Maximizing Efficiency: Preparing for the Super Bowl Surge in Customer Contacts
The NFL season represents the prime time for revenue and customer engagement for most North American sportsbook gaming companies. The excitement builds up during the NFL playoffs, reaching its peak with the Super Bowl, which generates three to four times the customer contacts of any regular busy NFL day. To handle the Super Bowl surge, the Customer Experience (CX) department starts preparations weeks in advance, ensuring they have the capacity to quickly respond to customer inquiries on the day.
From a capacity planning standpoint, staffing to cover the peak volume of contacts during the Super Bowl would lead to an excess of capacity afterward. This surplus would be slow to adjust during the off-season, resulting in higher labor costs and reduced financial flexibility for the department. This could limit our ability to allocate resources for the next high-demand season.
Therefore, as capacity planners, we strive to find a balance between meeting the immediate demands of Super Bowl day and preparing for future peak periods. We acknowledge that a queue of unanswered customer tickets will likely form on Super Bowl day. Our focus is on managing the size of this queue and the rate at which we can resolve these inquiries. Over the years, DraftKings' CX department has enhanced its Super Bowl performance by minimizing the queue's peak size and speeding up the resolution process.
The Workforce Management (WFM) team now assesses the demand trends of this NFL season to forecast next season's demand curve. This analysis will guide our decision on the number of frontline associates to hire towards the end of the off-season, leading into the next NFL season. Additionally, we explore innovative strategies to align the supply of associates with the fluctuating demand of the NFL season.
With another successful NFL season concluded, we look forward to the challenges and opportunities of the next one.
I'll also be attending and speaking at the SWPP Annual Conference https://swpp.org/annual-conference/ in Nashville from March 4 to 6. If you're there, let's connect!