under more than one category and receive multiple categorization tags. In fact, tickets now average 2.06 tags, according to Negron.

That accurate data, in turn, gets passed on to ESPN's product engineers and enables developers to further hone the performance of ESPN+ and the ESPN app.

"In a lot of cases, we're now able to target in on the actual problem," Negron said. "The goal is to get a more accurate reflection of what the fan is experiencing so that can be captured and passed on to the engineering and application teams."