Our belief is that you start with being able to pull together an ‘almost live’ single customer view. Every fan is different and each feels that they have some ownership in some way of the club and what it means to them. It is a highly personal thing. There is also a shared mentality as to what that experience means.
Use AI to optimise ticket sales
Sports fans tend to be loyal. They want to engage.
In today’s market however, even seasoned fans are potentially starting to take a different view. Retaining customers at the right value level is key. You’d want to know quickly if customers are likely to churn, or if they are going to reduce their spend, or indeed increase it. They are family after all.
You have a lot of partners, you have a lot of different systems. You probably have what feels like an unchewable feast of problems to get you anywhere near being able to be more agile. The data just isn’t there.
But it is. You have the data already, it’s time to use it. Here’s some areas that you can use AI for:
Ticket sales
Predict likely customers to churn
Identify potential new season ticket buyers
Forecast sales and attendance
Optimisation
Optimise ticket pricing
Optimise Suite sales
Optimise concession sales
Personalisation is key to success
One of the hardest parts of this is pulling the data together in the first place. See here for why Data Engineering is so important.
What you need next is being able to use this data.
Our belief is that you start with being able to pull together an ‘almost live’ single customer view. Every fan is different and each feels that they have some ownership in some way of the club and what it means to them. It is a highly personal thing. There is also a shared mentality as to what that experience means.
Research by Deloitte in the states talks about Core fan expectations and Basics. Personal identification with the team is massive, as is having experiences that are unique to the stadium. One big question is if the concessions provide value.
Each customer will behave in different ways and the data will be able to tell you how each behaves. Do they always come to weekend games but not mid-week, would they perhaps come to other games if they could get seats together with friends, are they based a long way from the ground and travel and weather information is important to them, do they work nearby and therefore their decision is taken the night before?
You’ve got the data already
It may be that your are a city centre venue, but with a largely out of town audience. Or you may be an out of town venue with a more central fan base. Clubs are now using stats to underpin their understanding of these same challenges and looking at the data.
You should be adopting the correct strategy for each customer, at a one-to-one level. Our Utopia product automates these strategies to help you reduce time to value.
So what kind of data are you going to need to do this?
- Transaction history & tenure
- Family and friends connections
- Communication engagement
- Social channel interactions
- Call centre records
- Website browsing
- Ticketing system interactions
- Ticket usage data
- Concession usage data
All of these sources, and there are others, will tell you something about the fan and what is important to them.
This will give you near as real time (and we mean seconds not days) reports on what is happening with your base and how that is changing.
What it gives you is the opportunity to not only understand the macros of your position, but also to start to use the data for customer service.
21st Century Customer service
Timing and service for high value customers is really important. High value clients expect to not only communicate quickly, but also to the right person, someone who can action their requests. It is therefore vital that when they communicate with you, you are able to action that dialogue quickly and appropriately. This will mean being able to route that call to the right level of agent quickly.
This is just the start of your roadmap. Where this goes is into conversations like this with your own digital assistant.
Here’s an example – this is not a chatbot, this is a digital assistant
Imagine being able to do that across 20,000 fans on the first day of the sales….
5 Key Benefits of using AI in Sports Stadium Marketing:
- Engage with fans on a one-to-one basis giving them a better experience from off-season to the day of the match
- Predict and forecast sales performance with much greater accuracy
- Optimise seats, suites and concession sales
- Automation reduces time to value – speed to insight is paramount
- Reduce operational costs and wastage – by being better, quicker, smarter
The game has changed but how many of those responsible for revenue generation are changing with it?