Village Roadshow looks to boost personalised customer experiences with latest tech investment

Australian entertainment giant, Village Roadshow, is giving its customer support technology a facelift to offer more personalise experiences for customers across digital channels.

The ASX-listed company, which has a diversified portfolio of assets including theme parks, cinema exhibition, film distribution and production, said MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform was identified as the right solution for a more personalised customer offering after undertaking a comprehensive market review with Capgemini.

“We brought in Capgemini to help us evaluate alternative approaches to connectivity and ultimately decided on MuleSoft because of Anypoint platform’s built-in security and monitoring capabilities and its hybrid functionality,” Village Roadshow’s group general manager for technology and services, Geoff Spicer, said.

Spicer told CMO the company was previously using a custom, point-to-point integration solutions for application and data integration. He said the Anypoint Platform is a better solution to custom code as Village looks to enhance the entertainment experiences offered to its customers.

Specifically, the vendor provides a powerful enterprise-grade platform for connecting applications and data. By taking an API-led connectivity approach, Village Roadshow can build an application network where applications, data and devices on the network become pluggable and reusable.

“This will help us build customer loyalty and derive greater value from IT assets,” he said.

The latest tech investment is part of Village Roadshow’s wider customer personalisation and engagement strategy.

“We believe providing this connectivity is key to providing personalised and relevant experiences for our customers, in particular for digital touchpoints,” he said. “We foresee an environment of ‘hyper-connectivity’ and need this to be managed, reliable and secure.”

But Spicer agreed leveraging the right technology in the pursuit of offering a more personalised entertainment experience for customers is not without its challenges.

“The first challenge is gathering information from a wide variety of sources about our customers, their preferences and how they prefer to interact,” Spicer said. “The second challenge is to connect this information to existing applications in a way that is consistent, robust and secure.  

“But this is where MuleSoft will assist. On top of this, MuleSoft has proven experience supporting high-volume transactions from other well-known consumer-facing enterprises.”

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