SPORTS & HOSPITALITY: Moving to a Single Customer View

In this case study, Andrew Wilson, Business Development Manager at Verteda, analyses how well sports clubs and venues know their clients, and outlines the benefits of a single customer view.

In the sports and hospitality sector, data floods in from every source: ticketing, payment systems, food and beverage, loyalty and membership programmes, merchandise stores, online marketing tools and access control systems.

Stadiums and venues have a general idea of fan behaviour, but do they have a single customer view that unites all of these disparate databases together?

One problem with the proliferation of tech in the hospitality sector is that now there are lots of different software platforms, mobile apps, databases and online tools being used, all collecting data. Much of this data may overlap, or not be able to be brought together to provide any meaningful insight.

Bring data together for a single customer view

One thing we’re talking to customers in the sector more and more about, is how can you move to a single customer view.

No one company has the answer or the solution, but it’s about getting set up correctly in your systems and operations to enable a single customer view.

There are many benefits to moving to a more accurate single customer view of your fans – it helps with resourcing and planning for non-attendance at games, and it supports your loyalty programme initiatives, helping you to be more targeted in your customer outreach activities.

Retail is a sector that leads in terms of making use of the data it has about customers and bringing that data together to make more accurate business predictions. Are stadia also building fan personas, detailing the behaviours of different fan types and how to market to, and attract, those different categories?

And, are other hospitality venues, such as pubs and restaurants, being as tailored in their messaging to their audience’s demographic?

If we look at typical marketing for pub chains, it’s unlikely that it is tailored to specific buyer profiles, in the way that a supermarket has its different offerings such as the ‘value’ range, or ‘dine in for £10’ offers, or their ‘special’ ranges. These have all been designed with a specific buyer persona in mind, which has occurred as a result of developing a single customer view; looking at those buyer persona assumptions and aligning them with data coming from stores and loyalty programmes to deliver more targeted offers.

Knowing what to do with the data

One of the problems with achieving a single customer view is that, very often, businesses don’t know what they would do with the information once they get it.

If we could say to you, here is a list of your top 100 ticketing spenders – what would you do with that information? Do you have a marketing and loyalty plan in place to deal with that information?

Or, if we said, here is a list of people who only attend 5 games a year – what would you do with that data to drive loyalty and revenues?

This is often the problem; in some cases, venues and stadiums are collecting masses of data about their fans and analysing it, but haven’t yet considered what they should do with that data, or are just looking at headline figures, such as revenue spend at the end of a match day and comparing it to the same time last year. Instead, analytics need to be more intelligently applied, drilling down into different fan demographics to deliver highly tailored offers to fans, and to find out what works and doesn’t work when they do take action based on the data.

If you knew which fans only came to 5 games a year and you had the data collection capabilities in place to run an A/B test, then you could trial two different offers or approaches – maybe looking at the impact of serving up offers through email or social media versus providing these fans with a discount voucher on the day for selected food and beverages when they attend the match.

Data collection through loyalty programmes

One reason why clubs can’t do this is because they don’t have a loyalty programme in place that can collect this data, which is where pre-pay loyalty cards are able to join up the gaps in our understanding about fans. If a fan buys a ticket and then pre-loads their loyalty card for spending on the day, using it to gain access to the stadium grounds, and then using the card for all purchases within the stadium, it’s very easy to get a single customer view of that fan; tracking everything from which kiosks they purchased from, what they purchased and when, and also to compare behavioural patterns occurring over different matches.

And, combined with Access Cards, loyalty programmes can deliver much more for stadiums. When a fan accesses a stadium using an Access Card (or ‘Fan Card’) which doubles up as his loyalty card for purchases, stadiums can track when the fan enters the stadium, how soon they make their first purchase and what they could do to encourage fans to enter the stadium earlier to make use of the wider hospitality options available and increase food and beverage spend. It joins up the picture that stadiums build about their fans, pulling data from when a fan enters the stadium, every interaction within the stadium walls, right through to their exit.

Verteda is working with stadiums, hospitality venues and pub chains to help them develop a more accurate ‘single view of the customer’ – through their smarter payment solutions, holistic employee onboarding and workforce management platforms and through their loyalty programmes and business analytics tools. One solution can’t bring all of your data together, but working on adjusting your systems so that they are analytics-ready rather than being analytics-prohibitive, moves you closer to the single customer view that venues today are working to achieve.

Find out more at http://www.verteda.com/

About the author

Andrew Wilson is Business Development Managerat Verteda, a leading technology partner to the sports and hospitality sectors.

Verteda is just one of the many industry-leading providers that will be showcasing their latest innovations at Europe’s first Premium Seat event, ALSD International, coming to London this October, 10-12.

ALSD International boasts a stellar speaker lineup of some 40+ high calibre industry executives, and already has a host of the top clubs, venues and architecture firms confirmed to attend, including Manchester City, Real Madrid, AS Roma, Fulham, Madison Square Garden, TAURON Arena, Barclaycard Arena Hamburg, Scottish Event Campus, SSE Hydro, The Sports Consultancy and Ahoy Rotterdam.

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