Santander offers a wide array of financial services, including retail and corporate banking, wealth management, capital markets and insurance. With over 9,000 employees and $77 billion in assets, Santander Bank is one of the world’s leading financial institutions.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
To maintain control over which employees could see and request company tickets, Santander originally limited ticket access to a small group of administrators who submitted requests on behalf of others throughout the organization. This restricted model produced inefficiencies and bottlenecks. By providing employees with direct, controlled access to tickets, Santander is now able to see exactly how tickets are being used and what results they are driving. Today over 9,000 employees have an easy way to see what tickets are available and how to request them.
THE CHALLENGE
As a premier financial services firm, Santander Bank uses client entertainment to build strong relationships with its customers. With numerous sponsorships with professional and collegiate sports teams, Santander manages a significant portfolio of ticket assets.
Prior to 2016, Santander was managing these ticket assets by allowing a limited number of people to access the system and submit ticket requests on behalf of those who wished to take clients to events. Admins would go into the system and request tickets for each of their business lines.
Hannah Longmore, Santander’s Corporate Program Manager, realized the limitations of this approach. While limiting access to a handful of admins seemed to provide the control Santander needed, it also produced inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Ticket admins had to know the ticketing needs of the bankers in their business line and manually enter each ticket request into the system themselves— a time-consuming process which introduced delays.
It was a time-intensive process for assistants, as they had to be aware of what every banker might need tickets for.”
Hannah Longmore, Corporate Program Manager
When the NFL season kicked off in early September, executive assistants would allocate all the season’s tickets for its different business lines before the level of demand for these tickets was known. They would then go back into the system and reallocate these tickets when they learned each business line’s actual needs. The process was confusing, and bank employees did not understand how tickets were allocated.
In 2016, Santander Bank’s leadership team examined how tickets were being used. They examined whether it could maintain the control it needed while making the process more efficient for everyone. InviteManager offered controlled access— the ability for employees to see exactly what tickets were available and to submit their own requests for them. Those requests would be sent to the employee’s manager for approval. Santander realized that by giving controlled access to the people who actually wanted tickets, it could eliminate all the delays introduced by admins acting as middlemen.
Santander’s leadership team also wanted to make it easier for bankers to see what events were available, and how to request them. Doing so would not only create a more transparent process, but it would also increase the likelihood that the right event would be selected for each of the bank’s clients.
THE SOLUTION
Santander decided to give over 9,000 employees controlled access to company tickets with InviteManager.
“Initially, I was concerned,” recalls Longmore. “I thought expanding access might cause the number of ticket requests to skyrocket, and that might overwhelm the review process.”
But as the process rolled out, Longmore saw new efficiencies emerge— just as she and the executive team had hoped.
“Executives no longer had to request tickets for their entire business line because relationship managers and individual bankers could request tickets themselves. That meant that if a ticket was requested, we knew for sure it was actually going to be used.”
Making it easy to see and request tickets increases demand for them, and that helps companies capture a higher ROI on these assets. That’s exactly what happened at Santander. As ticket use increased, it set up a process to accommodate and prioritize the different ways employees used live events. “The Bank allocates their tickets to client-facing employees, however, in instances where these tickets go unused, they are given out for team member engagement and employee recognition”.
As a result of the new system, ticket utilization soared. Over 90 percent of Santander tickets are now used to build strong relationships with its clients. Far from being overwhelmed by new ticket requests, Longmore found the process easy to manage.
“With InviteManager, the controls are already in place. It’s nearly impossible to make a mistake.”
Nobody should hesitate about using InviteManager. There are no downsides to the system, and it’s a nominal fee for the value it delivers.”
Hannah Longmore
