Moonee Valley Racing Club wins with WIFI
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Ocean Park wasn’t the only winner on Cox Plate Day
Moonee Valley Racing Club (MVRC) is the historical home of Australia’s most prestigious horse race, the Cox Plate. Established in 1883, Moonee Valley has enjoyed a rich and vibrant history of thoroughbred horse racing and is committed to offering its customers the best experience possible.
The Challenge
MVRC is one of the most progressive racing clubs in Australia when it comes to customer satisfaction and race day services. MVRC identified the need to improve patron satisfaction and provide their customers with a seamless race day experience that met the needs, in particular of the younger generation, by enabling race goers to use smart phone technology to enhance their race day experience. Ultimately MVRC want to improve their customer’s experience on race day to ensure they grow their customer base and revenue through return visits and commissions on betting.
In the past, 2 options were available to place a bet at the races, either via the TAB or a bookmaker. At times queues were long and frustrating and while standing in line, punters risked missing the social aspect of the day, watching the races live or even the opportunity to bet on a race. The advent of technology has enabled alternative options for betting online which have been embraced by race goers.
With excess of 30,000 people attending the Cox Plate as part of the Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival, MVRC wanted to ensure that their customer’s experience was not affected by the congestion on cellular 3G networks. Many customers have smart phones and wish to bet online as well as communicate with their friends via phone and through social media so MVRC needed to increase bandwidth to enable this.
MVRC also wanted to increase the security around its member’s area. Historically, members passed through a turnstile using their member pass that was manually checked as they entered. MVRC knew that in many cases members would simply hand their member pass to a friend over the balcony to gain additional entry to the member’s area and this needed to be addressed.
The Solution & Approach
Triforce work closely with MVRC to deliver and manage IT services and strategy via a full outsourced model providing a managed service with guaranteed SLA’s and performance.
Triforce has had a long term relationship with MVRC and formed a consortium with Vertel (Internet and Wireless service provider) working with Ruckus (Wireless Technology Vendor) to deliver the solution with Triforce being the solution integrator and MVRC project manager.
A WIFI project of this scope would typically take 6 months to deliver but knowing the MVRC had the Cox Plate as a milestone event to meet, Triforce and Vertel along with Ruckus committed to having the project complete in just 2 months. This required all resources being dedicated to completing this project with 100% focus from all parties and ensuring Triforce worked closely with the CEO and the operations team at MVRC throughout the project. “As a long standing IT infrastructure solutions integrator for the racing industry, we understood the challenge and impact of the project to Moonee Valley Race Club. We worked closely with the club to define the business need and design a solution to suit both commercially and technically, in turn working with Vertel to bring to the table the internet and wireless services. All parties took the challenge and shared the risk producing a very positive result.” said Corie Marinucci, General Manager of Triforce Services.
The project was implemented over multiple phases and covered a number of requirements:
1. Scanning member’s cards for identification and loyalty covering the member’s perimeter. The member’s area now has 14 entry/exit points that are controlled by hand held WIFI enabled scanners. This ensures there is only one entry per membership card at any one time.
2. Free internet roaming access on race days for the general public within the coverage area – as a means of reducing the current 3G public mobile congestion during major events where attendances exceed 30,000.
3. Wireless Network connectivity to current POS and staff rostering terminals and access to back-end systems and databases.
4. Other applications and network access requirements on race days including security monitoring, video surveillance and two-way radio.
“Right from the start Triforce had the interests of the club at heart and worked with us to understand the complexities of the organisational structure here and the different requirements of each of the stakeholders, they were able to pull everyone together and make sure it delivered the outcome that suited all needs but within the timeframe and the budget.” Said Michael Browell, CEO MVRC
The Business Benefits
- Business growth enablement: Support better commercialisation / business growth e.g. enable MVRC to sell internet as part of corporate events packages and use smart phone apps such as Passport for cashless payment in the bars and restaurant
- Marketing enablement: To log on to the WIFI network users need to submit an email address. This has enabled MVRC to build a customer database to which they can deliver targeted messages encouraging return visits as well as conducting satisfaction surveys to help them improve the customer experience further.
- Free PR: Race goers use social media to post updates about their experience.
- Increased customer satisfaction and growth of customer base
- Decrease in fraudulent entries in to the member’s area, thereby increasing satisfaction ratings of paying members
- Reduced costs: Allowed the club to reduce data costs of its administration department by utilising the WIFI.
“I would definitely recommend Triforce because they understood what the club was looking to achieve and had the ability to bring together the parties to deliver a robust solution and do it in a cost effective way” Said Michael Browell
