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Company: Delaware North
Company background: Delaware North is a global foodservice and hospitality company started in 1915 and headquartered in Buffalo, New York. We manage and provide food and beverage concessions, premium dining, entertainment, lodging, and retail at many large venues and special places. These include sports stadiums, entertainment complexes, national and state parks, airports, and gaming venues.
Before the pandemic in 2020, we were a team 60,000 strong. Our role has always been to work behind the scenes to create world-class experiences. The Delaware North customer journey is vastly multi-faceted. We must listen to what customers are saying; respond when they reach out; proactively engage with our brand (Delaware North brand and all 200 of our location brands). Delaware North operates more than 350 social media accounts across a variety of platforms, by a variety of staff resources across our global operations. This number does not include the ever-growing number of consumer review pages, sites, and channels (YELP, Google Plus, TripAdvisor).
Goals: Improved efficiency to handle the Delaware North social needs (governance, content, analytics, listening, campaign management, and visualization/display) from one unified, end-to-end platform. Implementation of a complete, purpose-built, center-led platform designed to provide the organization a standardized, single, unified experience to fully master the social landscape and provide for our customer’s journey.
“A social business has a deep integration of social media and social methodologies into the organization to drive business impact.” As defined by the Altimeter Group.
Delaware North’s businesses were especially hard hit by the pandemic. At the height of the crisis, our 105-year-old company was closed in all our 200 locations worldwide. Delaware North’s 2020 revenue was significantly lower than in 2019. We sustained tremendous financial loss and were forced to make many hard decisions, most difficulty a reduction to our global workforce and the movement of many of our colleagues to Business Disruption Leave. Our social team was also heavily affected by the company-wide reduction in staff and Business Disruption Leave. The team was reduced to only a handful of employees during the height of the pandemic which impacted us in both social publishing and moderation. Because of this, it was paramount for our team to gain as much efficiency as possible so that the significant workload could be accomplished by a much smaller team.
The company’s recovery was supported by the transformation of our enterprise operating model, work that we initiated before the pandemic. This included the implementation of the Khoros platform (Marketing, Care, Intelligence & Experiences).
Contact: Kerry Hassen
Title: Sr. Brand & Social Strategy
Related URLs: <Add supporting URLs of your community, social channels, campaign sites...>
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
Despite the pandemic and the impact on our business, our social media efforts continued to push on. Our Gaming, Parks & Resorts, and Restaurants all remained very active on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We published almost 16,000 posts across almost 400 social media channels between 4/1 and 12/3
Evaluation and Results
Khoros, our enterprise-wide tool proved invaluable given the growing demands for; the voice of the customer management, social customer care, marketing, and communication needs being placed on the digital channels. Management of our social business efforts in this way ensure
Khoros, our enterprise-wide tool proved invaluable given the growing demands for; the voice of the customer management, social customer care, marketing, and communication needs being placed on the digital channels.
Management of our social business efforts in this way ensured that the few resources that remained on staff during the height of the pandemic were able to access and manage the social and digital assets of the company. This was even though most of the remaining resources (5 people) had never worked in the Khoros system before.
The excellent support from our Khoros Support team ensured that the small but might team that remained were successful in their efforts to keep the business going.
OBJECTIVES / POTENTIAL BENEFITS:
- Efficiencies in the shared social services model with both people and platform resources.
- Improved enterprise analytics, data management, and reporting
- Costs savings by eliminating duplicative systems and platforms
- Allow for central support (training & backup)
- Engage with one strategic partner across all social platforms and tools including actionable listening, publishing, paid advertising, content management, customer management, social contest management, user-generated content management, and analytics for improved targeting and campaign effectiveness.
- Access a cohesive, unified system of engagement across 350+ social-owned accounts and owned websites. Allow teams to manage customer engagement from one simple interface without the complexity or additional cost of channel-specific or tactic-specific tools.
- Obtain a unified view of the customer, content, and campaigns. Select a system that would allow for advanced profiling and customer relationship management (CRM) integrations – providing a holistic picture of customers to all customer-facing teams.
- Enable true collaboration, visibility, and governance across teams, agencies, and silos.
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