The Pellucid Perspective - November 2022 - 2

GOLF COURSE
TECHNOLOGY
Customer Franchise Health
Actionable Analytics = Success
New Help is Coming
By Stuart Lindsay
W
e have been doing Customer Franchise Analytics
(CFA) for 20 years. Unfortunately, it is time consuming,
technically complicated and relatively expensive as
a result. But it has been very successful for the number of courses
that have used it. Although limited, we have done enough
of them to establish patterns and actionable steps that have fueled
an average of 8%+ revenue increases over the years. As we
will explain later, these analytics will become more important in
how we deal with the pricing questions emanating from both
improved demand and inflationary pressures. How will we detect
customer resistance?
Unique Annual Customers, Avg. Public Course
Customers contibuting 60% of Course Revenue
Avg. Annual retention (played 1+ times both years)
Avg. new customer adds over 3-yr period
6,000
15-20% (900-1,200)
<50% (or <3,000)
6,000
Even with limited deployment, we have analyzed the spending
of several million golfers at 100s of courses and extracted over
3 Million golfer email addresses. The major complication is that
the CFA process requires access to POS data from platforms that
tie customers to transactions. When we started, only a few POS
systems did that - today, almost all the major platforms do it.
The challenge of access to POS data has remained. This is further
complicated by courses switching POS vendors. Over the
last few years, over 3,000 courses have changed systems according
to our Internet Golf Database (IGDB) maintained by our
consortium led by Mike Dickoff at Apparation Golf (Pellucid is
an IGDB founding member). The problem is that most historical
customer/transaction data gets " lost in translation " .
This is about to change. Ross Liggett at Metolius has unlocked
the gates of data access for several major platforms. We
are currently " beta testing " the adaptation of our CFA process
using Ross' methodology. If we are successful - it will mean our
CFA will be easier, faster and less expensive. It will also be largely
automated opening up a wide range of usage not before practical.
Another significant enhancement of the Metolius process is
that your customer and transaction data will not be lost if/when
you switch platforms. Unless we miss our guess, this will also
be true for Rounds and Revenue history and most of the Key
Performance Indicators generated from that data. As POS technology
evolves (as is evidenced by the changes above); it will be
easier to switch platforms without the fear of compromising your
existing data.
2 The Pellucid PersPecTive
November 2022
CFA Report Components
* # of Unique Customers
* # of Returning Customers
* # of New Customers
* # of Lost Customers
* Average Transaction Size
* Average Customer Value
* Average Transactions per Customer
* Email Address Extraction by segment
We have had 3 successful years with demand and course utilization
levels we haven't seen since the 1990s. Our Golf Market
Research Center (GMRC) participants have almost all been
able to raise prices either by " rate card " or " dynamic pricing " . But
many of our operators are also feeling the inflationary expense
pressures that are now eating away at these revenue gains. " Can
we raise our prices to cover these added costs? " and " how are we
going to know if our customers are resisting the higher prices? "
are the tandem questions we're getting from virtually every one of
The Pellucid Perspective - November 2022

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