Employees of the Texas Legends are focused on creating excellent fan experiences that bring people back year after year. Part of building these great experiences includes having solid, streamlined processes for back office staff. Five years ago, the team was manually collecting data for ticket requests through paper forms, one-off emails, and lots of spreadsheets. This system was inefficient, time consuming, and nearly impossible to scale as the organization grew.
They decided it was time to quit relying on paper, emails, and hundreds of sporadic spreadsheets, and look for a seamless data collection solution that could streamline their internal and external processes. Once they discovered Formstack, they were sold. The first challenge they tackled was digitizing their ticket requests with Formstack Forms and Documents. From there, they began to tackle digitizing many other paper-based and manual processes, eliminating hundreds of spreadsheets and saving employees many hours of data processing per week.
Tell us about yourself!
My name is Kyle Judkins. I'm the Vice President of Entertainment and Technology, for the Texas Legends, through the NBA G League affiliate of the Dallas Mavericks.
What were the challenges before using Formstack?
We are a minor league sports team. And being a minor league sports team, we have a very small staff. And so we are looking for tools that helped us collect information better and streamline the information for us as well as our fans, to relieve any pinpoints for them.
How have you reimagined work using Formstack?
Employees were having to collect emails, names, and requests for tickets, all via either paper or singular emails. And with Formstack, we were able to, right out of the gate, simplify that process of taking over 5,000 requests and simplify into one form and one spreadsheet, so that we could automate that system as much as possible in our back end. What that did for us was it made it easier and less work intensive, and for our fans, we did not miss or mess up their ticket requests. So that was our first use-case with Formstack, and got the ground running about five years ago. And we've been adding on ever since.
What outcomes has Formstack helped you achieve?
Formstack allows us to modify, grow, and enhance our back of house projects, while also making the customer experience easier. And so now when people and fans walk into our office to buy tickets, sales reps go right into Formstack, enter all their information, and the tickets are ready for them at the door.
So Formstack has allowed us to take over 200 to 300 spreadsheets that we had individually across our computer systems, each user had one or two and you had to ask for it from someone else. And with Formstack, we've been able to consolidate that information all in our Formstack account. Formstack also sends us weekly emails that has the data inputted. And we can take that and put it into our other systems as needed. So it's made sure everyone is on the same page with up-to-date and accurate information.
What advice would you give someone looking to become "practically genius"?
When you're looking at problems in your day to day business, sometimes you're looking for big problems with big solves. And a lot of times to make those problems easier, you're going to solve little problems with little solves. And the advice for me would be Formstack is a big tool that solves a lot of little problems that get you a big win.
What challenges are you planning on tackling next?
If you follow sports, or basketball enough, you know it's a data driven sport these days from every level. There's stats everywhere you look. There's data everywhere you look in the major leagues. But when you get into youth sports, it's not there. But we wanted to bring the Major League level of data into our youth camps.
And so now with Formstack, we are able to evaluate all of our campers every camp week, and automatically send them an evaluation data report that rates all of their skills and abilities in a metric chart that tracks them as they progress through our camps, and they can see their progress. And so our camp instructors, all they have to do is input their rating, and on the back in Formstack gives us a chart, all the data for the parents to have to see how their child is progressing through our legends camp.
Would you recommend Formstack to a friend?
So, I would recommend Formstack to anyone really. Formstack has products and uses for every nook and cranny of your business, and can fit right in with anything that you're doing. It's easy to use, it's simple, it's a robust platform that has all the tools and abilities you can need in a form processor. The customer support is great, and every time you talk to someone from Formstack, they're just happy to help you.
They're happy to help you solve your problem or whatever issue you have. And we've loved working with them over the last five years, and look forward to working with them even further.
