The Buffalo Sabres know the best plays happen both on and off the ice. By putting fan feedback at the center of every decision, they turn insight into action across the entire fan experience.
With Alchemer, the Sabres gain a clear, real-time view of what fans care about most. These insights drive meaningful change to fans’ door-to-door game-day routines, higher satisfaction, steady year-over-year gains, and revenue growth that proves listening to fans is a win in any arena.
Through the 2026 regular season, the Sabres achieved:
+41K
open-ended responses analyzed this year
2x
increase in survey participation among fans vs. prior year
Double-
digit
increase in CSAT, NPS, and arena atmosphere ratings
$
Revenue growth
About the Buffalo Sabres
The Buffalo Sabres are a professional ice hockey team based in Buffalo, New York, competing in the NHL’s Atlantic Division. Founded in 1970, the Sabres have built a passionate legacy fueled by hard work, resilience, and one of the most dedicated fan bases in sports. They’ve built the fan-inspired “Sabrehood” a shared universe of fandom that connects the team, the city of Buffalo (and beyond), and its fans year-round, both inside the arena and out
The challenge: You can’t improve the fan experience if you don’t fully understand it
The Buffalo Sabres don’t just sell tickets. They sell an experience.
For the Buffalo Sabres, that experience starts long before the puck drops and extends well beyond the KeyBank Center arena. It starts even before the moment fans walk through the arena doors or when they arrive in downtown Buffalo. Experiencing pregame rituals and activations. The sights and sounds of the game – the atmosphere. The food and beverage options. The energy that makes the arena feel like a community and creates a true sense of belonging.
Analyzing and interpreting that full experience is the responsibility of Jeremy Cohen, who leads Fan Development & Insights for the Sabres. While his role sits in marketing, his work impacts nearly every department across the organization.
Before Alchemer, the Sabres collected feedback; but not at the depth, speed, or scale they required to put insights into action. They needed a better way to reach fans, collect insights, and act faster on feedback.
“Fans are our customers. Everything we do is about them, their experience in the arena, how they feel about the brand, and what it means to be a fan even when they’re not in the building.”
– Jeremy Cohen, Manager of Fan Development & Insights, Buffalo Sabres
The solution: The Sabres take their shot at better CX with an assist from Alchemer
With Jeremy on board, the team evaluated new CX platforms. He was already familiar with Alchemer from a previous role, and it quickly rose to the top based on the features and capabilities that mattered most:
- A polished and customized respondent experience to match the Sabres’ brand standards
- Seamless integration with the Sabres’ data warehouse (KORE) and visualization capabilities (Tableau) to instantly access insights and socialize across business units throughout the organization
- Hidden variables and URL parameters to enable future analysis of customer metadata, like persona- and ticket-type–based analysis
- Advanced logic and branching to serve different questions to different fan segments in a single survey
Just as important: Alchemer’s onboarding and support team ensured a smooth transition, so fans never felt the technology switch behind the scenes.
The Sabres playbook: Measuring and benchmarking the moments that matter
The “Gameday Pulse”, sent after every home game, is the Sabres’ most critical survey. This “pulse” of fan sentiment provides a consistent, game-by-game view of what’s working and what isn’t. It provides a benchmark across four KPIs.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely fans are to recommend attending Sabres home games
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): Overall satisfaction with the game day experience, from door-to-door.
- Purchase intent: Likelihood to attend another Sabres game in-season
- Word of mouth: Whether fans have spoken positively, negatively, or not at all about the organization in recent weeks
They pair these metrics with experiential diagnostics such as entering and exiting the arena, concessions, atmosphere, ticketing and content engagement, and built benchmarks where none had existed before.
For the first time, leadership can track trends over time in real time, spot spikes or dips, and prioritize improvements based on real fan impact, not just anecdotes.
“With Alchemer, now we can see what matters most to fans and weigh issues against each other in real time.”
- Jeremy Cohen, Manager of Fan Development & Insights, Buffalo Sabres
The impact: Making fan feedback a true power play
After implementing Alchemer, the organization now collects and visualizes feedback alongside its KPIs, and the impact shows up fast in ways they can consistently measure. With clear insights in hand, Jeremy and his team pinpoint exactly what to refine and focus on; changes which fans immediately notice and appreciate. Those actions have shown to improve fans’ experiences, drive higher revenue, stronger margins, and steady gains in fan satisfaction month after month.
