The sports and entertainment industry has been hit hard by COVID-19. German sports club Borussia Dortmund expects to report a loss of $50.5 million in the 2019-2020 soccer season after being forced to play matches without fans in attendance. And global concert producer and ticketing juggernaut Live Nation reported that revenue was down 98 percent in the second quarter of 2020, compared to the same time last year.
Businesses that service the sector have also been impacted, although Max Mueller, CEO of DAIMANI, says his company has fared better than many others. The Switzerland-based group offers luxury experiences for corporate and private clients attending sporting events and concerts.
“The good thing is that we’re small enough to be flexible but big enough to be reliable; and as a marketplace, we don’t have to give financial guarantees for event inventory,” Mueller says. “We’re focusing on increasing user experience while waiting for things to start up again.”
For example, the company has been creating virtual events including online meetings with sports stars like a famous ATP tennis player. Offered primarily to corporate clients that want to give customers luxury experiences, these events do not require travel or need to be held in person.
Given the company’s mission to provide VIP customer experiences, it is fitting that DAIMANI has relied on SAP Customer Experience solutions since 2018. The software helps it stay close to clients and understand what they need, while serving and marketing to them more appropriately.
According to Mueller, “For us, customer experience is the only important metric. Listening to the customer is paramount. But what do you use to measure and figure out what to improve?”
Using the SAP Customer Experience portfolio, DAIMANI has been able to understand two important aspects of customer behavior. First, the company can better understand the behavior of people who buy its packages. Second, it can crowd-test potential customers.
The company, founded in 2018, was set up from the start to have a holistic overview of customers. This lack of “information silos” makes it easier analyze existing and future customers and feed that data to product development, marketing, and sales staff appropriately.
DAIMANI considered other sales platform vendors, but selected SAP for its global scalability. Additionally, “SAP is quite young in the experience stuff so it had more of a focus on developing cool, new things,” says Mueller. “As a cloud-only business, SAP Cloud Platform was key to us. It lets us easily communicate with the outside world. We can really connect to a huge ecosystem — and as a platform we are nothing without our ecosystem.”
DAIMANI has digitized an industry that is primarily 95 percent offline. The company has created an online platform for corporations and individuals to purchase customized VIP wrap-around services to events — everything from flights to backstage passes — while similar offerings are developed and sold by agencies. The company operates primarily in Europe and Asia but hopes to expand to the United States in the future.
