Customer Spotlight: Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena

A World Class Facility

Imagine the vision and tenacity needed to spend years researching the perfect location, partnering with the City of Irvine, then engaging an award-winning architect to design an ice complex and arena of over 300,000 square feet.

The Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena broke ground in February, 2017. Since it’s opening in 2019, it has become a destination location that brings the community together over a shared love of sports and their winning NHL franchise the Anaheim Ducks. From a facility management perspective, their goal was to create a data warehouse designed to provide life-cycle insights from the youngest skaters through their journey to adult skaters, fans and often, years later, parents of their own young athletes.

At Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena, the goal to understand the entire customer experience is evidenced daily.  The arena houses the practice rink, as well as locker and weight rooms for the Anaheim Ducks. The possibilities for fan cultivation and community engagement using the Daysmart Platform are significant. Then add to that a host of other sports in the arena, special events and parties and you quickly grasp the huge importance of, and opportunities inherent in, life-cycle customer experience management.

While this facility may be new, the organization has a long history, and over the years has expanded throughout the southern California region from its Anaheim beginnings.  When you consider more than a two-decade heritage, broad geographic diversity and such a wide range of sports and activities, it’s easy to understand why deep customer insights are critical.

What was standing in the way of having life-cycle customer experience management capability?

Matt Rousso, Director of Business Intelligence for the Anaheim Ducks, has a vision as big as the data warehouse he and his team are building. Their goal is to make it easy to become a customer and fan with a well understood lifelong relationship. When Matt joined the team there was an enormous wealth of customer and fan data, but what they didn’t have was the ability to see and manage the entire customer experience.

Imagine a customer who is a hockey player, with a daughter learning to skate, and a teenage son who plays in a league. The entire family and all their records can be unified, presenting a picture of who uses the facilities, what they use them for, their preferred days and times, and what represents the best opportunity for cross-sell.

They had information, but not a full picture of how to most effectively engage their customer base. To that end Matt and his team began to research solutions that would allow them to round out their understanding and have the ability to engage the market more profitably.

Cindy Frazier, Programs Manager for Ice Management LLC, the parent company of Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena, along with other facilities throughout southern California, has a long history with the company. Looking back over her 23-year tenure she knows first-hand the power of technology to manage the facility for better outcomes. Along with Matt, she recognized the need to add to their customer insight and engagement capabilities.

In early 2019, they chose the Daysmart Software Platform to replace their existing solution.  Daysmart was implemented first at Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena, and is being rolled out to all other facilities under their umbrella with an estimated completion date of spring, 2020.

Today, at Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena, Daysmart is used for all booking, scheduling, registration, and check in for sessions. It is a full facility management program. Once fully implemented, Matt and Cindy will have access to customer profiles that span all facilities and all uses.

Imagine a customer who is a hockey player, with a daughter learning to skate, and a teenage son who plays in a league. The entire family and all their records can be unified, presenting a picture of who uses the facilities, what they use them for, their preferred days and times, and what represents the best opportunity for cross sell.  With such in-depth customer insight, it’s possible not only to simplify registration, payment and family scheduling, it’s also possible to develop loyalty programs and maximize revenue opportunities.

Proof of Concept— How is Daysmart Performing so Far?

According to Cindy and Matt, as of November 1, 2019, Daysmart has met every milestone and fulfilled on everything they expected. They’ve just rolled it out to three additional facilities, all under the Daysmart umbrella.

Next will be single sheet ice facilities, followed by multi-sheet ice facilities, with the goal that by spring, 2020, Daysmart is poised to deliver the unified customer experience management capabilities Matt had initially envisioned.

As the team at Great Park Ice and Five Points Arena have moved along their implementation path, the development team at Daysmart has supported special requests and worked to integrate Daysmart with a variety of other software tools. By spring 2020, Matt and Cindy will have the data they need to optimize customer interactions and accelerate revenue growth.