By Tony Attwood
Because of health issues I am having to cut back on my visits to Arsenal, so although I still have my season ticket, and attending games covered by that, I am not buying tickets for matches not included in the season ticket – such as some of the games in the three cups (League cup, FA Cup and Champions League) – that are not covered by my seasons ticket.
Which is why I thought it was strange to receive an email from Arsenal today which said
“Hi Tony,
“Thank you for your support at last night’s Carabao Cup match against Newcastle United. We’d love to hear about your experience at the Emirates!
“Have your say on your matchday experience by completing our online survey below, which should take no more than a few minutes.
“Your opinion matters and will help us to improve your experience on matchdays at Emirates Stadium.”
Now of course it is easy to laugh this off as a simplistic administrative cock-up; they used the wrong database of email addresses when sending out questionnaire, but there is something far more worrying than that here.
These surveys are used by Arsenal to help the club decider how to arrange their ticket selling, what prices to charge, how to promote, what to include in the season ticket and so on. The fact that they sent me, a person who did not have a ticket for last night, a survey to complete, means a fundamental part of their analysis is going to be flawed.
Of course it can be argued that people who did not go to the match, but who got the survey, will not complete it since they obviously were not there. But experience shows that some people who didn’t go will fill in the form, simply out of annoyance that they have been sent the questionnaire or maybe a sense of frustration that they didn’t get a ticket. At the same time a lot of people who did go won’t fill in the form simply because many people don’t.
The problem is Arsenal will have no idea what percentage of respondents come from each group. Worse if they ignore the fact that the research is flawed, they could draw false conclusions from the research.
Worse again, it shows that there is a fundamental flaw in their research department’s operations, which suggests other research they are undertaking might be flawed also.
Doing research into “customer” attitudes (I know we are fans but the people who do this sort of research tend to see us as customers) is a major part of business today, and it is vital that the research is undertaken properly at every level, including of course sending out the research questionnaires to the right people.
To my mind, as a season ticket holder over many decades, there are problems at Arsenal which could be addressed, but because we are seen as customers they don’t get addressed, because as customers we keep on buying.
