FSM
Feature
with Wembley Stadium GM Liam Boylan:
Liam Boylan.
Wembley Stadium has been stepping up its live event game over the past years, which resulted in a record season 2018/2019 in terms of events hosted at the iconic venue. Pollstar had an extensive chat with Wembley Stadium’s General Manager Liam Boylan about what it takes to run a 90,000 capacity building in a time of unprecedented demand for live entertainment.
Q: Everybody working in live entertainment seems to be in quite good spirits, seeing that live entertainment has never been in greater demand. How does that influence your day-to-day operation of Wembley Stadium? A: We’ve got an events team, for which there’d be nothing worse if they were just stuck with the same events going on all the time. The great thing about Wembley is its availability for multi-purpose events. We need to maximize that aspect. When the customer comes in, it isn’t
just about turning up for the event and leaving after. It’s about how they’re looked after from the moment they approach the stadium, including the pre-match entertainment. Even before football matches you’re starting to see lighting, laser and video
18 FSM
By Gideon Gottfried for
Pollstar.com
display. They’ve taken on board what the music industry has been doing for years. People are really enjoying live entertainment, and there’s a bar that’s been set, and people are looking for that. And if you’re not pushing your own bar, they won’t come. Now, Wembley has a name, it’s known
throughout the world, artists want to play here. But if we’re not on the ball with everything, that’ll change.
Q: What else are key factors to enhancing customer experience? A: One of the biggest changes in the last three years has been security, because of the atrocities that happened elsewhere. Artists are nervous about it. They’re
now looking at whether they and their fans are safe playing a certain venue. You have to enhance the security, but you need to be very careful about how you do it. You don’t want a customer feeling that they’re entering a prison. We have an ethos here that can be summed up as the three Ss: safety, security and service. The three have to go together. A customer coming in now is looking at,
‘what are you doing to make me feel safe?’ And if they, for instance, feel like they didn’t go through a search regime, they start to ask why, because they feel if you’re not doing it
to them, you’re not doing it elsewhere. One of the things we introduced is
the restricted bag policy. When you first mention this, people push back. ‘I’m coming from work, I got my laptop bag, why are you making me stop doing that?’ But whenever we’ve explained our reasons and rational to fan groups, they’re on board straight away. America is two years ahead of us with
that, their venues have been doing restricted bag policies for a while, and they’ve changed the culture. We’ve got to do that now in the UK. If you’re going to an event, take your bare necessities.
Q: How much are you spending on security? A: It’s costly. The security budgets are now a big thing for me to sit down with my finance people and it obviously pushes the costs on top of what we’re already doing by about half a million pounds a year. But it is an absolute necessity But you’re still coming to be entertained,
to go away with inspiring memories – so I want security to be there, but I want my frontline to realize that guest service is also important. When [my security staff] are dealing with the customer, they are first and foremost stewards, they are there to enhance the customer’s day.
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