Lucky Voice can’t get enough of Tableau Software. The best-in-class visual analytics solution answers almost every question this leading U.K. provider of karaoke services asks: how many people are booked into our karaoke bars next week? What drinks and food do they prefer? Which are the most popular songs to perform? Answers to these and a multitude of other questions are a click away, and available in a real-time, compelling, easy to use format. By standardizing on Tableau for business intelligence, Lucky Voice is growing revenues, redeploying hard-pressed development resources away from reporting into creating new karaoke services, and maximizing revenue per customer. It all adds up to a complete return on investment in only a few weeks. That is definitely something to sing about.
Karaoke calling
Lucky Voice is redefining the karaoke interactive entertainment experience. A network of private karaoke bars throughout the U.K., an online karaoke experience, and pay-as-you-go solutions for venues and operators enable tens of thousands of customers to sing along to their favourite songs every day.
The company’s growth has inevitably led to an increased demand for real-time, detailed reporting—and this quickly led Lucky Voice to Tableau visual analytics. “Within five minutes of trialling Tableau, I knew I had arrived at my destination,” says Nick Thistleton, Managing Director, Lucky Voice. “We looked at various alternatives, including Jaspersoft, Crystal Reports, and Microsoft PowerPivot, but all of these were either too expensive for our small dynamic company, too complex, or otherwise unmanageable. Tableau did everything we needed straight out the box.”
The intuitive, easy to use Tableau visual analytics technology is now the standard reporting mechanism for Lucky Voice. Live for one year and deployed in one day, the best-in-class hosted solution enables Thistleton and his team to analyze almost any aspect of the business in real-time. Data associated with the performance of each of the Lucky Voice karaoke bars, total booked and forecast revenue, the song catalog, and the demand for drinks and food is available in dashboards which can be filtered, highlighted, and drilled into.
This seamless insight into business performance accelerates trusted decision making and enables Lucky Voice to tailor its services to best meet customers’ needs—and drive revenue growth. For instance, staff working in the karaoke bars can review their sales performance via the in-bar reservation system and compete with one another to see who sells the most. A competitive incentive program has helped boost food and drinks revenues in each bar.
Return on investment in a few weeks
Tableau paid for itself within a few weeks of going live too. How? By pinpointing ways for the business to capitalize on revenue-generating opportunities. The visual analytics also frees developers from the burden of report generation to focus on other critical tasks, like the new touch-screen Web platform that serves up the songs in the bars. “Developers used to provide the reports; however, changes were slow and difficult, and you couldn’t play with the data. Using Tableau the team can ask incidental questions on the fly, without engaging with the developers. Freeing up development time has saved Lucky Voice a significant sum of money,” says Thistleton.
Tableau has helped change the culture of the company too, delivering faster, more accurate decision making, and making everyone more aware of—and in touch with—the performance of the business. “Knowledge used to be concentrated at the top of the company,” says Thistleton. “Tableau empowers the real decision makers elsewhere in the company, such as the people working in the bars and the ones that manage the online enquiries.”
The solution has also provided valuable reporting data that might otherwise have been buried and overlooked in a spread sheet. For instance, a simple enquiry in Tableau revealed that on New Year’s Eve 2012, karaoke fans had rejected the traditional sentiments of “Auld Lang Syne” in favor of “Gangnam Style” by the K-Pop rapper Psy. The song accounted for almost a quarter of the 100,000 songs sung that night on Lucky Voice’s online service. Lucky Voice published a press release with the finding, and received blanket, international coverage. That is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars of free promotional marketing from a couple of reporting clicks.
Thistleton concludes, “We were making decisions in the dark before we had Tableau; everything we did was based on instinct. Now we have real time insight into the business, which is helping to maximize sales growth.”