Insights from Irsan Widarto
The sports organization’s ability to grow and diversify its fan base rests on acquiring the right combination of operations-management tools for personalizing the fan experience. The digital age is granting rights holders the ability to collect first-party fan data via owned and operated products including mobile apps, live and on-demand video streaming functions, and their very own digital communication channels.
Efforts to optimize these functions have seen some entities centralize their data governance via an integrated digital customer-facing platform – such as the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) new-look mobile app, which brings the entire fan experience into a single subscription offering. For example, the service aggregates online merchandise sales for each of the North American basketball league’s teams, while it also enables subscribers to purchase tickets as part of a league-wide partnership with Ticketmaster.
Meanwhile, the NBA franchises themselves are reaping benefits from taking ownership of their ecommerce data. For example, ahead of the 2020/21 season, the Detroit Pistons launched its dedicated Pistons313 online store in partnership with the experiential services agency Legends.
The arrangement sees the Pistons organization leverage Legends’ strategic relationships with boutique vendors to help broaden its product selection, increase value for the franchise’s customer base, while taking control of its sales data. According to the organization’s earnings reports, the Pistons’ operating income stood at US$92 million for the 2021/22 season – its highest ever recorded, and an increase of 114 percent over the previous campaign.
While industry benchmarks, what they also tell us is that, no matter the size, type, or digital maturity of an organization, achieving data ownership doesn’t mean building one’s very own technology infrastructure. Even the most popular teams, leagues, and federations have the support of one or more outsourced contractors, which are now tailoring their products to reflect the sports industry’s new-found digital autonomy.
“While service providers such as Ticketmaster, for example, remain the ticketing aggregator of major events, they now play additional roles,” explains Irsan Widarto, N3XT Sports’ Data and Analytics Advisor. “Firstly, as a technology provider, they can tailor their solution to the client’s brand and customer experience, removing the need for redirecting fans to the Ticketmaster website. Secondly, as a result, this approach advocates greater collaboration between the sector’s various stakeholders, enhancing the organization’s ability to leverage its service partner’s intellectual property (IP) to develop fan engagement solutions that help grow and retain audiences.
“These big players are already opening up their services by offering APIs, meaning that clubs and federations that want to take user data into their own hands don’t need to invest huge capital expenditure upfront by building their own ticketing and ecommerce servers. Instead, they are able to integrate a third-party service functionality with their own customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This allows federations to tap the knowledge and reach of a specialized service provider and tailor it to their own business objectives.”
DATA SIMPLIFICATION FIRST STEP TOWARDS INTEGRATING OWNED DIGITAL SERVICES
Simplifying the flow and storage of data is a fundamental challenge for organizations seeking to optimize their digital operations. In order to integrate new technologies and interfaces into their digital frameworks, sports properties opt for different service providers with a built-in data-management capability to support them throughout the process. This is an attractive first step for organizations looking to build their own CRM system.
However, without first assessing the organization’s existing digital framework, technology partnerships and granular operational needs, these attempts to scale an organization’s digital footprint also risks generating data complexity and disrupting dataflow – especially when multiple technology vendors are called upon. Therefore, before deciding on the software solutions that are best equipped for meeting an organization’s business objectives, it’s imperative that the entity analyzes its existing data pool during the discovery process, to ensure that the integration of a new product or service does not cause further disruption to the property’s productivity and data governance.
No matter whether they are designed to manage the sale of tickets, merchandise, or deliver digital content to segmented audiences, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are becoming ubiquitous with the industry. Meanwhile, the sports organizations undergoing their own digital transformation journeys will find it easier to integrate such solutions – without the need of additional IT support – simply because they better understand their digital capabilities.
Furthermore, the notion of the ‘customer’ is becoming “more generic”, Widarto explains – meaning that sports organizations “no longer have to re-invent the wheel” to come up with their own definition of a customer. “Once a service provider has been identified, it’s important to note that most modern CRM vendors are able to reference real-time customer behavior from other applications,” he continues.
“For instance, whether they still have incomplete purchase orders in their basket or buy tickets via your interface. As a result, this supports the organization in numerous ways. These include: (1) making it easier to capture fan data; (2) configure modern apps so that the marketing team can use it without the help of the IT department; and (3) identifying ways in which the entity can enhance its data flows and data management.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
Just as digital media enables sports properties to connect with fans directly, market-by-market, the latest CRM solutions are being tailored to the so-called “base customer”, Widarto continues, adding that – in support of the industry’s pursuit of digital-product and data ownership – software solutions do not necessarily have to be built specifically to the client’s unique customer needs, but rather “tweaked to the organization, in favor of their unique remit for fan-data collection”.
For example, Ticketmaster provides white-label ticketing solutions to top-flight football clubs such as Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, while continuing to expand its reach in other sports markets. The solution is a fully customizable platform that allows any club to create its own branded ticketing page, gain greater ownership of the user data, and affords fans the option to forward and resell tickets via the rights holder’s official ticketing site.
In doing so, innovations of this kind enable sports teams, leagues, and competition organizers to expand their audience reach and maximize their revenue potential by tapping into the service provider’s expertise to inform their sales strategy. Whereas building owned and operated customer-facing solutions may not be cost-effective for some, an alternative option can be as simple as re-organizing one’s digital and data infrastructure to optimize its existing technology partnerships.
“Perhaps it was the case 10 years ago: consultants and developers would have supported sports federations on building their own ticketing systems, to capture first-party data,” Widarto says. “That is no longer a necessity – whereby the industry’s ongoing digital transformation, and the simplification of data management inside the organizations themselves, enables sports properties to integrate SaaS solutions more easily and grants them greater flexibility.
“Our role at N3XT Sports is to point out all the possibilities by identifying what data they already have in-house, then to help implement the technology frameworks for optimizing data collection and the rights holder’s own digital development. This approach helps to leverage the insights our clients need in order to understand the services and technologies they should be investing in, so as to achieve their business goals.”
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement digital strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To learn more about how digital transformation can support the growth of your organization, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.