Draper • The message to employees at Wednesday’s grand opening of StubHub’s new customer service office was clear: You’re here to make people happy.
Videos showed people going crazy when they found out they’d been able to get tickets to something they were dying to see.
“You saw the reactions,” StubHub’s head of global customer experience, Daron Fowlks, said over a microphone to many of the “couple hundred” employees gathered to celebrate the arrival of another big-name, tech-oriented company, one that’s part of the eBay family.
“How many of you have ever had an experience like that?” he then asked, more than half of the people in the room raising their hands to signal that they had. “We’re going to do that for people. We enable that to happen thousands of times a day.”
(Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune) Daron Fowlks, Head of Global Customer Experience for StubHub, "throws out the first pitch" instead of a ribbon cutting during the StubHub opening reception for employees at its newly-located Center of Excellence for Customer Experience and Trust Operations in Draper, Utah, Wednesday, October 18, 2017.
The StubHub center, which is expected to employ 400 by early next year, will handle calls from people seeking assistance in buying or selling tickets to events all over the world.
“Most of the time, if you’re calling us, it’s because you need help listing a ticket for the first time or trying to buy a ticket and you’re not quite sure how the process works,” said Alison Salcedo, StubHub’s spokeswoman for North America.
And the goal of this new Draper office, said Utah native Fowlks, is to “connect people to life-inspiring experiences, to get them to what they want, every single time, every single day.”
An abundance of multilingual Utahns made it easy for eBay to put its ticketing subsidiary’s operation in Draper, Fowlks said, noting that StubHub does business in 23 languages in 48 countries. Added colleague Perkins Miller, who worked for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee in the run-up to the 2002 Winter Olympics: “We help sell a ticket in the U.S. every 1.3 seconds.”
The motivational speeches were part of a celebration that included a food truck lunch, a DJ playing tunes so employees could display their karaoke prowess and the chance to shake hands or have a picture taken with former Jazz basketball player Thurl Bailey.
He shared his own examples of inspirational sports memories — the chance of playing professionally against his idol, Julius Erving, and of playing collegiately for the effervescent Jim Valvano, who led Bailey’s North Carolina St. Wolfpack team to the 1983 national championship and died of cancer at age 47.
In the crowd were Rep. Mia Love and Draper officials, including economic development Director David Dobbins.
“StubHub will be a wonderful addition to a growing list of companies locating in Draper,” he said, pointing to the presence just down the road of DellEMC, VPR Technology Group, 1-800 Contacts and, of course, eBay.
“It helps being able to attract the kind of employees they want for their ‘Center of Excellence.’ Our vision has been to add jobs and opportunities for a wide range of employees, and StubHub will just add to that opportunity,” he said.
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