One such example is gauging the crowd’s reception of a new videoboard, which was installed before the 2024-25 season as the first of several planned venue improvements. Given the sizable investment, the Sabres needed to ensure the change was positive – and they learned that it has paid back dividends. Fans noted the significant improvements to the arena atmosphere and their overall experiences in surveys, commenting on improved graphics, better replays, live selfie capabilities, stat-rich sub-screens and an elevated, immersive game presentation.
Jeremy recalls, “The response wasn’t just positive, it was gratitude. Fans were genuinely thankful we made the change.”
And the numbers support the anecdotes. Throughout that season and into the current one, fan feedback improved dramatically, and they immediately started seeing an upwards trend in their benchmark KPIs versus the year before.
When fans see their feedback not only taken but acted upon, it builds trust and loyalty, turning passive fans to die-hard supporters.
“I feel like I’m seeing improvements discussed based on our feedback. I really appreciate all the efforts being made! Go Sabres! It’s good to know the organization wants to hear from the fans to help make our game day experiences (and beyond) the best they can be…”
– Buffalo Sabres fan
Better food, shorter lines, happier fans
Food and beverage became another high-impact area where fan insights directly shaped action. Using Gameday Pulse and post-season surveys, the Sabres established clear KPIs for concessions, including speed of service, quality, variety, and friendliness of staff, and tied open-ended feedback to specific in-arena experiences. With benchmarks set in year one, the team could track performance quarter over quarter, month over month, and even game by game.
That data flowed seamlessly from Alchemer into their data warehouse, KORE, and then into their analytics platform, Tableau, giving the team real-time visibility into fan expectations and gaps in the food and beverage experience.
Those insights fueled a revamp of the food program, with a strong focus on local favorites and fan-requested options including:
- More local food vendors and Buffalo-area breweries with familiar favorites
- New market-style and cashless concessions with shorter lines and faster service
- Expanded dietary options and gluten-free choices
By listening to fans and acting on their feedback, the Sabres elevated the entire gameday experience. The impact was immediate: food and beverage satisfaction rose, fan net sentiment strengthened, and month-over-month satisfaction outpaced previous seasons.
“We’re collecting more fan feedback than ever without adding extra lift for the team, which frees me up to focus on deeper analysis and higher-impact work.”
- Jeremy Cohen, Manager of Fan Development & Insights, Buffalo Sabres
Insight beyond game day
While post-game surveys remain the core use case, Alchemer supports feedback across the organization, including:
- Season ticket member experience and renewal surveys to ensure benefits and perks match what Members value
- Event feedback with on-site learnings to keep a pulse on fan sentiment throughout the season and create unforgettable experiences
- Sponsorship and brand-lift studies on behalf of corporate partners
- Qualitative research recruitment and screening
- Segment-specific learnings and embedding a typing tool to evolve segmentation modeling
These insights are shared across the Sabres organization helping ticketing, digital content, events, brand, community relations and leadership align priorities and spend resources where they matter most – on the fans.
Conclusion
With Alchemer, the Sabres turn a better fan experience into measurable growth. They capture more insights without adding workload, build clear benchmarks to spot what fans want in real time, and share those insights with leadership to enable faster, smarter decisions.
The result is a deeper understanding of fans, better experiences off the ice, and a data-driven playbook the team can build on season after season.
What’s next?
The Sabres aren’t skating across the finish line just yet. They’re still finding new ways to level up the fan experience. Recently, the Sabres began using Alchemer Pulse to analyze over 40,000 open text responses unlocking deeper, more actionable insights. The team can now ask more intentional open-ended questions and use purpose-built AI to analyze responses at scale, adding a powerful layer of qualitative insight to the fan experience. That includes quantifying overall text sentiment with Alchemer’s proprietary Net Sentiment metric, which the Sabres can directly correlate with existing survey KPIs.
While it’s still early, the team is already uncovering patterns that would have been nearly impossible to spot manually, such as emerging game presentation issues tied to specific fan segments or seating areas.
As Jeremy puts it, “I am floored by the capabilities of Pulse. It’s a researcher’s dream to put hard numbers to unstructured qualitative data.”
There’s more to come, but one thing is clear: the Sabres are committed to listening to fans and getting better every season.
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